Functional explanation in economics: a qualified defence

A Defence of Contemporary Economics: Zombie Economics in Review

John Quiggin wants what fundamentally all economists want. He would like to make society better off. Of course, economists differ over how that goal should be accomplished. Quiggin thinks that society would be better off if income and wealth were redistributed from the currently rich to the currently poor, if there were a larger role for the government, and if fluctuations in aggregate employme...

Simple minds: a qualified defence of associative learning.

Using cooperation in chimpanzees as a case study, this article argues that research on animal minds needs to steer a course between 'association-blindness'--the failure to consider associative learning as a candidate explanation for complex behaviour--and 'simple-mindedness'--the assumption that associative explanations trump more cognitive hypotheses. Association-blindness is challenged by the...

A defence of functional modularity

Although belief in the existence of mental modules of some form is widespread among cognitive researchers, neurally sophisticated researchers commonly resist the view that cognitive processing involves modules which are functionally independent of one another. Moreover, within the past few years, at least three noted researchers (Fodor, Kosslyn, and Uttal) have called into serious question the ...

Defence Economics and the Industrial Base

Functional explanation and the function of explanation.

Teleological explanations (TEs) account for the existence or properties of an entity in terms of a function: we have hearts because they pump blood, and telephones for communication. While many teleological explanations seem appropriate, others are clearly not warranted--for example, that rain exists for plants to grow. Five experiments explore the theoretical commitments that underlie teleolog...