Semantic Economics: Economic Phenomena as Held Difference Under Cost

This paper proposes Semantic Economics as a research field grounded in a single constitutive thesis: economic phenomena are constitutively semantic where their identity, persistence, and failure depend on held differences under cost. The thesis is stated in a constitutive-operational form. Constitutive: the identity-conditions of economic phenomena - what makes a price a price, a currency a currency, a balance sheet a balance sheet, or a crisis a crisis - are co-extensive with the holding-conditions of structured difference under cost. Operational: this constitutive structure projects onto a falsifiable measurement programme, currently instantiated by a four-primitive grammar - drive, hold, blockade, boundary - and by a reported Hold-Capacity anchor in banking crises. This v3.1 revision preserves the v3.0 performative-constitutive clarification and makes explicit the performative-constitutive meaning of “semantic” used throughout the paper. A difference is semantic when its being-held across time, boundary, and perturbation constitutes - not merely enables - its consequentiality for the admissible future of a system. The holding is not an external support added to an already meaningful content. It is the operative process through which the difference counts. Thus, a price, currency, balance-sheet entry, collateral claim, or promise is semantic not because it is represented in language, but because the held difference orients action, distributes claims, constrains possible futures, and can fail when the holding process fails. In its present internally validated form, Hold-Capacity exhibits cross-crisis threshold stability in the inter-val 𝐻∗𝑐𝑐 ∈ [0.43, 0.46], with a leave-one-out bootstrap median 𝐻∗𝑙𝑜𝑜 = 0.480 and a 95 percent critical band [0.470, 0.570] across thirty-eight banking institutions and three systemic crises. This empirical anchor is treated as proof-of-measurement, not proof-of-field, and remains pending external replication. Cost throughout this paper is read inclusively: energetic, institutional, informational, capital, or opportunity cost. The paper is a position paper, not a results paper. It does not claim that economics is reducibleto semantics, nor that semantic structure is metaphysically prior to physical, institutional, or social processes. It claims instead that, within admissible domains, economic and semantic identity-conditions emerge together wherever structured differences are stabilized, carried, and exposed to cost. Three load-bearing falsifiers are stated, together with one substrate-specific falsifier addressing the cost-bearing component of the thesis. The paper closes by sketching a research programme whose first domain paper, Semantic Finance, follows directly. Appendix E adds a hardened full-DQ operationalization: drive as pressure, hold as no-discharge capacity, blockade as transport attenuation, boundary as membrane contactability, and a pre-registrable rupture-pressure diagnostic whose status is explicitly candidate rather than theorem.