I am very late in commenting on this essay by Jesús Suaste Cherizola. In this first comment I want to touch briefly on the issue of ontology in economics. What a relief it is to find economic analysis which takes ontology seriously. Ontology is integral to the entire CasP project though understandably it does not get foregrounded in every text. The term “ontology” appears in Cherizola’s essay title and gets 8 more mentions in the text, excluding the citation. This is significant and refreshing. Mentioning ontology and the need for re-examining economic ontology on the RWER blog gets a very uneven response. Some understand the need for such an endeavour but many dismiss it as a presumed metaphysical side-show unrelated to economics or even anything real. Mentioning ontology on other economics blogs draws responses from being completely ignored to dismissive remarks that ontology is speculative, post-modern (sic) or already fully settled in economics.
Of course ontology is not settled in orthodox economics. It’s obsolete. Much of it is still 19th C stuff and it was wrong then. The other issue is that many people don’t seem to understand that both scientific disciplines and formal disciplines have ontologies. Ontology is not the exclusive preserve of religious and speculative metaphysics. The ontologies of empirical and formal disciplines are very different (in derivation) from those of metaphysics. However, this thread is not the place for me to pursue this issue. At this stage I would like to know if;
(a) I should write a more in-depth comment specifically on Jesús Suaste Cherizola’s essay? and
(b) What would be the best thread for me to write a little on ontology and the need for applying ontological methods and schemas to economics?
I hope I am not too late to give more detailed comments on the essay. at least.