Epistemological Suggestions in „Entropy Low and Economic Process”

Abstract

The paper is aimed to derive, on criticism basis (following, especially, the critic rationalism, as method), epistemological suggestions from the crucial work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process”, in order to these suggestions or challenges constitute going points for further logical assessments or polemical debates. By this way, four basic epistemological suggestions are identified: a) inconsistency between the analytical description of the economic process and its evolutionist nature (that implies qualitative changes); b) logical and epistemological bases for the possibility of a theoretical economic science (i.e. of a theory of the economic science); c) impact of the qualitative changes of the economic process on the non-linearity of the economic models for prognosis; d) logics, based on the entropy law, to pass off the rationality of optimality and to enter the rationality of sustainability. Each of these suggestions (explicit or implicit mentioned in the evocated work) plays as rational, for the authors, to formulate epistemological assessments, critics or proposals for solutions aimed at to pass over the arisen epistemological or methodological problems. The authors believe that the entropic paradigm proposed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen for the economic epistemology and methodology is one of the most interesting, from the philosophic and logic points of view, having abundant resources to open a re-conceptualization of the logical bases of the economic science, to rethink the theoreticity of the sciences that study fields where evolutive processes are going, and to think, with more maturity, to the way in which the human rationality could answer the challenges the entropy law arises