The Naturalistic Turn in Economics

Economics is increasingly adopting the methodological standards and procedures of the natural sciences. The paper analyzes this 'naturalistic turn' from the philosophical perspective on naturalism. I distinguish between three kinds of naturalism: mark I, the reduction of behavior on psychoneural phenomena, mark II, the transfer of patterns of causal explanations from the natural sciences to the social sciences, mark III, the enrichment of the ontology from observer-independent to observer-relative facts. Building an integrated naturalistic paradigm from these three ingredients, I show that naturalism in economics will only be completed by a simultaneous linguistic turn, with language being analysed from the naturalistic viewpoint