Neuroeconomic reductionism at work ? A review of Paul W . Glimcher ’ s

Recent years have seen a wave of interest in connections between neuroscience and the models and generalizations of neoclassical and behavioral economics. Interdisciplinary investigations of decision-making in humans and non-human animals have yielded a flagship neuroeconomics textbook (Glimcher, et al. 2009), hundreds of journal articles, and high-profile academic conferences. They have also attracted constructive and destructive criticism—not to mention charges of hype and irrelevance—from cognitive neuroscientists (Gallistel 2009), economists (Gul and Pessendorfer 2008), and philosophers of science (Ross 2008). Paul Glimcher is one of the most creative, interdisciplinary, and philosophically inclined neuroscientists currently working on decision making. His book Decisions, uncertainty, and the brain (2003) put his research on primate visual decision-making in the context of a brief history of neuroscience since Descartes's work on the reflex and even included a short discussion of consciousness and philosophical zombies. Glimcher's latest, cheekily titled Foundations of neuroeconomic analysis (hereafter FNA) presents the case for his laboratory's research program seeking no less than a " partial reduction […] of economics to psychology and thence to neuroscience " (Glimcher 2011, xv). FNA is organized into four main sections, the first of which tackles the difficult issues of inter-theoretic relations and reductionism. Here, Glimcher partially traces the history of the idea that all scientific theories may be reducible to fundamental physical theory from the logical positivists through Ernest Nagel, briefly discussing critiques from C. D. Broad, Jerry Fodor, and others along the way. Nothing he says here will be new to philosophers of science, and unfortunately there is no discussion of more recent work on reductionism from philosophers of biology or the social sciences (for a review of these issues, see Sarkar and Wimsatt 2006). To cite one example, William Wimsatt's (2007)