The Universal Language of Economics: où-logòs or éu-logòs?

The problem of the unification of the scientific language has always accompanied the evolution of scientific thought and practice. Linguae francae have evolved in time to allow intellectual exchange across linguistic, cultural, and political borders: Greek, Latin, French, and English. The question also if abstract geometrical forms or mathematics could represent a universal language, devoid of any cultural or historical contamination, has also occupied the mind of many epistemologists and scientists. In economics the question of a unified language, possibly pictorial, was brought in the foreground, in the Vienna swept by Machian relativism, by Otto Neurath. The crisis of traditional physics was also internalized, in the same circumstances, by John von Neumann, who would spearhead the adoption of machine language for operational research into economics. Von Neumann also transformed the economic man into an amateur econometrician who takes decisions based on intuitive probability betting. Modern markets, though, are not only the arena of these new stochastic men but also of artificial beings that were created to resemble these stochastic men. A new economics that allows for these profound changes and speaks the language of these new market actors is, nonetheless, still to come.