Re: econ. and cognitive psychology

[Kevin Quinn <kquinn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

North's latest book makes some noise along these lines, but doesn't get
very far. I've been thinking about the implications of a hermeneutical
approach a la Charles Taylor for economics. In "Social Science as
Practice" Taylor says social scientists *articulate our practices*. This is
both a creation and a discovery; articulation partially shapes what it is
an articulation of, but there is nevertheless something "out there" to be
right or wrong about.  This seems to open the door to a sort of multiple
equilibria account of the relationship between our interpretations of
what we are doing--either the informal ones that guide our practical
lives or the more formal ones we call "social science"--and the reality:
Because articulations are constitutive to a certain degree of what they
are about, there will be multiple ideology/reality equilibria.  E.g.,
as things stand now, rational choice pictures of agency get an unearned
descriptive accuracy (they partially constitute that  which they
articulate): if we changed our view of agency, we would get, to
some extent, a different reality. Then we need to evaluate the whole
complex of ideas/reality that we get with rational choice theory or with
alternatives to it. Taylor would say that rejecting instrumentalism--his
term for rational choice pictures of agency--would make our practices "go
better". So we may be "locked-in" to rational choice right now, but this may
be a Pareto-dominated idea/reality!---Kevin Quinn

On Sat, 22 Apr 1995, Jonathan Dune wrote:

> I would like to see some work in this area.  Path dependency can be
> easily interpreted along the lines of patterns of cognition, that is,
> ideologies/worldviews we use to make meaning out of phenomenon on a
> personal level has social correlates.  Our current system needs to be
> seen as embedded in a partially deterministic web of relationships.  Our
> simple cause/effect and self-deterministic models of activity do not
> accurately model existence.
> 	
> 	Every action requires cognition which is selective perception and
> 		selective meaning.
> jdune
>