Relational Processes in Whitehead’s Metaphysics and Commons’ Economics. The Relevance of Cosmology for Economic Theory

Scientific methodologies are faced with two problems. On the one hand, they have to decide whether to proceed macro- or microanalytically. This paper deals with several microanalytical conceptions (Whitehead, Commons, Wieland, etc.) that have chosen this approach because the basic units (events, transactions) are the only “things” that actually exist. In this sense, these microanalytical approaches are “reductive” (they concentrate on the most basic units). On the other hand, scientific theories have to deal with the problem of complexity reduction. Because it is the nature of scientific theories to come up with models which are abstractions from the “messy” reality, science must always be confronted with the question of how much complexity reduction is appropriate. While radical “reductionist” methods declare that all things are actually “nothing but …”, the mentioned conceptions are not “reductionist” because they conceptually take into account the polydimensionality of the real. In this view, the concrete world of business presents itself as a network evolving out of countless transactions with a polydimensional (and not: monodimensional) nature.