Quality and Quantity in Economics: The Metaphysical Construction of the Economic Realm

There is a feeling today, more or less vague but nonetheless real, that accountants, economists, and others who deal mainly with money, inhabit a different world from everyone else. ¹ This "economic world" maps roughly onto the ordinary world of things, people, and the activities of life, but it comes subtly adrift at important points in ways that produce bafflement. Economists often insist that they live in the "real world," with the heavy implication that their critics and detractors live in a world of dreams, and though this insistence is sometimes enough to silence opposition, it is seldom accepted as wholly convincing or satisfactory.

My purpose here is to argue that this feeling that the economic world is strange has substantial grounding of a kind not to be brushed aside as inexpert "folk economics." The feeling presupposes a contrast between a commonsense world and an economic world, and if there is such a contrast to be drawn, it ought to be possible to say something about these worlds and how and why they differ. I shall take it that the commonsense world is the world as it is ordinarily thought of and spoken about, and by "ordinary" thought and speech I mean those conducted in terms of the concepts of the natural language we all use. The economic world, accordingly, is the world as it is thought of and spoken about using economic concepts.

In order to limit and define the task, I shall consider two ordinary concepts which have fundamental places in our common conceptual scheme for dealing with the world and its contents, that of a thing and that of an activity. Ordinary English has been partly penetrated by economic or market conceptions, but by considering old and fundamental concepts there may be some hope of navigating around this obstacle. These ordinary or natural language concepts have logical features which characterize them and connect them with other concepts in the scheme, and this tissue of characteristics and connections I shall refer to as the metaphysics of natural language. In order to find forms
of expression suitable to serve the purposes of economic thought, economists have, since the eighteenth century when economics first emerged as a discrete science, reformed the metaphysics of the ordinary concepts of a thing and an activity, and I shall chart those reforms in sections I and III and consider some of the consequences for understanding that they have had in sections II, IV, and V.

The ordinary concepts of thing and activity, and their corresponding economic ones of utility and labor, evidently contest the same ground as elements of alternative or rival ways of handling certain portions and aspects of the world of ordinary experience. In order to get some grip on the confusions that arise in this contest, I shall draw contrasts between modern market thinking and premodern thought which did not suffer from this modern difficulty. Alasdair MacIntyre has illuminated aspects of modernity by means of contrasts with premodernity in the philosophies of knowledge, ethics, and politics, and it may be that the same is possible in metaphysics and in thought about matters that are today called "economic."

Aristotle's philosophy sticks very closely to the metaphysics of natural language. He saw it as the task of philosophy as he understood it to discover the logical characteristics of the concepts in common use in the natural language and the connections they have with other concepts in the scheme. This is a descriptive conception of the philosophical task rather than a reforming, or "revisionary," one, as P. F. Strawson put it. Wittgenstein was alarmed at the relaxed habits which mainstream Anglophone philosophy had got into regarding attempts to reform the metaphysics of natural language, which some in that tradition have disdained as the "metaphysics of the Stone Age." Whether or not one is inclined to share Wittgenstein's general alarm, there is, I think, good...