This paper examines how accounting philosophy can be reconstructed under the dual conditions of China’s socialist basic economic system and the Intelligent Industrial Revolution. It argues that accounting philosophy is an evolving framework shaped by institutional logics and technological paradigms. The industrial-capitalist paradigm remains important, but its explanatory and normative capacity is constrained when accounting must address data, algorithms, platform rules, and carbon/natural capital, while also responding to public-value and sustainability constraints beyond a single profit function.

This paper adopts a normative-conceptual approach combining philosophical analysis and institutional interpretation. It builds a dual-anchor framework: China’s socialist basic economic system as the institutional anchor and the Intelligent Industrial Revolution as the technological anchor. On this basis, this paper reconstructs accounting philosophy along four dimensions: ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology.

The conclusions are as follows: First, accounting-object admissibility should no longer depend mainly on physical materiality or completed transactions, but on “institutionalized existence”: whether a candidate object can be transformed into an accounting fact through rights definition, standardized measurement, normalized disclosure, and assurance accessibility. Second, accounting knowledge is moving from ex post recording to a continuous loop of prediction-governance- verification (PGV). Under intelligent conditions, accounting and auditing increasingly rely on forward-looking estimation, process control, deviation tracking, and iterative calibration, turning accounting knowledge into governance evidence. Third, accounting should move from profit-centered instrumental rationality toward value-sensitive coordination of instrumental and value rationalities. In China’s institutional context, accounting must preserve comparability and verifiability while also serving national strategies, public values, sustainable development, and long-term resilience.

This paper makes the following contributions: Theoretically, it offers a China-anchored framework for reconstructing accounting philosophy in the intelligent era and clarifies how institutional conditions and technological change jointly reshape accounting ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. Practically, it translates philosophical reconstruction into implementable pathways, and proposes a localized implementation route linking international comparability with domestic institutional adaptation through mapping, bridging, and pilot testing.