In a providential account of the changing relation between political economy and economics, the late nineteenth-century development of economics is identified with the rational choice model; and the revival of political economy in the late twentieth century comes with the export of this model to politics and the other social sciences. An alternative prudential account locates the revival of political economy with a significant qualification to the rational choice model. This qualification restores an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century view of rule-following to (...) human agency. This essay sets out these accounts and draws the conclusion that the choice of one over the other matters, not least for the practice of contemporary politics. (shrink)

One might expect that, in pure coordination games, coordination would become less frequent as the number of options increases. Contrary to this expectation, we report an experiment which found more frequent coordination when the option set was unrestricted than when it was restricted. To try to explain this result, we develop a method for eliciting the general rules that subjects use to identify salient options in restricted and unrestricted sets. We find that each such rule, if used by all subjects, (...) would generate greater coordination in restricted sets. However, subjects tend to apply different rules to restricted and unrestricted sets. (shrink)

This article examines, experimentally, whether inequality affects the social capital of trust in non-market and market settings. We consider three experimental treatments, one with equality, one with inequality but no knowledge of the income of other agents, and one with inequality and knowledge. Inequality, particularly when it is known, has a corrosive effect on trusting behaviours in this experiment. Agents appear to be less sensitive to known relative income differentials in markets than they are in the non-market settings, but trust (...) in markets appears generally more vulnerable to the introduction of inequality than in the non-market setting. (shrink)

This paper uses evidence from laboratory experiments to identify a variety of tribalisms. This is important because some tribalisms encourage zerosum thinking and others do not; and some are not developed by Buchanan. This, in turn, supplies new insights into Buchanan’s project of identifying the kinds of environment that encourage his sense of moral progress. In particular, current levels of inequality become a significant barrier to moral progress not only because they create an economic form of tribalist zero-sum thinking but (...) they also undermine the scope for positive-sum. (shrink)

"The enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence to have affected Western and Eastern Europe in the last decade. In this book, academics from a range of disciplines debate Mary Douglas's distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyse the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. Mary Douglas, Britain's leading cultural anthropologist, contributes several chapters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This article examines, experimentally, whether inequality affects the social capital of trust in non-market and market settings. We consider three experimental treatments, one with equality, one with inequality but no knowledge of the income of other agents, and one with inequality and knowledge. Inequality, particularly when it is known, has a corrosive effect on trusting behaviours in this experiment. Agents appear to be less sensitive to known relative income differentials in markets than they are in the non-market settings, but trust (...) in markets appears generally more vulnerable to the introduction of inequality than in the non-market setting. (shrink)

This paper reviews some of the key responses to Hahn's famous retiring remarks and argues that none has satisfactorily addressed Hahn's suggestion that a discipline does not need to consciously discuss its foundations as it can rely on an evolutionary process to select them. The paper presents a general counter to Hahn on this point which, when applied to contemporary economics, supplies a strong case for the study of methodology now. The particular strength of the case now turns on the (...) current ferment at the foundations of the discipline over the rational choice model. (shrink)

Mark Siderits has been one of the sharpest, clearest philosophers working on Buddhism in the last several decades. His work has also been strikingly wide-ranging. In this chapter, we will focus on two themes in his work that we find particularly interesting. First, Siderits makes a strong case that Abhidharma Buddhists promote mereological nihilism – the view that only simple entities are ultimately real, and aggregates (like a chariot or a heap) are at best useful fictions. Mereological nihilism grounds (...) an argument against the existence of selves, which of course, is central to the tradition. But Siderits draws out a further, bracing conclusion from mereological nihilism – that consciousness isn’t ultimately real. We think this conclusion so antithetical to other commitments of Buddhism that it provides reason to doubt whether Buddhists should sustain the commitment to mereological nihilism. There is another important argument for the no-self view, however, Vasubandhu’s causal-efficacy argument; on this argument, real things must enter in cause-and-effect relations, and when we turn to cause-and-effect, there is no place where the self plays a necessary role. This argument informs our exploration of the second theme from Siderits – his defense of the “personalist” view that person (unlike self) is a useful fiction. We challenge this claim, first by noting that Vasubandhu himself uses the causal-efficacy argument against both selves and persons, and second by arguing that selves and persons are also on a par when it comes to whether they are useful fictions. (shrink)

This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shuan Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Mirowski on a diverse range of topics such as gender, post-colonial theory, rationality, and modernism.

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural (...) evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher's The Inordinance of Time develops an account of the experience of time at the intersection of three approaches: phenomenology, cognitive ...

Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including perception, affect, and action. Gallagher argues that the brain is not secluded from the world or isolated in its own processes, but rather is dynamically connected with body and environment.

