Corps de l’article

Introduction

During the writing of this essay wildfires raged in the west coast region of the United States; hurricanes repeatedly devastated the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast; and the hottest summer on record coincided with the lowest rainfall for what is the normally the wet season in the southwestern U.S. More named tropical storms/hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. in 2020 than in any other year. Moreover, in recent years such storms have begun to display heretofore rare phenomena of rapid intensification, extreme rainfall amounts, and wind intensities that exceed previous recordings. The whole pattern fits within a well-documented dramatic increase in disasters that are largely climate-related.

The general list of well-documented consequences of human-induced climate change includes (but is not limited to) the following : altered ocean currents; climate refugees; coral reef die offs; death of bees; declining fish populations; destruction of rainforests; disappearing sea ice; draining of aquifers; drought; expanding ranges of mosquitoes, ticks, and other harmful insects; famines; heat waves; increasing economic inequality; increasing extreme thunderstorm precipitation and tornadoes; increasing incidence of flash flooding; increasing mudflows, mudslides, and debris flow hazards; increasing sea levels; increasing tropical storm, hurricane, and typhoon intensities; increasing wildfire incidence and intensity; mass extinctions; ocean acidification; permafrost melting; rapidly ablating glaciers and ice sheets; spread of disease, including malaria, West Nile and dengue fevers; and increased potential for warfare.

These can all be considered to be symptoms of much larger issues. The specific phenomena of wildfires and tropical storm rainfall/flooding connect to climate change through complex chains of causation. All these phenomena and their interconnections are investigated by scientists, whose goal is to understand them with hope that such understanding will benefit society.

The above list of observations identify some of nature’s realities for phenomena that are very closely related to climatic change. In essence, the list presents what Earth itself is communicating about the consequences of its changing climate to those scientists who understand the message. Other scientists present physical representations of the changing climatic phenomena through physical models that simulate the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on climate warming. These models provide simplified mathematical predictions that are commonly viewed as authoritative pronouncements about how climatic changes will continue into the future. Considerable controversy then ensues about all the uncertainties associated with those predictions.

This writing has also coincided with the term of an American President, who, after being informed about the aforementioned phenomena, and their links to climate change, responded by saying, “I don’t think science knows” (New York Times, September 14, 2020). The views of this president seem to have been largely driven by economic concerns, where “economics” is not being viewed as a science in the Peircean terms that will be discussed subsequently in this essay.

Economics, as a science, presumably seeks understanding of people in regard to resources, wealth, consumption, production, and numerous other factors dealing with human welfare. However, the central role economic factors in regard to human affairs has led to a performativity for economics such that the science has become a part of the system that it purports to study (Callon 2007; Hermann-Pillath 2020). Through its theories and models performative economics does not merely describe an external economic world; it shapes that world in its own image (Brisset 2020).

The currently proposed remedies for climatic change operate on decadal time scales. They include generating zero-carbon electricity (via wind, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, etc.); the zero-carbon electrification of homes, vehicles, businesses, etc.; the making of everything more energy efficient; reduction of non-carbon, radiatively active gas emissions (including methane, nitrous oxide, etc.); and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Because the costs associated with these proposed remedies will be immense, there presumably will have to be trade-offs in which future outcomes get weighed in economic terms. These trade-offs have both conventional and existential elements. The conventional economic impacts include quantifiable impediments to the conduct of life, notably high monetary costs. In contrast, the existential elements are more qualitative, arising through extremes as great as the possible collapse of civilization (Oreskes & Conway 2014). Of course, one might hold that the most extreme possibilities are so vague and hypothetical that they pose unreal considerations. But how valid is this presumption, and should such possibilities viewed as unrealistic in a scientific economic analysis?

Pre-Modernist Perspectives

The current crisis over dealing with climatic change can be viewed as but one of many dysfunctions that have come to be associated with modernity in general. The modern world has generated a kind of alienation of human society from the rapid pace of technological advances that contrasts with seemingly insurmountable vulnerabilities to crises and problems. One high-profile reaction to these issues is “postmodernism”, which embraces skepticism toward the ideologies of modernism that are embedded in Enlightenment rationality and have come to be associated with economic and political power. While espousing interesting critiques of such things as scientism, truth claims, epistemic certainty, and stability of meaning, postmodernism has largely failed to provide practical remedies for the failings that it critiques.

