The Economic Principle as a Foundation of Epistemology

Knowledge is a real process instantiated in time, matter, and energy. Real processes operateunder resource constraints. Any epistemology that ignores these constraints is thereforestructurally incomplete. This paper argues that the economic principle understood as allocationunder scarity is not a domain-specific assumption imported from economics, but afoundational condition of any physically realized epistemic system.Once epistemic activity is treated as a cost-bearing process, ideals such as completeness,unlimited recursion, and maximal rationality are shown to be structurally incoherent ratherthan merely impractical. The argument is strictly descriptive: scarcity is not invoked as anormative criterion, but as a constraint delimiting which epistemic norms can be meaningfullyinstantiated at all.The implications are illustrated for scientific inquiry as an institutional epistemic systemand for artificial intelligence as a limit case of epistemic compression, where diminishingreturns and instability expose the consequences of ignored epistemic budgets.