Abstract

The study of economics has been a going concern among philosophers for the better part of twenty years without very many people even noticing that economics has a metaphysics. Indeed, among economists the term ‘metaphysical’ is probably an epithet of opprobrium, employed to suggest that a claim is untestable or otherwise without cognitive significance. Philosophers of economics will admit to the existence of an epistemology of economics—the study of the nature, extent and justification of economic knowledge. But even this is controversial among some economists. The notion that economics might have a metaphysics as well as an epistemology will be scoffed at by those economists doubtful about the enterprise of the philosophy of economics altogether. Nevertheless, philosophers of economics should have no trouble identifying a metaphysics in some of the theoretical commitments of economics.