An alternative to postmodernism, less high in profile, is the premodernist view that that, following the Enlightenment, a kind of philosophical “wrong turn” was taken on the pathway to modernity. In the relationship between politics and economics an example of such premodernist thought is provided by the work of philosopher Hanna Arendt (1906-1975). Arendt was a student of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), an early proponent of existentialism, who later came to view philosophical problems more broadly in terms of the nature of human thinking in relation to the fundamental metaphysical issue of being itself, the consequences of which he viewed as unresolved since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Hanna Arendt observed that modern economics has a relationship to politics that is totally unlike that prevailing in ancient Greece, when these concepts had their origins as realms of thinking. For Aristotle (384-322 BC) politics was originally conceived as a kind of “ethics writ large”. If ethics is defined as the moral principles that govern an individual citizen’s conduct or behavior, i.e., that which compels the individual toward the right kind of actions, then politics must be the equivalent of that right kind of action for the state, which in ancient Greece was the polis, and hence the etymology of the word.

Economics in ancient Greece was a private affair for the household. It involved practical needs, applicable to issues of individual concern. Politics, in contrast, involved the much more important affairs of state. Its resolution required logical discourse among the elite citizenry. Thus, politics was the primary concern for a society, while economics was of secondary importance.

In the modern world, the relationship between economics and politics has been inverted. The major political systems are dominated by economic ideologies, ranging from capitalism to socialism to communism. The affairs of state are now argued primarily relative to macroeconomic concerns, as opposed the kinds of concerns prevailing at beginnings of western thought. It was Arendt’s view that something was lost in this transition, and that a recovery of that element might aid with fixing some of many problems occurring at the interface between politics and economics. Given the modern performativity of economics, this is certainly a concern in regard to economic analyses related to climatic change.

Another important premodernist was the American polymath scientist/ logician/ philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). As a scientist himself, Peirce embraced a very broad view of science, not as a repository of truths and facts, but as the attitude that a community of like-minded investigators must take about the object of their inquiries. That attitude is focused above all on the search for truth.

Economic Shibboleths

Paul Samuelson (1915-2009), the first American to win the Nobel prize in Economic Sciences, introduced to term “shibboleth” to describe economic outcomes that become so much enshrined in authority that that they assume the status of laws that define the very outcomes that they were meant to describe (Samuelson 1977). This is a kind of corollary to the performativity of economics because it contributes to the same kind of logical circularity. Candidates for economic shibboleths include cost-benefit analysis and the associated consideration of discount rates in relation to future benefits.

Cost-benefit analysis is the predominant methodology by which economists evaluate the potential value of future actions against the costs associated with implementing those actions. The concept of a discount rate enters cost-benefit analysis from considerations exemplified in business transactions whereby future profit opportunities for a business entity are weighed in terms of comparison to current benefits that can be derived from funds on hand. Clearly, the latter could simply be invested at a minimum interest rate with a secure enterprise such as a bank. The secure benefits that could be derived from this interest rate must be discounted relative to the anticipated future benefits in order to make economic sense according to such a business-oriented model.

It seems to be a matter of absolute faith among many economists that future costs relative to benefits must of necessity be discounted at a positive rate. Extrapolating from current understanding, it is assumed that reducing global carbon emissions, investing carbon sequestration, and other remedies for global climatic change will certainly incur massive costs in the short term relative to highly discounted levels of benefit that might accrue over the long term. Economic models show that, assuming a reasonable long-term interest rate of 4% per year, the sum of the discounted benefits to be gained over the multi-decadal, generational time scale of global climate change will be much less than the costs that would have to be incurred over the same time period (Dasgupta 2007 : 123). Thus, it appears that, with mathematical, lawlike certainty, forgoing a level of consumption today would demand such an immense amount of benefit in the long-term future that its failure to achieve a positive financial return effectively precludes adoption of the proposed climate change remedies.

The problem with this kind of analysis lies in the presumptions that underpin the economic extrapolations. One assumption has to do with the general nature of the problem. The climate change crisis is but one of an increasing number of “wicked problems”. The latter are unique, seemingly endless questions without true or false answers, that get viewed from conflicting perspectives and whose supposed “solutions” lead to yet more wicked problems. Wicked problems have human causes, their solutions must be developed as things go along, and every wicked problem is unique. Global climate change has been classed as a “super wicked problem” (Lazarus 2009).

