ISSUES AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL MUTATIONS IN THE ECONOMIC FIELD

Knowledge in economics, as well as in other fields included in social sciences, can

not be achieved upon the Galilean model, so customary in natural sciences. In time, its

transfer conducted to the finding of some inconsistencies at the level of theory or between

theory and practice. The subject-object discernibility, a possible simplification in natural

science, becomes problematically in social sciences, where this delimitation operates only in

theory, and, actually, the effects of the whole "package" are registered in. Also, the

repeatability of initial conditions, possible in natural sciences through the control of the

variables, becomes inoperative within social sciences that can not recreate the original

context. All these lead to the idea that explanatory models and theories based on the causaltype

determinism do not provide satisfactory answers. That is why the Aristotelian tradition is

brought into attention, emphasizing the determinism of intelligibility type.