Don Ross

People differ in the extent to which they discount the values of future rewards. Behavioural economists measure these differences in terms of functions that describe rates of reduced valuation in the future – temporal discounting – as these vary with time. They measure differences in preference for risk – differing rates of probability discounting – in terms of similar functions that describe reduced valuation of rewards as the probability of their delivery falls. So-called ‘impulsive’ people, including people disposed to addiction, tend to choose rewards in patterns that are described by unusually steeply sloped discount functions. The empirical literature is ambivalent as to whether this applies to pathological gamblers (PGs) who manifest most other behavioural patterns associated with addiction, with different, equally careful studies suggesting opposite conclusions (Petry & Casarella 1999; Holt, Green & Myerson 2003). This puzzle may arise from the fact that most previous experiments on discounting behaviour were not designed so as to allow effects of high temporal discounting to be distinguished from effects of low probability discounting. (Addiction has sometimes been associated with the latter because it seems to involve, at least in the starting addict, under appreciation of risk.) Our research project investigates both forms of discounting behaviour and their relationship to severity of risk of PG in a community sample of South African gamblers.

This chapter discusses the plausibility of the criticism against the thesis that external factors causally influence cognition and that they are, consequently, partly constitutive of cognition. The discussion should not be taken as implicitly proposing that the opposite theory is true, although the works of Adams and Aizawa suggest that they are defending internalism. This can be attributed to the fact that systems are, by definition, bounded; one must make assumptions about systems in developing cognitive models. This chapter defends the position that metaphysical considerations should play no role in deciding how to model cognition. It further explains how there is no basis for a general fact of the matter about determining what is and what is not a cognitive system.

The paper replies to Wade Hands’s recent criticism of one part of my 2005 book, Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation (ETCS). Hands argues that my association of my view of the foundations of microeconomics with aspects of the thought of Lionel Robbins and Paul Samuelson is gratuitous and historically misleading. I argue in turn that Hands’s general criticism rests on his ignoring the fact that my treatment of both Robbins and Samuelson is explicitly critical. On Robbins, I argue that Hands’s concerns amount to an objection to me only given an absurd principle to the effect that the only non-misleading kind of associative relationship one can draw between two historical theses is identity. On Samuelson the dialectic is more complicated because, as a result of not understanding what philosophers call ‘externalism about intentional content’, Hands misreads the relationship I aim to construct between my general view and Samuelson’s.

McClamrock argues for a thesis he calls radical externalism' in the behavioral and cognitive sciences. In my paper, I contend that McClamrock's thesis, though true, is not radical. This is because he urges externalism with respect to cognitive task-individuation and task-explanation, both of which are standard practice in the relevant disciplines. Semantic externalism may remain contentious, I argue; but the sense in which philosophers continue to argue about it has little bearing on the actual conduct of cognitive science. I conclude with a diagnosis as to why externalism seems more contentious than it ought to

This paper is part of a larger project defending of the foundations of microeconomics against recent criticisms by philosophers. Here, we undermine one source of these criticisms, arising from philosophers' disappointment with the performance of microeconomic tools, in particular game theory, when these are applied to normative decision theory. Hollis and Sugden have recently articulated such disappointment in a sophisticated way, and have argued on the basis of it that the economic conception of rationality is inadequate. We argue, however, that their claim rests upon a misunderstanding of the concept of a game as it is used in microeconomics.

There are many general economic policies I favour such that I would feel significantly ashamed were I to succumb to bribery, or to institutional pressure short of physical threat, to publicly support their opposites. Here are a few of these policies: (1) Rich countries should not impose trade barriers, including subsidies for their own producers, against imports from poor countries. (2) Leaders of poor countries should be regarded as irresponsible when they imply to their people that their economic difficulties arise principally from wickedness and exploitative behavior on the part of rich countries – the moral urgency of (1) notwithstanding. (3) Much freer movement of people across national borders for purposes of labour should be allowed everywhere. (4) Destitution is an unduly severe penalty for laziness, lack of talent or intelligence, or bad luck. More productive people should provide the lazy, the unskilled and the unlucky with as large a basic income grant as is compatible with maximizing net social productivity (which no present society comes very close to doing, partly due to confused social morality and partly due to incentive-distorting tax systems).

Most philosophical accounts of the foundations of economics have assumed that economics is intended to be an empirical science concerned with human behaviour, though they have, of course, differed over the extent to which it has been or can be successful as such an enterprise. A prominent source of dissent against this consensus is Alexander Rosenberg. In his recent book, Rosenberg summarizes and completes his statement of a position that he has been developing for some time. He argues that although economists evaluate one another's work according to shared and rigorous standards of adequacy, these standards are strictly internal, like those of mathematics, instead of being derived from discoveries about contingent relationships between theoretical statements and empirical facts. Economics, that is to say, is essentially conceptual rather than empirical inquiry. In the following discussion, I will provide grounds for resisting Rosenberg's conclusion. The point of this criticism, however, is not mainly negative. Most of the historical preoccupations of the philosophy of economics, like those of the philosophy of science in general, have been epistemological. Careful attention to Rosenberg's argument, however, redirects our attention to ontological questions about the objects of economics, and this redirection, I will maintain, is to be welcomed. I will argue that while the majority of philosophers of economics is correct, as against Rosenberg, in regarding economics as an empirical science, the conventional view as to the identity of its empirical objects should be substantially revised under the pressure of Rosenberg's criticisms. My critical analysis of the implications of Rosenberg's work for the ontological commitments of economics is intended to furnish one line of argument towards my own conception of the objects of economics. This conception, which is still preliminary in many respects, will be briefly sketched toward the end of the present paper; a detailed account of it is given in Ross and LaCasse

Murphy (2006) criticizes psychiatric nosology from the perspective of the philosophy of science, arguing that the model of pathology as encapsulated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reflects a folk conception of the mental, and of malfunctioning, that is inadequately integrated with cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. The present paper supports this view through a case study of research on pathological gambling. It argues that recent modeling based on fMRI studies and behavioral genetics suggests a stipulative, non-seamless reduction of pathological gambling to a specific disorder of the mesolimbic dopamine system. This argument is agnostic as between prior philosophical commitments to realism or empiricism.

The aim of this report is to consider feasible conditions under which South Africa!!" processed (e.g., canned and other packaged) fruit industry would be internationally competitive and a profitable site of investment, and therefore able to resume a pattern of growth from which it departed in the early part of the present decade. This is in service of the wider aim of identifying, in a subsequent phase of the project, appropriate industrial policy measures which Government might put in place to assist the industry, in accordance with sound principles of national welfare optimization and public finance.

Of crucial importance to all parts of the transport services and materials sector in South Africa is the way in which the Government chooses to implement its ambitious plans to reinvest in the country’s basic infrastructure. How will it navigate competing demands from urban and rural environments, given the divergent economics that describe them? How will it balance the goals of poverty fighting, skills empowerment, and keeping SA internationally competitive, as it considers infrastructure project options?

This paper argues that the most common reading of Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science in the methodology literature, according to which it was an historical foil for subsequent positivist-empiricist ideas, underestimates its contemporary relevance. In light of recent scholarship on 1930s positivism in philosophy, Robbins’s Essay is better interpreted as representing an attitude I call ‘broad positivism’, which remains a live option in contemporary philosophy of science. In consequence, the basis of Robbins’s preference for clear demarcation between economics and psychology should be regarded as not merely historical in interest, but as raising valid considerations against the widespread current trend towards ‘correcting’ aspects of economic theory by reference to psychological experiments.