Contemporary research in economic and legal disciplines shows conceptual and methodological frameworks that often emphasize a strong empiricism and utilitarianism based on a pretended objectivity and neutrality that are mostly justified in data, numbers, mathematical models, probability and statistics. In social sciences, the classic method of dialectical interpretation, typical of Humanities, has been replaced for those of the natural sciences.

This work argues that this reductionist perspective on the use of empirical and quantitative tools has been a key cause behind the sterility of many of the epistemological and methodological stands and the way of setting up and validating current economic and legal theories.

This work challenges the mathematical system that underlies the current behavioral analysis in law and economics and argues that many of the core insights of their approaches are irremediably flawed because they do not provide a useful epistemic tool for analyzing individual decision-making. Numerical methods provide plausibility, because of their formalism and their scientific appeal, but not necessarily objectivity. On the other hand, dialectical interpretation of social phenomena is not always subjective or speculative.

From a perspective of Law and Economics as human sciences, that is, which material object is the one of Humanities (therefore as true social and moral sciences), it is necessary to resituate the ends and objects of both disciplines.

This rediscovery basically consists of conceiving Economics and Law as ethical disciplines whose axis must revolve around the human person and his responsibility as a social being. For this purpose, it will be of great help the humanistic and holistic contributions that the Spanish Late Scholastics usually grouped under the label School of Salamanca were able, starting from Aristotle and Classic philosophy, to develop at a time of major global transformations in social and market structures.

This work aims to trace the basis of a philosophical alternative that goals to improve the epistemology of Economics and Law, to make them more human and realistic, ie, closer to the dilemmas and personal choices in the economic and legal contexts. This epistemological vision is founded in an open reasoning compatible with the causal structure of people’s physical, social, market and legal environments. An epistemological approach in which the analysis based on mathematical methods does not blur or omit the complexity of human ends and behavior in society and the intrinsic ethical dimension of actions in the market.