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12Economics, social neuroscience, and mindshapingIn J. Harbecke & C. Herrmann-Pillath (eds.), Social Neuroeconomics: Mechanistic Integration of the Neurosciences and the Social Sciences, Routledge. pp. 174-202. 2021.We consider the potential contribution of economics to an interdisciplinary research partnership between sociology and neuroscience. We correct a misunderstanding in previous literature over the understanding of humans as ‘social animals’, which has in turn led to misidentification of the potential relevance of game theory and the economics of networks to the social neuroscience project. Specifically, it has been suggested that these can be used to model mindreading. We argue that mindreading is…Read more
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12What science can do for democracy: a complexity science approachHumanities and Social Sciences Communications 7. 2020.Political scientists have conventionally assumed that achieving democracy is a one-way ratchet. Only very recently has the question of “democratic backsliding” attracted any research attention. We argue that democratic instability is best understood with tools from complexity science. The explanatory power of complexity science arises from several features of complex systems. Their relevance in the context of democracy is discussed. Several policy recommendations are offered to help stabilize cu…Read more
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21Two fallacies in comparisons between humans and non-humansAnimal Sentience 3 (23). 2018.The hypothesis that humans are superior to non-humans by virtue of higher cognitive powers is often supported by two recurrent fallacies: that any competence shown by humans but not by our closest living relatives must be unique to humans; and that grades of intelligence can be inferred from behavior without regard to motivational structures.
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7Team agency and conditional gamesIn Michiru Nagatsu & Attilia Ruzzene (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.We consider motivations for acknowledging that people participate in multiple levels of economic agency. One of these levels is characterized in terms of subjective utility to the individual; another, frequently observed, level is characterized in terms of utility to social groups with which people identify. Following Bacharach, we describe such groups as ‘teams’. We review Bacharach’s theory of such identification in his account of ‘team reasoning’. While this conceptualization is useful, it ap…Read more
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55Stability of democracies: a complex systems perspectiveEuropean Journal of Physics 40 (1). 2019.The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large in public discourse. Complex systems theory offers a range of powerful new tools to analyse the stability of social institutions in general, and democracy in particular. What makes a democracy stable? And which processes potentially lead to instability of a democratic system? This paper offers a complex systems perspective on this question, informed by areas of the mathematic…Read more
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22Evidence of risk aversion in laboratory settings over small stakes leads to a priori implausible levels of risk aversion over large stakes under certain assumptions. One core assumption in statements of this calibration puzzle is that small-stakes risk aversion is observed over all levels of wealth, or over a â sufficiently largeâ range of wealth. Although this assumption is viewed as self-evident from the vast experimental literature showing risk aversion over laboratory stakes, it actually req…Read more
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74Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment (edited book)MIT Press. 2000.The essays in this collection step back to ask: Do the complex components of Dennett's work on intentionality, consciousness, evolution, and ethics themselves ...
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The economics of the sub-personal: two research programsIn Barbara Montero & Mark D. White (eds.), Economics and the mind, Routledge. 2007.
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156Reply in Book Symposium on James Ladyman, Don Ross: 'Everything must go: metaphysics naturalized', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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33Scientific metaphysics and social scienceSynthese 202 (5): 1-34. 2023.Recently, philosophers have developed an extensive literature on social ontology that applies methods and concepts from analytic metaphysics. Much of this is entirely abstracted from, and unconcerned with, social science. However, Epstein (2015) argues explicitly that analytic social metaphysics, provided its account of ontological ‘grounding’ is repaired in specific ways, can rescue social science from explanatory impasses into which he thinks it has fallen. This version of analytic social onto…Read more
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Strategic theory of norms for empirical applications in political science and political economyIn Harold Kincaid & Jeroen van Bouwel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science, Oxford University Press. 2023.The study of social norms sprawls across all of the social sciences but the the concept lacks a unified conception and formal theory. We synthesize an account that can be applied generally, at the social scale of analysis, and can be applied to empirical evidence generated in field and lab experiments. More specifically, we provide new analysis on representing norms for application in empirical political science, and in parts of economics that do not follow the recent trend among some behavioral…Read more
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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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53Why People are Atypical AgentsPhilosophical Papers 31 (1): 87-116. 2002.Abstract In this paper, I argue that the traditional philosophical approach of taking cognitively and emotionally competent adult people to be the prototypical instances of agency should be revised in light of current work in the behavioral sciences. Logical consistency in application is better served by taking simple goal-directed and feedback-governed systems such as insects as the prototypes of the concept of agency, with people being agents ?by extension? in the same sense as countries or co…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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45Group Doxastic Rationality Need Not Supervene on Individual RationalitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 106-117. 2006.There is a strong formal analogy between proposition-wise supervenience of collective doxastic rationality on individual doxasticrationality and supervenience of social choice functions on individual choice functions. In light of this analogy, the basis for List and Pettit’s impossibility theorems can fruitfully be compared with the basis for Arrow’s. This helps to explain why List and Pettit can derive no impossibility theorem for set-wise supervenience. However, there are empirical reasons for…Read more
