The Metaphysics of Neuroeconomics

CRESPO, RICARDO F.

Buenos Aires

Jornada; XX Jornadas de Epistemología de las Ciencias Económicas; 2014

CIECE, UBA

Starting from the recognition of the influence of theory on the selection and interpretation of data, we reach today at a general acceptance of the dependence on a metaphysical worldview of the content, formulation and method of scientific theories. In this chapter I draw on Craig Dilworth (2006) thesis on the physicalist (and consequently materialist) metaphysical commitments of contemporary science and I show how this link is present in neurosciences, economics and neuroeconomics. However, some tensions remain in these sciences between an acceptance of an absolutely physicalist conception of reality and the defense of the existence of realities beyond matter. The physicalist worldview is concretized in sciences by the predominance of scientific positivism. There is a timid resistance to it in the field of neurosciences and of economics. In fact, the mother-theory of neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, aims to explain the empirical anomalies of positivist economic theories trying to enter into the black box of openly manifested data going beyond them. However, the recently born child, neuroeconomics, pretends to have found the root of those anomalies in an even more materialistic internal place: neural interactions. Consequently, the result is a deepening of the materialistic explanation. In neuroeconomics the physicalist worldview has won the tension between a complete physicalism and the openness to other realities. However, even at this ground some opposite voices remain.