Another important issue has to do with the extremes that are increasingly characterizing the world’s climate. Extremes are conventionally predicted by means of extrapolations from current experience. The general fallacy of this whole approach to extremes has been explored in Nassim Taleb’s (2007) “black swan theory” or “theory of black swan events”. Taleb (2007) asserts that, instead of extrapolating from large populations of more common phenomena, it is much more important to place major emphasis on extremes themselves. By concentrating on the ordinary and the “normal,” the current assumptions about extreme phenomena relegate them to “outlier” status, focusing attention instead on statistical analyses of the large samples that are available for ordinary cases. Taleb (2007) argues that the consequences of this approach are being manifested in the spectacular economic losses that occurred in financial meltdowns and are increasingly accompanying current disasters. The impacts of black swan theory for projecting future benefits from climate mitigation expenditures are immense.

A third problem is the nature of mathematical modeling itself. Models are human constructs that simplify the larger reality of the world. They embody the elements abstracted from the world, defining systems that the modelers deem to be essential for the workings of the world. This process involves assumptions and simplifications that can make the modeling process suboptimal for the productive and creative processes that facilitate the fundamental advancement of science as a process of discovery (Baker 2017).

Is Economics a (Peircean) Science?

There is on the Theodore von Kármán Auditorium of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory this quotation from the famous aeronautical engineer for whom the building is named : “Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.” Though he was a phenomenal engineer, von Kármán did not view science in the way that Charles Peirce came to recognize it. Science is much, much more than the study of today’s facts (“the world as it is”), and economics is impoverished as a science to the degree that limits itself to today’s facts.

Charles Sanders Peirce was immersed in science from birth (Brent, 1998). His father, Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), was one of the most important American scientists of his day, and he made great efforts to instill the scientific spirit into the young Charles. Much of the science that Charles Peirce eventually came to do professionally would today be labeled “geophysics”. He spent many years making very precise gravity measurements for the U.S. Coast Survey. Thus, his science was concerned with active observations and measurements of real-world phenomena in concert with the work of many other scientists devoted to a similar quest for understanding.

While pursuing his long career as a scientist, Peirce also developed a life-long passion for the study of logic and related aspects of philosophy of science. These combined in generating his views on the nature of science itself. If a mode of inquiry is indeed to be a theoretical science, he reasoned, then it cannot merely be equivalent to systematized knowledge. In his hierarchy of the theoretical sciences (De Waal 2001 : 5) Peirce would class economics as a “special science” dealing with human “psychics” in descriptive, classificatory, and nomological terms. Then, as with all “special sciences”, economics, must be an on-going process of investigation rather than an assemblage of established facts. There has to be a continual search for the truth of things. If truths are already known, as in the case of established facts, then there is no further truth to pursue. To limit theoretical economics, to established facts would be violation of what Peirce held to be “The First Rule of Reason” (Haack 2014).

Of course, Peirce’s argument would not apply to a practice of economics as being a kind of applied technology, using assumed facts to achieve practical goals, much as von Kármán has characterized engineering. However, such an enterprise cannot claim the status of being a theoretical science. In the Peircean perspective, its practitioners would not have the appropriate scientific attitude.

For Peirce, science is above all an activity and an attitude, held by a community of like-minded investigators, who are passionately driven by their desire to uncover the truths of the world. In order to pursue this inquiry, it is actually necessary to have uncertainty, not to suppress it. How could one possibly do science, as just defined, if its subject matter consisted of facts and absolute truths? There would be nothing to pursue. Science is a living, dynamic process of inquiry, not a dead collection of presumed factual truths. Scientific inquiry is open ended. Questions (hypotheses) are pursued to generate understanding that makes for more and more reliable knowledge.

Science should not be confused with engineering, which applies current understanding and does not see the discovery of new truths about the world. Engineering seeks for reduced uncertainties in order to produce solutions to problems, but those solutions are always limited because of available time and resources. Moreover, these solutions apply to very limited circumstances, and they can be totally invalidated because of unknown factors or changing conditions relative to the assumptions that were necessarily imposed to achieve timely and cost-efficient outcomes. Science, by contrast, seeks to discover previously unknown factors by concentrating on uncertainties, and its inquiries have no pre-defined limits.

