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Publication Details

Economics as a Natural Science

(Original title: Ekonómia ako prírodná veda)
Filozofia, 52 (1997), 1, 31-38.
Type of work: Between Philosophy and Sciences
Publication language: Slovak
Abstract

This paper seeks to present a set of insights which may promote the understanding of economics as a natural science. To perceive economics science in terms of an exact natural discipline implies the adoption of these two assumptions:

- all economic phenomena are the consequence of an inexorable operation of the life conservation principle which, in turn, controls behavioral patterns as encountered in individuals and corporations;

- the knowledge of the life conservation principle allows for the employment of the methodology of exact natural sciences which takes into account the impact of that principle on individual and corporate activities expressed in the four values: entity's knowledge, information at entity's motive and entity's time which are spontaneously quantified via a double-feedback structure - the single coherent pattern found in all living organisms of the organic universe, hence in humans and corporations as biological entities.

Like the natural principle of mass and energy conservation in physics which, at large, is responsible for the expansion and promotion of exact knowledge in the fields of mechanics, thermodynamics, in the disclosure of regularities governing electric phenomena and the like, the knowledge of the natural principle of life conservation will lead to the unified understanding of moving forces which generate or set in motion not only economic phenomena and processes, but these pertaining to the area of psychology, sociology, cognitive science and, by and large, encountered in the entire organic world. Intelligence is the critical instrument of the human species' survival. This seemingly trivial insistence may well provoke the adoption of a new approach toward artificial intelligence.

The set of the above presented ideas can be applied to the study of the entire organic world, equally by sciences on society and by biological disciplines. The presented considerations try to throw additional light on the causes underpinning activities of living organisms as part and parcel of the organic world, to which people and their institutions (such as budiness enterprises) also belong. The suggestions and arguments as sketched above can be viewed as a new scientific discipline termed AUTOORGANICS, the morpheme 'auto-' placing emphasis on the self-produced and self-organized emergence, control and evolution of the organic world intent on survival. For the application of autoorganics to economics refer to Jaroslav Zapletal's book on the topic.

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