Abstract
Should economics study the psychological basis of agents’ choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between ‘mentalist’ answers to this question and rival ‘behavioural’ answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the ‘functionalist’ variety [Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2016). Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: A philosophy-of-science perspective. Economics and Philosophy, 32(2), 249–281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267115000462]. Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input–output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some risky commitments about the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 292-310 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of Economic Methodology |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 27 Jul 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement no 715530. Thank you Chloe de Canson, Caglar Dede, Conrad Heilmann, Francesco Guala and two anonymous referees for your gracious and constructive comments on the manuscript. I'm also indebted to Johanna Thoma and Kate Vredenburgh, and to the participants at their 2018 workshop at the LSE on Revealed Preferences, for discussion of some of these ideas.
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