Mixing the attitudes of a pure, theoretical science with an applied science or engineering can lead to dysfunctions. In the global climate change debates, the goal may not be the finding out how things really are or will be. Instead, the primary motivation might be profit in the short term, or some other economic consideration. As reasoning focused on the truth of things, this inquiry would be classed as “fake” according to logician Susan Haack (2007), who developed this idea from Peirce. Moreover, there is a closely related dysfunctional reasoning, also recognized more than a century ago by Peirce. This is ‘‘sham reasoning’’ which occurs when it is not the reasoning that determines what the conclusion will be, but it is the conclusion that determines what the reasoning will be.

Peirce further recognized that one of the most important qualities of a true science is fallibilism. Fallibilism holds that one can trust an assemblage of related beliefs that have been shown generally to work in practice, experiment, etc., even though we cannot be absolutely certain about the validity of any one belief in isolation.

Kantian Influences and Pragmatism

Charles Peirce was a child prodigy. In 1851 at age eight, he became so fascinated with an older brother’s book on logic that he devoted much his subsequent life work to intense study of this topic. Three years later Peirce’s father introduced him to the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). From 1855 to 1859, Peirce devoted so much study to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that he claimed to have essentially memorized the entire book. Though he would later come to revise many things that he learned, Peirce knowingly acknowledged his immense debt to Kant, who was one of the greatest of all philosophers.

Like Kant Charles Peirce was a polymath deeply interested in a broad range of interrelated subjects. His greatest passion was for logic, which he envisioned as a normative science of how reasoning ought to proceed in general, as applicable to other sciences, among which he included metaphysics, as well as special sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Peirce’s goal of bringing the attitude of a scientist to metaphysics is especially interesting, and he describes it as follows :

That laboratory life did not prevent the writer ... from becoming interested in methods of thinking; and when he came to read metaphysics, although much of it seemed to him loosely reasoned ..., yet in the writings of some philosophers, especially Kant, Berkeley, and Spinoza, he sometimes came upon strains of thought that recalled the ways of thinking in the laboratory, so that he felt that he might trust to them....

Peirce 1905. Reprinted in Peirce 1998 : 332

Metaphysics is typically ignored by practicing scientists. Sir Isaac Newton famously warned, “Physicist beware metaphysics.” This aversion to metaphysics was not the way the subject was originally conceived. Aristotle, who literally wrote the book on metaphysics, held that everyone has a metaphysics, whether they admit it or not. Charles Peirce emphasized the practical consequences of this fact.

Immanuel Kant’s great work, Critique of Pure Reason, was produced to save the universality and certainty of knowledge from the skepticism to which pure empiricism had been shown to lead by the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Kant pursued this goal by developing what he called a “transcendental” view of knowledge, referring to the human ability to know how objects are possible before they are experienced with the senses. This, he believed, constituted “a priori” knowledge, or “synthetic a priori judgments” about how it is possible to experience objects such that this experience is partly constituted by the self-activity of the human mind. Kant employed formal logic to deduce a “phenomenology” consisting of “categories of thought” that are essential qualities of phenomena abstracted from their particular manifestations.

Peirce followed Kant in developing his own philosophy, but he did so from a view of logic as a theory of right reasoning. Indeed, he was motivated to advance the philosophy of logic in order to overcome difficulties that he believed Kant had encountered by applying inappropriate syllogistic arguments. From Kant, Peirce developed (1) a broad and classical view of what constitutes “science”, (2) an architectonic approach to philosophy (a foundational structure of systematic inquiry, underpinned by logic), (3) a conviction that there are a small number of concepts (categories of thought) that structure experience (but Peirce developed his own non-Kantian phenomenology), and (4) a view that, while metaphysics seemed to be in a sorry state, it was too important to be dismissed as meaningless (something that the logical positivist philosophers of science were later to do in the early twentieth century).

Peirce reduced the fundamental categories of Kant’s phenomenology to three. First was a quality of being or existence, but also including potentiality and spontaneity. Second was a quality of necessity and the relating of things, including cause and effect. Third was a representation of things, including tendencies toward laws or habits. Peirce named these categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and he used them as the basis for his entire philosophical system, including the semiotics that will be discussed in a subsequent section of this essay.

Peirce also realized that Kant employed a pragmatic (versus “truth”) criterion for knowledge, such that one could believe in “pure ideas” or “a priori notions” because of their regulative function for promoting inquiry. Peirce developed the idea of pragmatism into a major element of his philosophy, basing it on a criterion of meaning that he first presented in 1878 (Peirce 1878), as follows : “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”.

