Transmutability, generalised Darwinism and the limits to conceptual integration

Christopher Brown

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2013, vol. 37, issue 1, 209-225

Abstract: This article explores the limits to conceptual integration between evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and economics. The new learning in the natural sciences supplies material to update and enrich the microfoundations of institutional economics—specifically, the instinct–habit psychology. The framing of social reality with evolutionary concepts is, however, misguided in important respects. Metaphorical modelling is the transfer of concepts developed for the understanding of one domain to another, ontological distinct domain. The argument is made that the generalisation of Darwinian principles to the phenomena of institutional persistence and change is theorising by metaphor, because there are crucial ontological differences separating the natural and social domains. Social reality has the property of transmutability—meaning the social environment, unlike the natural domain, is changeable by human agency. This article endeavours to explain how the generalisation of the natural selection principle evokes a fallacious conception of institutional reality. The idea that 'fitness' in the social/economic sphere is a matter of purposive adaptation by agents to exogenous conditions is misleading, because real success in business or politics is transformative and is achieved by catalysing and maintaining advantageous shifts of widely prevalent habits of thought and behaviour. Copyright , OUP.

Date: 2013
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