Natural Kinds and a Kripkean-defense of economics as a science: a study of Kripko-Marxism

Abstract

This paper uses the notion of Natural Kinds to defend the “scientific” character of Marxian economics as a discipline. Drawing from Saul Kripke and other natural kind theorists, a criterion will be supplied that is at once logical, modal, semantic, ontological, and empirical. This would represent an encapsulation of the intuitive standards around which different economic theories compete, representing a theory-indistinct target that all scientific claims of economics aim to hit. We will demonstrate this using the case example of the work of Marx. This procedure could be repeated with any contending economic theory, giving us a theory-neutral condition for evaluating the “scientific” status of economic claims. Three results follow: (a) we get a logical framework for defining the validity-space of claims that would make up “economics;” (b) we get a tool for comparing varying economic claims or theories against one another, a tool that could be used with many others; and (c) we will see how counter to some theorists, economics does in fact represent a Natural Kind.