Let’s face it, though: according to an uncontroversial definition of dogmatism, there is a gathering of faithful Austrian methodologists and economists here. That’s simply factual, not insulting.
This is a LvMI forum, where Austrian methodologists and economists would most likely gather. It’s like going to Stormfront and pointing out that there’s a lot of racial separatist and neo-Nazis on the forum (or going to RevLeft and pointing out the large amounts of leftist/socialist).
Mean activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum.
Which is why people find Pot as a form of utility, but doesn’t explain why one person gets a dopamine high off pot, while another gets a high off baseball, and yet another gets an entirely different high skiing. Ultimately all thats been done is you’ve changed subjective valuation into a series of technical terms which describes a physical location of the brain responsible for letting us know something feels good. IT still does not explain why baseball effects some people while TV effects others. It doesn’t explain the preferences or the degrees in preferences. It still does not explain why reading is more of a utility to one man over watching TV, and why for another it’s vise versa. Or why in some people there is a balance of the two.
In other words nothing has changed, whatsoever, and you’ve wasted alot of time thinking you’re going to find the answer to life in the ventral striatum! JK 
Mean activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum.
And how do you know that is “utility”? What is the phenomenon of utility apart from this, how do you identify it, how do you define it? Why is interesting to study it? You’re basically doing the equivalent of saying thinking is some activity that goes on in XYZ area, as if there’s no mental phenomenon going on in the subject’s mind. You may deny it, but denials by themselves are worth sweet f-all, sort of like eliminating the problem to be explained by sweeping it under a rug.
AJ, thanks for that link! Some choice quotes in there…
“Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”
– Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner“Oh, you think you’re thinking, but that’s just a delusion - or it would be, if there were such things as delusions.”
Biological taxonomy is folklore. These things are just energy fields.
Yeah, I could probably be considered a logical behaviorist. My point is this: what truths can emerge if you don’t anthropomorphize people? (Since that trait is, technically, an evolutionary trick to misperceive physical processes.)
Is there a lay-accessible introduction somewhere? Wikipedia’s entry is uselessly uninformative and the references are all scholarly.
I would be curious to know whether the psychological wing of neuroeconomics comes from mainstream psychology or evolutionary psychology. If mainstream, then it is a dead end. Evo psych is the future.
Clayton -
Our misperception perceives itself as misperception! What a wonderful contradiction!
Let’s look at a “prefrontal cortex”. I’m holding one in my hand. I take away an atom. Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”? I take away another atom. How about now? I take away another atom. How about now? …Fast forward a few hours of taking away atoms… I take away another atom. Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”? …Fast forward a week of taking away atoms… I take away another atom. Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”? How do I know when I have taken away the last atom of the “prefrontal cortex”? How do I know that it is a “prefrontal cortex” that I am taking atoms away from? Are the atoms that I took away still a “prefrontal cortex”? Now I add an atom. How do I know that I added an atom to the/a “prefrontal cortex”? Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”…Fast forward a year of adding atoms… Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”? …Fast forward a billion trillion years of adding atoms… Is it still a “prefrontal cortex”? How do I know when are no atoms left to add? How do I know when “it” is no longer a “prefrontal cortex”?
“I don’t even know what a prefrontal cortex means.” – Caley McKibbin
Perhaps the Science vs. Folk School should add an atom to their folk cerebral cortexes.
Clayton, I would personally agree that evolutionary psychology is the most scientifically grounded and informative branch of psychology we have, but I also don’t consider that opinion uncontroversial (consider the “‘just so’ stories” criticism).
To answer your question, neuroeconomics most certainly takes account of adaptationist thinking.
Caley, your point is reasonable.
To be sure, I am an ontological reductionist–or, perhaps, an “ontic fundamentalist” as William C. Wimsatt might call me.
I prefer a “desert ontology” as Quine has envisioned; that is, nothing ultimately exists but physical particles, even if our epistemic limitations and practical purposes shall forever lead us to refer to various ensembles of them.
Thus, if I have pursued an intertheoretic reduction from a folk-psychological homo economicus to neural networks, then I consider this a step in the right direction, not a resting place.
“Neuroeconomics provides a model of the architecture that links brain and behavior. Mind, though it may very much exist, simply does not figure in that equation.” – Paul W. Glimcher
That seems reasonable: we can surely learn something useful from treating people as black boxes or automatons. I can know, for instance, that if I tell people one thing they will usually treat me better than if I tell them another thing. Sometimes analyzing this in terms of human action could be too cumbersome, and instead I just work with my statistical data.
An example is the advertiser’s claim that “Sex sells!” Maybe the advertiser notices that he is motivated toward buying decisions by semi-nude women on the box and he presumes others are sufficiently like him, but in this case he seems to be making a purely statistical statement, not about humans as actors per se, but about humans as objects/robots/automatons/numbers/etc. It’s still a useful observation.
However, I don’t know that Austrian theory denies this.
I think that you are talking about something like, if I see a picture X associated with good A instead of no picture X, I have a greater probability of buying it, and I expect that other people are like me, so, because I want to sell those goods, A, I will try to get people to associate those pictures, X, with those goods, A.
But using the categories good, buying, wanting, and so on, are only possible because we have praxeology, so I don’t think that it is even possible to consider that sort of statistical thing only of natural science. It might be an empirical regularity that we could consider as a part of natural science, namely, psychology, but it relies on the vocabulary of praxeology. In fact, I think that praxeology is the foundation, or at least the vocabulary, of psychology, just like logic or mathematics is the foundation, or at least the vocabulary, of physics. How could you do psychology without praxeology? And how could you do physics without logic and mathematics? In both cases, you wouldn’t even have any vocabulary to work with.
So I would call what you are talking about applied psychology, which is empirical, while being careful to remember that the foundation of applied psychology is praxeology, which isn’t empirical.
But I think that Neoclassical is trying to go a lot further than that, and argue that we could reduce buying, selling, goods, wanting, and so on, to terms of natural science, so that we don’t even need to use praxeology as the foundation anymore. I think that he is trying to say that we could reduce things like buying, selling, goods, wanting, and so on to categories of movements.
So I don’t think that your example is what he is talking about.
I thought Neoclassical said elsewhere that he is not against most of Austrian theory, just that he believes there are other valid methodologies. His debate with Grayson was over whether methodological dualism is the only sound approach to the pursuit of knowledge, not whether it was sound at all.
Methodological pluralism is the only sound approach. Methodological dualism is merely the starting point to liberate economics from the grasp of people with a scientistic view of how science should proceed, and is emphasised because it was Mises’s primary concern, rather than the methodology of sciences like biology (as against physics).
That’s essentially correct.
Furthermore, I contend that if a priori reasoning exists at all, then it is evolutionarily contingent, a biological trait, and thus is not necessarily sound; that is, for us to believe any reasoning whatsoever, it must generally cohere with our empirical knowledge (i.e., confirmation holism). There is no foundation that offers us “irrefutable” truths or “apodictic certainty.” As Georges Rey states, “Appeals to some special faculty of a priori intuition capable of unproblematically apprehending clear and distinct ideas, or forms in Plato’s heaven, do seem little better than theological claims about the deliverances of revelation.”
The fact that Mises and Rothbard justified their a priori faith differently should suggest something is amiss.
In what way is the methodology of biology incompatible with the methodology of physics?
