Don Ross (2008), Philosophy of Science 75(5), 732–743 (December 2008), in the PSA 2006 symposium proceedings. The preprint is PhilSci-Archive item 3045. — DOI-10.1086/594518
Key takeaways
- Ross argues that OSR, usually motivated only by fundamental physics, is also the right ontology for a mature special science, economics. The progress of economic theory from Jevons through Hicks–Allen (1934), Samuelson (1947), Debreu (1959) and Arrow (1965) consists in steadily removing psychological, individual-level hypotheses. Its basic objects are optimisation problems, above all games, which are “mathematical structures … whose relata are distinguished as such by the mathematical representations … just like quarks and bosons” (§3). So OSR, joined with an assumption that science is unified, gets consilient support from outside physics. Individuals, in physics and in economics, are “book-keeping devices”.
Standing in the record
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-09-26, to put Ladyman and Ross’s ontic structural realism and rainforest realism on the record. Their book Every Thing Must Go (OUP 2007) could not be obtained from a legitimate source, nor could the two founding papers (Ladyman 1998, Ross 2000); this work is one of four freely available statements from which the views are pieced together. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-189 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — Worth reading as Ross’s own short statement of what OSR says outside physics. It argues that individuals are bookkeeping heuristics while “tables and rocks” and people still exist, and that consilience across the sciences, not physics alone, can support OSR. Its history of economics is a sketch, and its central claims are asserted from the formalism rather than argued against a worked alternative. Cite the 2008 Philosophy of Science version. This note reads the 2006 preprint.