Economics and Philosophy 32 (2):249-281 (2016)
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Abstract |
Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states.
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Keywords | Mentalism Behaviourism Revealed preference Decision theory Naturalism Non-reductive physicalism Neuroeconomics Belief-desire models |
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Reprint years | 2015, 2016 |
DOI | 10.1017/s0266267115000462 |
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References found in this work BETA
Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents.Christian List & Philip Pettit - 2011 - Oxford University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
What Is Risk Aversion?H. Orii Stefansson & Richard Bradley - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (1):77-102.
Preferences: Neither Behavioural nor Mental.Francesco Guala - 2019 - Economics and Philosophy 35 (3):383-401.
Reason-Based Choice and Context-Dependence: An Explanatory Framework.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2016 - Economics and Philosophy 32 (2):175-229.
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