An Evolutionary Approach to Emergence and Social Causation

Copyright © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.Rom Harré criticizes critical realism for ascribing causal powers to social structures, arguing that it is human individuals, and not social structures, that possess causal powers, and that a false conception of structural causation undermines the emancipatory potential of critical realism. I argue that an interpretation of the category of process as the spatio-temporalization of the category of structure, which underpins much evolutionary theory, provides the conceptual tools to explain how the critical realist transformational model of social activity can escape from Harré's criticism, leading to a general conception of social development within which various types of evolutionary processes can be identified as particular cases. I then argue that Tony Lawson's PVRS model provides an evolutionary perspective that enables the conceptualization of coercive power as selective pressure

Sen's capability approach and Post Keynesianism: similarities, distinctions, and the Cambridge tradition

Copyright © 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc.The capability approach to human development, proposed by Amartya Sen and others, is now a prominent perspective within welfare economics and development economics. I argue that the capability approach, like Post Keynesianism, can be situated within the Cambridge economic tradition, a tradition grounded on classical economics, and characterized by an ontological focus on themes such as openness and uncertainty, and by a common social philosophy. Furthermore, I argue that the capability approach and Post Keynesianism can be seen as complementary and mutually enriching approaches

Sustainability economics, ontology and the capability approach

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The relationship between sustainability economics and the capability approach has recently been explored. Here I shall discuss this relationship, and argue that a study of the ontology underlying the capability approach can help us to see more clearly the interconnections between sustainability economics and the capability approach. In particular, the interpretations of the capability approach as an ontological exercise, which have recently emerged in the literature, enable us to have a better understanding of the essential categories used in the capability approach, and to establish a clearer connection between the capability approach and sustainability economics

The ethics of freedom: on the moral foundations of economic analysis

A filosofia utilitarista subjacente à escola neoclássica de economia tem sido amplamente criticada por Amartya Sen, facto esse que, segundo o autor do presente artigo, nos pode sugerir o desenvolvimento de uma teoria económica baseada numa concepção ampla de liberdade. Para Sen, com efeito, o conceito de liberdade comporta duas dimensões bem explícitas, uma relacionada com as oportunidades proporcionadas pela liberdade, e a outra relacionada com os aspectos processuais da mesma. No que se refere à primeira dimensão, o artigo sublinha sobretudo o facto de a liberdade proporcionar a possibilidade de realizar determinados objectivos, numa perspectiva consequencialista. Por outro lado, a dimensão processual da liberdade evidencia a importância dos direitos e dos procedimentos, pelo que o artigo mostra igualmente até que ponto Sen se encontra também em linha com as éticas de cariz deontológico. Dado, porém, que as abordagens consequencialista e deontológica tendem a ser consideradas incompatíveis, o artigo não pode deixar de levantar a questão relativa à coerência da concepção ética do próprio Amartya Sen. No final de contas, a intenção do artigo é precisamente demonstrar que estas duas abordagens (consequencialista e deontológica) não são necessariamente incompatíveis entre si, pelo que o autor procura no conceito de incerteza o elemento necessário a uma correcta com-preensão da relação que existe, nomeadamente no campo da economia, entre esses dois tipos de abordagem ética. Finalmente, no sentido de evidenciar a coerência da concepção de agente económico defendida por Sen, o artigo recorre também, entre outros, seja ao conceito "sentimento moral" desenvolvido por Adam Smith, seja à noção Kantiana de "imperativo moral".ABSTRACT: Amartya Sen criticises the utilitarian philosophy that underpins neoclassical economics, and suggests the development of an economic theory grounded on a broad conception of freedom. According to the article, freedom includes for Sen two dimensions, namely the opportunity aspect and the process aspect. The opportunity aspect of freedom consists in the capability to achieve the goals that freedom provides us with, and, thus, can be seen in a consequentialist fashion. The procedural dimension of freedom, on the other hand, highlights the role of rights and procedures, and is in line with deontological approaches to ethics. But since deontological (or procedural) and consequentialist approaches to ethics are often said to be incompatible, the article raises the question of whether Sen’s conception is coherent or not. The author of the article argues that consequentialist and deontological approaches need not be incompatible, whereby he underlines in a special way the role of uncertainty as a key element in the understanding of the relationship between those two views of ethics. Finally, the article also assesses the coherence of A. Sen’s conception of the economic agent, a conception that resorts both to the notion of "moral sentiments" developed by Adam Smith as well as to the notion of "moral imperatives" developed by Kant

