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14Consciousness and the Origins of Thought (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 456-457. 1999.Consciousness has clearly been the topic of the decade in the philosophy of mind. In a series of papers published throughout this period of frenzied attention, Norton Nelkin worked his way more painstakingly through the conceptual tangles than, perhaps, any other philosopher. While battling with cancer, he fused his ideas into the present book, and managed to complete it only days before the disease triumphed. So this is a heroic work of scholarship, in the most literal sense. It is also a very …Read more
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13L’étude de tout, par tous les moyens ; étude critique de Philosophie de l’esprit, état des lieux (Paris, Vrin, 2000, 337 p.), par Denis Fisette et Pierre Poirier (review)Philosophiques 30 (1): 245. 2003.
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12Equilibrium Versus Understanding, Mark Addleson. Routledge, 1995, 293 + x pagesEconomics and Philosophy 14 (1): 163. 1998.
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11Economics is all over the mapBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (1): 98-99. 2014.Bentley et al. say that economics is the science of their map's northwest quadrant, where choice is individual and transparent. This accepts the picture of the discipline common among behavioral economists who aim to drag economics southward but not eastward. In fact, leading economics journals regularly publish models located in all four quadrants, and the prominence of work from the eastern zone is increasing.
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11Metaphor, Meaning, and CognitionPeter Lang. 1993.This book explores and offers solutions to a range of conceptual and philosophical problems that underlie attempts to understand metaphor processing in the context of cognitive science. The author vigorously criticizes the prevailing philosophical prejudice against traditional «comparison» theories of metaphor, arguing that the problems with the comparison theory are exciting problems that demand solutions, rather than grounds for rejecting the theory itself. Furthermore, it is through these pro…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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10A modern guide to philosophy of economics (edited book)Edward Elgar Publishing. 2021.This insightful Modern Guide offers a broad coverage of questions and controversies encountered by contemporary economists. A refreshing approach to philosophy of economics, chapters comprise a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives, from lab and field experiments to macroeconomics and applied policy work, written using a familiar, accessible language for economists. Highlighting key areas of methodological controversy, the Modern Guide looks at estimating utility functions in choi…Read more
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10Economics is the only established discipline that is regularly charged not just with including ideologically motivated research programs and hypotheses, but with actually being (at least in its institutionalized mainstream form) an ideology. As Coleman (2002) documents, this charge has followed economics since its modern inception as ‘political economy’ in the eighteenth century. There is a veritable tradition of what Coleman calls ‘anti-economics’, most famously populated by people such as Rusk…Read more
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9Is resolve mainly about resisting hyperbolic discounting?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Ainslie insightfully refines the concept of willpower by emphasizing low-effort applications of resolve. However, he gives undue weight to intertemporal discounting as the problem that willpower is needed to overcome. Nonhumans typically don't encounter choices that differ only in the time of consumption. Humans learn to transform uncertainty into problems they can solve using culturally evolved mechanisms for quantifying risk.
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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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8Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive AssessmentMIT Press. 2000.An assessment of Dennett's philosophy by various philosophers. Includes Dennett's responses.
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7L’étude de tout, par tous les moyens ; étude critique de Philosophie de l’esprit, état des lieux , par Denis Fisette et Pierre Poirier (review)Philosophiques 30 (1): 245-262. 2003.
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7PHILIP MIROWSKI The Effortless Economy of Science? (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (3): 659-665. 2009.
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6Three recent book-length studies in the philosophy of economics (Mirowski 2002, Davis 2003, Ross 2005) have drawn attention to the fact that mainstream economic theory has consistently avoided commitment to any particular model of the person. This is the most significant respect in which economics has kept aloof from part of psychology. The widespread belief, on the other hand, that economists’ attentiveness to the psychology of choice and decision had to wait for the Allais challenge and then f…Read more
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6Notes on coordination, game theory and the evolutionary basis of languageInteraction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 13 (1): 50-65. 2012.It is widely appreciated that establishment and maintenance of coordination are among the key evolutionary promoters and stabilizers of human language. In consequence, it is also generally recognized that game theory is an important tool for studying these phenomena. However, the best known game theoretic applications to date tend to assimilate linguistic communication with signaling. The individualistic philosophical bias in Western social ontology makes signaling seem more challenging than it …Read more
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5Endogenous choice of institutional punishment mechanisms to promote social cooperationPublic Choice. forthcoming.Does the desirability of social institutions for public goods provision depend on the extent to which they include mechanisms for endogenous enforcement of cooperative behavior? We consider alternative institutions that vary the use of direct punishments to promote social cooperation. In one institution, subjects participate in a public goods experiment in which an initial stage of voluntary contribution is followed by a second stage of voluntary, costly sanctioning. Another institution consists…Read more
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5Francesco Guala The Methodology of Experimental Economics (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 247-252. 2008.
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4People 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, i…Read more
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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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4In defence of scientismIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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3The new economy is characterized in the developing world by open capital markets and coordinated international regulation - neither of which existed in the colonial period.
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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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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
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3Cooperation on Multiple Scales: Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation Peter Hammerstein, editor Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003 (485 + xiv pp; $47.00 hbk; ISBN 0-262-08326-4) (review)Biological Theory 1 (4): 428-430. 2006.
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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