There has been considerable discussion lately of the concept of open systems, which has revealed that different participants are using the terms ?openness? and ?closure? in different ways. The purpose of this paper is to address issues of meaning that arise in this particular discourse, with a view to clarifying both conflicts in usage and the underlying issues involved. We explore the different meanings of openness and closure extant in the literature, as applied at the ontological and epistemological levels, focusing (...) on our own use of the terms in relation to that which prevails in neoclassical economics on the one hand and to the use made of them by Tony Lawson and other critical realists on the other. (shrink)

This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton's neoclassical approach, Sen's commitment approach and Kirman et al.'s complexity approach. The primary focus is the multiple selves problem and the difficulties associated with failing to explain social identity and personal identity together. The argument of the paper is that too narrow a scope for reflexivity in individual decision?making renders the problem intractable, but that enlarging (...) this scope makes it possible to explain personal and social identity together in connection with an individual behavior termed comparative value?objective evaluation. The paper concludes with recommendations for treating the individual objective function as a production function. JEL classification: D01, D63, Z13. (shrink)

In this paper I propose that what social psychologists refer to as social identity is a plausible empirical correlate on the part of the individual to what some philosophers and economists call collective intention. A discussion of an experiment yields the question what kind of mental state social identity might be and how it is related to the standard desire/belief conception. It is argued that social identity involves both a desire and a belief, and that one distinguishing feature of it (...) is that it makes individual choice parametric. (shrink)

methodology both of neoclassical and Austrian economics, as well as other approaches, from New Keynesianism to analytical Marxism. Yet there is considerable controversy as to what the phrase means. Moreover, the methodologies of those to whom the theoretical practice of MI is ascribed differ profoundly on the status of the individual economic agent: economics.

In the recent literature at the interface between economics, biology and neuroscience, several authors argue that by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of decision making, economists will be able to construct predictively and explanatorily superior models. However, most economists remain quite reluctant to import biological or neural insights into their account of choice behaviour. In this paper, I reconstruct and critique one of the main arguments by means of which economists attempt to vindicate their conservative position. Furthermore, I (...) develop an alternative defense of the thesis that economists justifiably rely on a methodologically distinctive approach to the modelling of choice behaviour. (shrink)

Can teams and other collectivities have preferences of their own, preferences that are not in some way reducible to the personal preferences of their members? In short, are collective preferences possible? In everyday life people speak easily of what we prefer, where what is at issue seems to be a collective preference. This is suggested by the acceptability of such remarks as ‘My ideal walk would be . . . along rougher and less well-marked paths than we prefer as a (...) family’. One can imagine, indeed, that each member of a given family prefers something other than what the family prefers. What, then, do the collective preferences of everyday understanding amount to? (shrink)

Economists disagree about whether they should aim to provide explanations, about what they should aim to explain, and about how they should go about explaining. This essay will address all three of these controversies. I shall argue (1) that explanation is a central task in economics, (2) that one should adopt an explicitly causal model of explanation, (3) that economists cannot avoid explaining individual choices and they should attempt to explain the paths that take the economy from one equilibrium to (...) another, and (4) that explanations in economics cite reasons as well as causes. Most of these points apply across different schools of economics, but “economics” in this paper should thus be read as “mainstream economics.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine metaphysical aspects in the neuroeconomics debate. I propose that part of the debate can be better understood by supposing two metaphysical stances, mechanistic and functional. I characterize the two stances, and discuss their relations. I consider two models of framing, in order to illustrate how the features of mechanistic and functional stances figure in the practice of the sciences of individual decision making.