Rules, social ontology and collective identity

Copyright © 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing.Mainstream game theory explains cooperation as the outcome of the interaction of agents who permanently pursue their individual goals. Amartya Sen argues instead that cooperation can only be understood by positing a type of rule-following behaviour that can be (and often is) out of phase with the pursuit of individual goals, due to the existence of a collective identity. However, Sen does not clarify the ontological preconditions for the type of social behaviour he describes. I will argue that Sen's account of collective identity can be best interpreted in the light of John Searle's notion of collective intentionality, while Sen's explanation of rule-following behavior and agency is best understood using the critical realist transformational model of social activity.

Ética, economia e sustentabilidade

A crise económica e social actual levanta questões importantes acerca da sustentabilidade do sistema sócio-económico contemporâneo. Será argumentado aqui que, para responder à crise actual, torna-se necessário abordar duas questões éticas, designadas por Amartya Sen como a questão "Socrática", que se prende com a componente motivacional do agir humano (e o comportamento dos agentes económicos), e a questão "Aristotélica", que se relaciona com o bem comum (e tem implicações ao nível do impacto da distribuição na sustentabilidade social e económica). A crise actual resulta em larga medida de uma incapacidade da teoria económica ortodoxa para analisar estas duas questões, que sendo fundamentais para autores clássicos desde Adam Smith a Karl Marx, foram todavia marginalizadas dentro da teoria económica ortodoxa

Capabilities as causal powers

Copyright © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.The author argues that Sen's capability approach is primarily a philosophical under-labouring exercise aimed at elaborating certain central economic categories, and that the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of Sen's approach are radically different from those of contemporary welfare economics and mainstream economic practice. Sen's notion of ‘capabilities’ as the potential functionings to achieve well-being is interpreted here as a specification of the ontological category of ‘causal power’, presupposing an open system conception of reality that contrasts with much of contemporary economic practice

Can neuroscience inform economics? Rationality, emotions and preference formation

Copyright © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.The interaction between neuroscience and economics has gained much prominence recently, leading to the emergence of the new and expanding field of neuroeconomics. I will argue that, although there is much insight to be gained from the interaction between neuroscience and economics, the implications of recent developments in neuroscience and neuroeconomics for the deductivist methodology of mainstream economics, and its emphasis on prediction of events, have not been sufficiently addressed. In fact, much research on neuroeconomics has contributed to the formulation of deductivist models aimed at the prediction of events, when the more fruitful use of neuroscience in economics consists rather in the utilisation of its insights for the development of an explanation of social behaviour that moves beyond the mainstream deductivist methodology. The somatic marker hypothesis, developed by Damasio and others working closely with him, will be suggested as an alternative framework for conceptualising the emergence of social behaviour from a neurobiological substrate

Numerical uncertainty and its implications

A scrutiny of the contributions of key mathematicians and scientists shows that there has been much controversy (throughout the development of mathematics and science) concerning the use of mathematics and the nature of mathematics too. In this work, we try to show that arithmetical operations of approximation lead to the existence of a numerical uncertainty, which is quantic, path dependent and also dependent on the number system used, with mathematical and physical implications. When we explore the algebraic equations for the fine structure constant, the conditions exposed in this work generate paradoxical physical conditions, where the solution to the paradox may be in the fact that the fine-structure constant is calculated through different ways in order to ob-tain the same value, but there is no relationship between the fundamental physical processes which underlie the calculations, since we are merely dealing with algebraic relations, despite the expressions having the same physi-cal dimensions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Early Atlantic navigation: pre-portuguese presence in the Azores Islands

We present here evidence of pre-Portuguese presence in the Azores Islands, Portugal, found near the site of Grota do Medo (Posto Santo), discovered by Rodrigues (2013) in Terceira Island, Azores. This evidence was dated by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, and indicates the presence of human activity in Terceira Island before or during the XIth century. The evidence consisted in a man-made rock basin, which was found in a site that contains also striking similarities with many other aspects from ancient cultures, including other man-made rock basins, arrangements of large stones which resemble megalithic constructions, and inscriptions in stones which resemble ancient petroglyphs. Although the dating of this evidence is highly suggestive of the presence of human activity in the Azores Islands long before the arrival of the Portuguese navigators of the XVth century, there is no clear evidence which enables us to identify which specific culture may have existed in the Azores before the Portuguese arrival.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio