Foundations of Evolutionary Economics, Chapter One, Ontology

This is an entirely new draft of the first chapter of my book “Foundations of Evolutionary Economics” which is going to be published by Edward Elgar in due course. With permission of the publisher, the draft chapters are posted on the SSRN website to facilitate academic discussion for further improvement. A full summary of Chapter One can be found at the beginning of the main text. I present a naturalistic ontology for economics which builds on Peirce’s theory of signs and posits the principle of bimodality. According to this view, all phenomena can be analyzed in the matterenergy mode or the semeiotic mode. I relate this distinction with the duality of two kinds of facts, observer relative and observer independent. Further, I introduce a set of impossibility theorems which allow to specify the ontological constraints which every economic theory has to observe. For evolutionary economics the principle of consilience holds, which implies that economics has to eschew the idea of axiomatic autonomy, but aims at an integration across all sciences. Then, economics appears to be the scientific discipline which deals with a particular kind of human artefacts, i.e. markets