Ian Wright

This monograph examines the domain of classical political economy using the methodologies developed in recent years both by the new discipline of econo-physics and by computing science. This approach is used to re-examine the classical subdivisions of political economy: production, exchange, distribution and finance. The book begins by examining the most basic feature of economic life – production – and asks what it is about physical laws that allows production to take place. How is it that human labour is able to modify the world? It looks at the role that information has played in the process of mass production and the extent to which human labour still remains a key resource. The Ricardian labour theory of value is re-examined in the light of econophysics, presenting agent based models in which the Ricardian theory of value appears as an emergent property. The authors present models giving rise to the class distribution of income, and the long term evolution of profit rates in market economies. Money is analysed using tools drawn both from computer science and the recent Chartalist school of financial theory. Covering a combination of techniques drawn from three areas, classical political economy, theoretical computer science and econophysics, to produce models that deepen our understanding of economic reality, this new title will be of interest to higher level doctoral and research students, as well as scientists working in the field of econophysics.

he design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention). The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of `perturbant', emotional episodes.

The classical labour theory of value generates two well-known contradictions: Ricardo's problem of an invariable measure of value and Marx's transformation problem. I show that both contradictions derive from a category-mistake of supposing that technical costs and total costs are of the same logical type. This category-mistake is the underlying cause of the almost two hundred year history of the 'value controversy'. Once identified we can avoid the mistake, which reveals a more general labour theory of value with an invariable measure of value and without a trans- formation problem.

The teaching of critical thinking in public schooling is a central aim. Yet, despite its widespread acceptance in curriculum documents, critical thinking is rarely taught. Motivated by Onosko (1991), and by the efforts of some post-secondary instructors of critical thinking to get critical thinking taught in schools, I look at the recent literature on (a) critical thinking in the social studies, (b) definitions of, and programs in critical thinking, (c) teachers beliefs, and (d) the milieus in which teachers work. I pose three questions and provide tentative hypotheses as to why critical thinking is not being implemented in schools