Peirce made other important modifications to Kant’s original scheme. The most important of these derived from his scientific instinct not to accept Kant’s rejection of the human ability to know what Kant called das Ding an sich (“the thing in itself”). Kant had gone through immense pains to argue there was a distinction between phenomena (which we could know via mediation through the categories of thought) and noumena (which we cannot know). This was the logical price that Kant paid for achieving the certainty of knowledge that was made possible by the certainty of his synthetic a priori judgments. Thus, Kant espoused a transcendental idealism, meaning that percepts (the objects of experience) are not the real things of the world, but only the signs of those things. Kant’s notion of signs, Peirce realized, was nominalistic, and he retraced the medieval debate over nominalism versus realism in order to resurrect a concept of realism that could replace Kant’s idealism, making it more consistent with the attitudes of scientists, as he knew them (Forster 2011).

The Perils of Nominalism

Fifty years prior to this writing a now-classical argument was put forth in a popular essay by the nobelist economist Milton Friedman. This was published in the September 13, 1970, New York Times Magazine with the title “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Friedman was a life-long advocate of free markets, whose ideas had a major influence on major political figures of the later 20th century, such a Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1970 article, Friedman disparaged the notion that there could be “social responsibilities of business”. He asserted that only people can have responsibilities; “business” as whole cannot be said to have responsibilities. To have such imposed on business would be antithetical to the free enterprise, private property system. In short, that imposition would be socialism, an ideology inconsistent with the values of the American system.

Friedman’s argument seemed logically persuasive. He claimed that business has no social values or social responsibilities “in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals”. He further asserted, “Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.”.

This idea of the individual man in the economy, a homo economicus, is central to much of what has come to underlie economic thinking, including the cost-benefit analysis of global climate change. This homo economicus is viewed as an individual rational agent who will maximize profit as a producer or maximize utility as a consumer. Besides being yet another shibboleth, this reduction of general categories, such as human society, the economy, business, etc., to mere names for collections of individual entities is an example of nominalism, which Peirce recognized to be a metaphysical presumption about what is considered to be real.

The traditional view of nominalism places it in the scholastic context of the debate over universals. Thus, the term “human” does not involve any essence of human nature. There are individual human beings, but there is only a name, not a reality, to “human.” Peirce realized (1) that modern logic and much of science both largely involve the unstated presumption of nominalism, and (2) that nominalism is not so much about universals as it is about the metaphysical nature of reality. Basically, the nominalist restricts reality to things that actually exist in the world. Because modern logic and science both involve the unstated presumption of nominalism, this restriction also severely restricts the viewpoint of science, which Peirce viewed as the search for the ultimate correspondence of our conceptions of the world with reality. Peirce’s broader concept or reality led him to a broader concept of science. Reality, as he came to define it, is that which is independent of what anyone in particular might think it to be. This view Peirce derived from the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus (1266–1308). Thus, for Peirce, reality is not restricted to that which exists in the here and now. Instead, it must also include anything for which an inquiry can be pursued by a community of inquirers appropriately dedicated to the ultimate settling of all doubt about the matter. That community Peirce held to be coincident with the community of those scientists dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

Peirce recognized that his understanding of pragmatism as a principle of logic could apply to the metaphysical problem of reality. He applied the pragmatic maxim to the Scotus definition of reality as being that which is independent what you or I or anyone in particular might think something to be. The result was recognition that such independence could only be achieved if this form of reality became the object of a final opinion to be held by all who would honestly and sincerely inquire into the question.

There is a clear relation here to the nature of a mathematical proof. It is not that such a proof has a kind of physical actuality or existence in the world. Rather, for anyone who understands the nature of the mathematical operations, there can certainly be no doubt that a proper executed mathematical truth is necessarily true, and the logical object of a truth must indeed be a reality.

To be a true scientist, the economist must view the future economic state of the world to be a phenomenon for continual investigation. The attitude should be similar to that of a laboratory scientist, attempting to study a phenomenon through controlled experimentation. However, given that the economy is an on-going phenomenon, it must be observed as it progresses. The goal must be to concentrate on what could be and what might be, or, in short, what the future possibilities are. In contrast, it is scientifically unrealistic to push all considerations to the state of the present, as is done by nominalism.