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304What to say to a skeptical metaphysician: A defense manual for cognitive and behavioral scientistsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 603-627. 2004.A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that…Read more
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47What can economics contribute to the study of human evolution?Biology and Philosophy 27 (2): 287-297. 2012.The revised edition of Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers is critically reviewed. Seabright aims to help non-economists participating in the cross-disciplinary study of the evolution of human sociality appreciate the potential value that can be added by economists. Though the book includes nicely constructed and vivid essays on a range of economic topics, in its main ambition it largely falls short. The most serious problem is endorsement of the so-called strong reciprocity hypothesis tha…Read more
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114Two styles of neuroeconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 24 (3): 473-483. 2008.I distinguish between two styles of research that are both called . Neurocellular economics (NE) uses the modelling techniques and mathematics of economics to model relatively encapsulated functional parts of brains. This approach rests upon the fact that brains are, like markets, massively distributed information-processing networks over which executive systems can exert only limited and imperfect governance. Harrison's (2008) deepest criticisms of neuroeconomics do not apply to NE. However, th…Read more
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7Francesco Guala The Methodology of Experimental Economics (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 247-252. 2008.
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21Timing models of reward learning and core addictive processes in the brainBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (4): 457-458. 2008.People become addicted in different ways, and they respond differently to different interventions. There may nevertheless be a core neural pathology responsible for all distinctively addictive suboptimal behavioral habits. In particular, timing models of reward learning suggest a hypothesis according to which all addiction involves neuroadaptation that attenuates serotonergic inhibition of a mesolimbic dopamine system that has learned that cues for consumption of the addictive target are signals…Read more
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40The game-theoretic innocence of experimental behavioral psychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3): 426-427. 2001.Hertwig and Ortmann imply that failure of many behavioral psychologists to observe several central methodological principles of experimental economics derives mainly from differences in disciplinary culture. I suggest that there are deeper philosophical causes, based (ironically) on a legacy of methodological individualism in psychology from which economists have substantially cured themselves through use of game theory. Psychologists often misidentify their objects of study by trying to wrench …Read more
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27The evolution of individualistic normsIn Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott & Ben Fraser (eds.), Cooperation and its Evolution, Mit Press. pp. 17. 2013.It is generally recognized that descriptive and normative individualism are logically independent theses. This paper defends the stronger view that recognition of the falsehood of descriptive individualism is crucial to understanding the evolutionary and developmental basis of normative individualism. The argument given for this is not analytic; rather, it is based on empirical generalizations about the evolution of markets with specialized labor, about the nature of information processing in la…Read more
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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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52The cognitive and behavioral sciences: Real patterns, real unity, real causes, but no supervenienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 637-647. 2004.Our response amplifies our case for scientific realism and the unity of science and clarifies our commitments to scientific unity, nonreductionism, behaviorism, and our rejection of talk of “emergence.” We acknowledge support from commentators for our view of physics and, responding to pressure and suggestions from commentators, deny the generality supervenience and explain what this involves. We close by reflecting on the relationship between philosophy and science
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46Towards a New Philosophy of Positive EconomicsDialogue 34 (3): 467-. 1995.Imagine asking a typical, well informed, contemporary philosopher whether or not she considered biology to be a science. Our informant, being a philosopher, would not necessarily respond with the straightforward “of course” that would be expected from anyone else. She might first reason through a complicated and heavily qualified definition of science, or she might distinguish certain parts of biology that she held to be more clearly scientific than others. If she were partial to a certain sort …Read more
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26Special, radical, failure of reduction in psychiatryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Use of network models to identify causal structure typically blocks reduction across the sciences. Entanglement of mental processes with environmental and intentional relationships, as Borsboom et al. argue, makes reduction of psychology to neuroscience particularly implausible. However, in psychiatry, a mental disorder can involve no brain disorder at all, even when the former crucially depends on aspects of brain structure. Gambling addiction constitutes an example.
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18Some mental disorders are based on networks, others on latent variablesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 166-167. 2010.Cramer et al. persuasively conceptualize major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) as network disorders, rejecting latent variable accounts. But how does their radical picture generalize across the suite of mental and personality disorders? Addictions are Axis I disorders that may be better characterized by latent variables. Their comorbidity relationships could be captured by inserting them as nodes in a super-network of Axis I conditions