Neuroeconomics, naturalism and language

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

No 108, Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management

Abstract: Neuroeconomics stays in the center of the ongoing naturalistic turn in economics. It portrays the individual as a complex system of decision making mechanisms and modules. This results into a conceptual tension with the standard economic notion of the unity of the actor that is a systemic property of economic coordination. I propose to supplement neuroeconomics with a naturalistic theory of social coordination. Recent neurobiological and psychological research strongly supports claims made by some heterodox economists that the identity of actors emerges from social interaction, especially in the context of the use of language. Therefore, I argue that the completion of the neuroeconomic paradigm requires a naturalistic theory of language. I provide some sketches based on teleosemantics and memetics, and exemplify the argument by a naturalist account of money.

Keywords: Naturalism; neuroeconomics; individual identity; language and economics; naturalistic theory of social interaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B41 D87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/27873/1/588393436.PDF (application/pdf)

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:zbw:fsfmwp:108

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().