Darwinism, causality and the social sciences
Geoffrey Hodgson ()
Journal of Economic Methodology, 2004, vol. 11, issue 2, 175-194
Abstract:
Recently the degree to which 'evolutionary economics' does or should involve Darwinian principles has come under debate. This essay builds on previous arguments that Darwinism has a potentially wide application to socioeconomic evolution, which does not involve biological reductionism. It is argued that at the core of Darwinism are presuppositions concerning causality and causal explanation. Contrary to widespread belief, these presuppositions do not downgrade or ignore human intentionality: they simply require that it too is in principle subject to causal explanation. Neither are these presuppositions 'deterministic' or 'mechanistic', at least by some prominent meanings of these terms. Furthermore, the presupposition of causal determination does not necessarily exclude or include stochastic or probabilistic determination.
Keywords: Darwinism; ontology; causality; determinism; evolution; emergent properties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501780410001694118 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jecmet:v:11:y:2004:i:2:p:175-194
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJEC20
DOI: 10.1080/13501780410001694118
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Economic Methodology is currently edited by John Davis and D Wade Hands
More articles in Journal of Economic Methodology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().