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106What Is Addiction? (edited book)The MIT Press. 2010.Leading addiction researchers survey the latest findings in addiction science, countering the simplistic cultural stereotypes of the addict.
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150The alleged coupling-constitution fallacy and the mature sciencesIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. 2010.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 developin…Read more
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3Scientific realism, constructive empiricism, and structuralismIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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1Rainforest realism and the unity of scienceIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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Ontic structural realism and the philosophy of physicsIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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Conclusion : philosophy enoughIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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Causation in a structural worldIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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4In defence of scientismIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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536Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalizedOxford University Press. 2007.Every Thing Must Go aruges that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it ...
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2The 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 arg…Read more
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84Our point of departure is Russell’s (1913) argument for the ‘complete extrusion’ of the word ‘cause’ from the philosophical vocabulary. We argue that at least three different types of philosophical project concerning ‘cause’ should be carefully distinguished, and that failures to distinguish them lie at the root of some apparently recalcitrant problems. We call them the ‘cognitive’, the ‘scientific’ and the ‘metaphysical’.
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32Critical Notice of Ron McClamrock "Existential Cognition"Canadian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.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 …Read more
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10Coordination and the foundations of social intelligenceIn Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 481. 2012.
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If one player’s gain is exactly equivalent to another’s loss, the game is said to be zero-sum. For example, football: every improvement of position for one team is an exactly corresponding deterioration for the other team. On the other hand, a buyer and a supplier haggling over a price is not a zero-sum game, since the parties hope to mutually gain
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68The Microeconomic Interpretation of GamesPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994. 1994.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 o…Read more
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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 econo…Read more
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24Game Theory in Studies of Evolution and Development: Prospects for Deeper UseBiological Theory 1 (1): 31-32. 2006.
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123Real Patterns and the Ontological Foundations of MicroeconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 11 (1): 113. 1995.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 alth…Read more
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59Murphy (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 …Read more
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8There may not be many points of consensus over what best promotes economic development, but here is one that has formed over the past decade: the institutional context matters a lot. This represents the single greatest shift in economic thinking about development since World War II, for there once was an almost equally clear consensus that institutions..
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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 …Read more
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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 proje…Read more
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254Chalmers's Naturalistic Dualism: The Irrelevance of the Mind-Body Problem to the Scientific Study of ConsciousnessIn Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, Oxford University Press. pp. 165-175. 2005.
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4This 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 sci…Read more
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3Writing in the Business Day on 2 October 2007, economics journalist Hilary Joffe notes that “it was not long ago that there was a famine of infrastructure investment [in South Africa]; now there’s a feast, with each new week bringing reports of new projects and new, much higher estimates of the totals to be spent in years to come.” Joffe expresses enthusiasm about this, for reasons with which we agree: The infrastructure feast has already helped to raise SA’s investment ratio to nearly 21% of gr…Read more
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16Critics of mainstream economics typically rest important weight on the differences between people and the 'agents' that populate economic theory and economic models. Hollis and Nell (1975) is both representative of and ancestral to many more recent variations on the theme. Lately, the upgraded status of behavioral economics (BE) within the discipline's mainstream has encouraged a number of writers to use revolutionary rhetoric in promotion of a 'paradigm shift' that includes the rejection of 'ra…Read more
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3This paper critically discusses Amartya Sen’s case for broadening the basket of wellbeing indicators in development policy beyond income and consumption expenditure. I first argue that, contrary to what Sen has suggested, the theoretical and practical motivations that he gives for this do not form a mutually complementary set. In the second, policy-focused, part of the paper I present problems Sen’s approach to measurement raises in the context of a case study from rural South Africa. I conclude…Read more