Wanhong HUANG
This volume develops the epistemological and research-practical foundations required for Generative Relational Economics. It examines how relational realities become accessible through evidence, manifestation, representation, interpretation, judgment, and historically situated inquiry, while maintaining a distinction between what is observed or represented and the relational structures inferred from those manifestations.The epistemological analysis addresses evidential mediation, uncertainty, salience, interpretation, representation, model dependence, inverse inference, and historical re-epistemization. Knowledge is treated as a relational achievement whose validity depends upon the interaction among objects of inquiry, observers, methods, institutions, records, and interpretive contexts.The volume then develops research as praxis. Historical, interpretive, qualitative, quantitative, empirical, formal, and computational approaches are treated as partially irreducible modes of epistemic access rather than as components of a universal methodological hierarchy. Their relations may involve complementarity, tension, mutual correction, and revision.The final portion develops a methodology of relational inquiry concerned with entities, relations, processes, events, states, properties, boundaries, memberships, networks, and historically evolving relational structures. Particular attention is given to the identification of relational objects, comparison across contexts, temporal reconstruction, representation, evidence, and the limits of relational attribution.The result is an epistemological and methodological architecture for studying relational economic systems without reducing them either to isolated entities or to a single privileged mode of representation.