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions (...) in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? (shrink)

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism (...) is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. (shrink)

I present arguments against both explicit and implicit versions of the simulation theory for intersubjective understanding. Logical, developmental, and phenomenological evidence counts against the concept of explicit simulation if this is to be understood as the pervasive or default way that we understand others. The concept of implicit (subpersonal) simulation, identified with neural resonance systems (mirror systems or shared representations), fails to be the kind of simulation required by simulation theory, because it fails to explain how neuronal processes meet constraints (...) that involve instrumentality and pretense. Implicit simulation theory also fails to explain how I can attribute a mental or emotion state that is different from my own to another person. I also provide a brief indication of an alternative interpretation of neural resonance systems. (shrink)

Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.

Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith. The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the author’s many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.

This paper develops an empirical argument that the rejection of moral objectivity leaves important features of moral judgment intact. In each of five reported experiments, a number of participants endorsed a nonobjectivist claim about a canonical moral violation. In four of these experiments, participants were also given a standard measure of moral judgment, the moral/conventional task. In all four studies, participants who respond as nonobjectivists about canonical moral violations still treat such violations in typical ways on the moral/conventional task. In (...) particular, participants who give moral nonobjectivist responses still draw a clear distinction between canonical moral and conventional violations. Thus there is some reason to think that many of the central characteristics of moral judgment are preserved in the absence of a commitment to moral objectivity. (shrink)

_The Phenomenological Mind_ is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: • what is phenomenology? • naturalizing phenomenology and the cognitive sciences • phenomenology and consciousness • consciousness and self-consciousness • time and consciousness • intentionality • the embodied mind • action • knowledge of other minds • situated and extended minds • phenomenology and personal identity. This second edition includes a new preface, and revised (...) and improved chapters. Also included are helpful features such as chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and a glossary, making _The Phenomenological Mind_ an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher presents a ground-breaking interdisciplinary account of action. He shows that in order to understand human agency and the aspects of mind that are associated with it, we need to grasp the crucial role of context or circumstance in action, and the normative constraints of social and cultural practices.

This introductory article explains the coverage of this book, which is about developments in research on the topic of the self. This volume introduces the complexity of the concept of self and to the many different approaches to its analysis. It presents analysis from various fields including analytic philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and postmodernism. Part of the book explores how certain aspects of self are constituted in brain processes, narratives, or actions while other parts investigate how some aspects of the (...) self coming apart in anomalous experiences, experiments, or pathologies. (shrink)

Summary Pattern and generalisation are both thought to be fundamental to mathematics and are therefore important in mathematics education. This study investigates how children throughout the junior age range generalise about number patterns and the cognitive processes involved in this. The data were collected from 315 children aged between 7 and 11 years, by means of a workbook which gave children the opportunity to work with different types of pattern within different tasks. Analysis of the data revealed the different types (...) of generalisation made by the children and the different cognitive processes which seemed to be involved. This paper examines specifically the strategies children use when they make generalisations about individual number patterns and briefly discusses how these vary across year groups. (shrink)

In Jackie Kay's award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf's version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay's novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film (...) which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss's African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century. (shrink)

A recent Massachusetts bill seeks to incentivize living organ donation among the state’s incarcerated population by offering volunteers reduced sentences. While the incentive has been removed from the bill, the bill remains controversial. This essay argues that insofar as carceral conditions unduly motivate incarcerated people to participate, living organ donation in prison remains a morally hazardous initiative. The essay suggests that the pervasiveness of medical neglect in Massachusetts prisons not only makes organ donation unsafe but it also implicitly renders the (...) lives of those outside of prison more valuable than those inside. This falls short of Catholic teaching on human dignity. Drawing from the history of medical experimentation in US prisons, the essay posits how the state might unduly influence incarcerated people to become living donors by preying on their moral sentiments. In such instances, the self-gift of organ donation can be understood as a kind of exploited or coerced kenosis. (shrink)

We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding, predictive processing and predictive engagement. We examine the concept of active inference under each model and then ask how this concept informs discussions of social cognition. In this context we consider Frith and Friston’s proposal for a neural hermeneutics, and we explore the alternative model of enactivist hermeneutics.

I propose a distinction between two closely related problems: the problem of social cognition and the problem of participatory sense-making. One problem focuses on how we understand others; the other problem focuses on how, with others, we make sense out of the world. Both understanding others and making sense out of the world involve social interaction. The importance of participatory sense-making is highlighted by reviewing some recent accounts of perception that are philosophically autistic -- i.e., accounts that ignore the involvement (...) of others in our perception of the world. (shrink)

In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty. Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or gives (...) meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language, even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal to private knowledge.Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from Boston University. (shrink)

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been (...) concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

We propose to extend Clark and Chalmer’s concept of the extended mind to consider the possibility that social institutions (e.g., legal systems, museums) may operate in ways similar to the hand-held conveniences (notebooks, calculators) that are often used as examples of extended mind. The inspiration for this suggestion can be found in the writings of Hegel on “objective spirit” which involves the mind in a constant process of externalizing and internalizing. For Hegel, social institutions are pieces of the mind, externalized (...) in their specific time and place. These institutions are the products of shared mental processes. We then use these institutions instrumentally to do further cognitive work, for example, to solve problems or to control behavior. (shrink)