These Peircean norms for proper economics as a science follow directly from the hierarchy of the sciences that was noted above. The special science of economics must adhere to a philosophy that includes scientific metaphysics, which for Peirce involves the broad definition of reality that does not restrict that concept to nominalism. This scientific metaphysics, in turn, must follow from the various normative sciences. The latter hold both metaphysics and the special science of economics to a logic that defines the right reasoning, i.e., the logic for that science. Pragmatism, is what insures the quality of that reasoning, such that it is both ethical (right) and esthetic (good).

The final philosophical warrant for economics as a science involves the raw appearance of what it studies, i.e., the phenomenology of what appears in the course of its inquiries. Again, Peirce has a way of understanding the components of that appearance. As noted above, in a Peircean science phenomenology cannot be limited solely to raw facts, i.e., to what the nominalist would consider to be the brute realities of the world. The universe, according to Peirce, must also include (1) the fundamental being of the objects of our inquiries, their “thisness” which we can sense directly without the imposition of relating them to other entities, and (2) the growth and development of phenomena, whereby they connect to other phenomena and change through time. With respect to this latter quality, it is especially missed by a nominalistic metaphysics. In that failure nominalism provides a false path to inquiry before the inquiry even begins.

Econosemiosis

Peirce’s rejection of nominalism and his revised understanding of phenomenology eventually led him to fully embrace a theory of signs, that is, a semiotics. In an early paper on human faculties, Peirce (1868) had already observed that all knowledge is mediated through an inferential process involving signs. His definition of what is meant by a sign is distinctive, and it was further refined through his career, but his key insight was that all thought is in signs. The importance of this point can be grasped from one of Peirce’s later definitions of “sign” (Peirce 1902 : 527), as follows : “Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in some way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum.”.

The ad infinitum is very important because the interpretant component to the sign means that all signs (and therefore all thought) cannot occur in isolation, but only in direct relationship to subsequent signs (or thoughts). Thought is in motion, and thereby operates in a continuum. Neither cognition nor representation exist at one instantaneous state of mind, but rather they exist in a continuity of mind. As Peirce (1868 : 103) puts it : “Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us.”.

Moreover, Peirce understood the entire world as perfused with signs. Thus, in adopting a semiotic view of the world, a scientific investigator comes to understand the world, not in a detached manner as a mere source of data, but as a complex interpretive structure, in which the investigator is immersed. This is a world mediated and sustained by signs that exist in a continuous, connected flow, a semiosis, in which the signs are things that stand for something else (their object) in relation to something else (their interpretant). It is through this semiosis, or action of signs, that the world “speaks” to the investigator (Baker 2000).

Instructive illustrations of the role of semiosis in the investigative process are provided by considering the methods of an experienced medical doctor, interpreting the symptoms of a disease, or the investigations of a master detective, interpreting clues at a crime scene. As an example of the latter, Sherlock Holmes studies numerous clues (indexical signs) that relate to other clues, developing them into an interconnected web. Eventually a picture emerges that becomes a working hypothesis, binding all the clues together into a kind of narrative that possesses an overall consistency and coherence. Note that the key element in this process is not the correspondence testing of individual hypotheses as propositions. Rather, it is the overall consistency and coherence of the narrative, as a working hypothesis, that adds confidence to process of inquiry.

The economist, as an investigator seeking understanding by making discoveries about the world, needs to be involved in an econosemiosis. The key inference employed in this process is neither the induction nor the deduction that are most often distinguished in modern discussions of logic. Rather, the key mode of inference is abduction. Just as the master detective is attracted to clues, the attention of the econosemiotic investigator should be attracted to particular processes or to particular circumstances that lead to productive effect-to-cause inferences. Of greatest interest, given the investigator’s broad experience with similar sign systems, is something surprising that seems particularly important. Based on such observation, it can be inferred that, if such and such were the case, then this surprising fact would follow as a matter of course. This is what Peirce, defined as an abductive inference. Thus, as envisioned by Peirce, and recently summarized by De Waal (2013 : 66), a short statement of scientific reasoning is the following : “Abduction furnishes us with explanatory hypotheses, or theories, deduction draws out their logical implications, and induction verifies (or falsifies) these implications, and by doing so verifies (or falsifies) the hypothesis.”.

