Truth, knowledge, and entrepreneurship theory: arguments for a rationalist scientific epistemology

The replication crisis has cast social science’s epistemological foundations into question. So far, entrepreneurship scholars have responded by advocating more transparency in data collection and analysis, better empirical methods, and larger and more representative data. Here, we explore the possibility that the problem may be innate to empiricism itself within the social sciences, generally, and entrepreneurship theory, specifically. We review classical arguments and introduce new ones about how and why the weaknesses of empiricism—such as challenges of unobservability—are exacerbated in the study of human behavior, which weaknesses manifest centrally in entrepreneurship theory. These arguments suggest that social science as principally an empirical endeavor may be foolhardy, particularly in the highly agentic entrepreneurship discipline. Herein we propose a radical solution: a rationalist scientific paradigm, where phenomenological reasoning, rather than observation, is paramount. This proposal rests upon arguments that empiricism’s innate limitations can be overcome, albeit not entirely, by its rationalist counterpart. We can, we argue, develop robust scientific foundations—even laws as valid as those of the natural sciences—for entrepreneurship theory through a formal rationalist approach. These laws would necessarily be few but would serve as a much stronger foundation for entrepreneurship theory than the empirical contingencies that we observe. We conclude by illustrating what such a rationalist management program might look like for entrepreneurship scholars with Bylund’s entrepreneurial theory of the firm.