TY - CHAP
T1 - Metaphor and economic thought
T2 - A historical perspective
AU - Mouton, Nicolaas T.O.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Ever since economists first began to inquire into the nature of what Adam Smith called “the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”, they have resorted to metaphors to make sense of phenomena like markets and money. Rather often, they borrowed ideas from the biological sciences of their time. If we track the evolution of “economic biology” over time, it turns out that most extensions and elaborations of the metaphor carry subtle but strong traces of their approximate historical provenance. More generally, a historical perspective enables one to see the metaphors underlying economic reasoning as flexible and dynamic processes, rather than as fixed and static systems.
AB - Ever since economists first began to inquire into the nature of what Adam Smith called “the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”, they have resorted to metaphors to make sense of phenomena like markets and money. Rather often, they borrowed ideas from the biological sciences of their time. If we track the evolution of “economic biology” over time, it turns out that most extensions and elaborations of the metaphor carry subtle but strong traces of their approximate historical provenance. More generally, a historical perspective enables one to see the metaphors underlying economic reasoning as flexible and dynamic processes, rather than as fixed and static systems.
KW - History of economic thought
KW - historical situatedness
KW - evolution of economic metaphors
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 9783110272963
T3 - Applications of Cognitive Linguistics
SP - 49
EP - 76
BT - Metaphor and Mills
A2 - Herrera-Soler, Honesto
A2 - White, Michael
PB - Mouton de Gruyter
CY - Berlin, Boston
ER -