In his later life Peirce became increasingly distressed that his logical methodology of pragmatism became misapplied by subsequent philosophers. In his view these later pragmatists misunderstood the scientific realism that was fundamental to his logical understanding, and he viewed semiotics as corrective in overcoming this limitation. He argued that what he termed “Critical Common-Sensism” involves true scientists in the actual kind of being that is investigated. If all the world is mind, as expressed through signs, which is fundamental to semiotics, then the logical methodology for best understanding that meaning has to be through the interpretive process of seeing where those signs lead. This realization led to Peirce to restate his pragmatic maxim in semeiotic terms, as follows (Peirce 1905 : 481) : “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct that, conditionally upon all possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.”.

If the purport of any concept lies its perceived bearing on human conduct, then, following Peirce’s (1905) argument, the meaning of climate change has to lie in its conceived bearing on how humans will conduct themselves in the future. That this defines climate change is a reality that must be incorporated into the social science that deals with human wealth and prosperity.

That science is economics.

That climate change is a reality extending into the future means that some of its specific facts will lie beyond human control. However, those particular facts are exactly the ones that scientific investigation should be able to infer under favorable circumstances. In other words, they can be reliably predicted. In contrast, there are other future facts, which will be such that their exact character will be beyond human ability to reliably infer. However, though this class of future facts lies beyond the any ability for reliable prediction, these are also the facts having the special quality that humankind will have the capacity to modify and control them. How do we take advantage of this realization?

Between the logic, expressed through pragmatism, and the special sciences that deal with the physical and psychic worlds (economics being one of the latter), there lies, in Peirce’s view of science, a stratum of metaphysics. Peirce viewed the distain for metaphysics taken by the logical positivists as inherently nonrational. Peirce followed Aristotle in holding that all the special sciences necessarily presume a kind of metaphysics, and to not be critical of that is to relegate one’s metaphysics to the most impoverished of kinds.

Peirce bemoaned the fact that much the special sciences (and this would include economics) adhered to the metaphysics of nominalism, which limits reality to brute actualities. As a scientific realist (science defined as Peirce viewed it), Peirce believed in the reality of possibilities and progressive change.

Because logic, as a normative science of correct reasoning, as expressed through pragmatism, involves deliberative conduct, it must necessarily be founded on moral and ethical imperatives. Though logic has to do with how we ought to reason rather than how we ought to act, the pragmatic maxim, understood in the context of realisms and objective idealism, enjoins those claiming to hold a scientific attitude to continually engage with the on-going consequences of the actions that follow from the adoption of any concept. To do otherwise would be to engage in meaningless nonsense.

In the controversy over the economic impact of dealing with global climate change there is negligible meaning in current states of things. Only in the realizations of future consequences will there be any significant meaning. Possibilities for the future are real in that they will have real consequences, and those are consequences that can be altered by our deliberative action. To privilege present actualities as the only aspects of reality is to be illogical.

If the purport of any concept, understood as a symbol, lies its perceived bearing on human conduct, then, following Peirce’s (1905) argument, the only meaning of climate change must lie in its conceived bearing on how humans will conduct themselves in the future. That this defines climate change as a reality that must be incorporated into any social science that deals with human wealth and prosperity.

Conclusions

From a Peircean perspective, much of the conventional economic approach to the climate change problem is antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry. It adheres to an extreme form of nominalism, thereby limiting itself to an incomplete picture of what needs to be understood along the pathway toward discovering the truths about human affairs involving resources, consumption, production, and all-important factors relating to the welfare of human beings. If economics is to be a science in the Peircean sense, it also cannot be equivalent to systematized knowledge about these factors. It must be an on-going process of inquiry, not an assemblage of facts. That process has to be the continual search for the truths concerning the special subject matter of economics. That search needs to be an investigation employing the special methods of economics, while always employing the full range of scientific inquiry for which fallibilism that is an essential component.

In its performative role economics has become party to a view, manifest in the power aspirations of so much modern political activity, that the world is something that ultimately needs to be bent to human goals of monetary wealth. For Peirce this is entirely unrealistic, not merely in an ethical sense, but also as a matter of science. The latter must follow the logic of pragmatism, which holds through its semiotic expression, that the world is better viewed as our great teacher. The world manifests itself through signs, which the scientist must interpret in order to find its truths. The proper attitude for scientists in regard to economics is to be shrewd enough to learn the lessons that the world has to teach us.

Thus, the remedy for previous failings would entail adopting an econosemiotic approach. Understanding climate change in regard to human welfare cannot be accomplished by “studying the world as it is.” Contrary to that nominalistic limitation, an authentic science (in the Peircean sense) has to embrace study of the world as it will become as a realm of real possibility.