So. Naturalism in Philosophy of Mind was making progress after centuries and millennia of stagnation, but only by sacrificing common sense and alienating anyone who wasn’t willing to give up long-cherished notions of what it means to be human. Didn’t bother me any, but, I’m weird. In a lot of ways, the revolutions taking place in the cognitive sciences and their implications for things like philosophy, ethics, free will, and understanding what it means to be human, are just the next, inexorable steps of the Copernican Revolt, and are every bit as shattering in how they dethrone man from the center of his universe.
Indeed, it’s why I left academic philosophy: 50-100 years from now, Daniel Dennett will be hailed as the greatest philosopher of mind since Descartes, and EVERYONE will be in fundamental agreement with his positions – either that, or we will be sliding back into a new Dark Age. But while I had already seen the light, my temperament was too much like Dennett’s to do anything but ape him. What naturalistic philosophy of mind needs is the establishment of fortifications in the beachheads already opened by Dennett: the kind of rigorous articulation and defense that someone like Manuel Vargas brings to the table. Not being suited to that sort of rigorous, meticulous argumentation, I was out of luck for a groundbreaking career in Phil Mind.
Economics, however…
I had already found myself interested in economics, and kept wondering: What would economics look like through a naturalistic lens? The one lesson my experience with Philosophy of Mind stressed on me was that getting a handle on tricky questions from a naturalistic perspective could yield fruitful results; but that doing so required starting from naturalistic assumptions, rather than merely imposing naturalistic constraints on a given situation. Witness, for example, how purely wrongheaded many attempts at uncovering the evolutionary origins of language have turned out to be. A naturalistic approach to economics must end up with modern economics, but it must also assume that economic activity, as it takes place today, is continuous with human activity stretching back to evolutionary time. (Let us call this the fundamental naturalistic stance)
That constraint proved to be great fun.
It is, in fact, the only thing that could make my project both original and productive. Looking back with hindsight, it is fortunate that my efforts started on that tack: it has saved me from pitfalls that afflict other currents in economics that are kicking around presently, since I’m certainly not the only person around who is trying to integrate economics into a naturalistic framework. There is at least one “branch” or school of economics which ties economics directly to physics. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science both have established camps within economics, and “evolutionary economics” attempts to model economics along lines similar to evolutionary biology. One very interesting and enterprising author even wrote a book describing how one can actually analogize economics to biological evolution. (This was actually a pretty substantial influence in my own work, and I want to give M. R. due credit because B. was such an important book; but since I can’t have you reading him yet, I have to withhold some information.)
However pure in spirit and noble in intent each of these approaches are, however, they still suffer from serious defects. At a minimum, they are incomplete: they do not explain different facets of economics in a coherent, systematic framework. In most cases, too, they are either unmotivated or inadvertent: yes, this might work, but why does it work? Why look at economics this way? And at bottom, those failures can be attributed to a failure to look at economics as being continuous with the natural order “from the beginning.”
But I didn’t know all this back then: not having studied economics at all, I wasn’t familiar with the above approaches to the subject. And, therefore, fortunately, was spared from going down those or other unfruitful paths. All I was armed with was my philosophical temperament for digging out foundations, and my commitment to the fundamental naturalistic stance. As a result, I kept turning over the same question, over and over, became obsessed with it, really. And it was in asking that question that I started down the path which has led me here:
What, exactly, is economics about?
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