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Rationality and Explanation in Economics
ISBN-13: 9780415551212 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 298 str.
Rationality and Explanation in Economics
ISBN-13: 9780415551212 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 298 str.
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Economical questions indisputably occupy a central place in everyday life. In order to clarify these questions, people generally turn to those who are familiar with economics. In answering such legitimate questions, economists propose explanations which rest on a few principles among which the rationality principle is by far the most fundamental. This principle assumes that people are rational, but what is meant by this has to be specified. Rationality and Explanation in Economics claims that only a minimal kind of rationality is required to 'animate' economic explanations. However, such a conception of rationality faces serious objections: it is closely associated with harshly criticised methodological individualism and it is not easily disentangled from sheer irrationality. The book answers these objections and shows that the economists' way of mobilising the concepts of maximization or of consistency for defining rationality raises more serious problems. Since the latter have encouraged various attempts to downgrade or even to dispense with the very notion of rationality, the book is largely devoted to countering arguments associated with these attempts and to show why postulating that agents are rational is still the only efficient way to explain economic phenomena as such. The author also proposes original views about the role of rationality, the meaning of methodological individualism, the relevance of the selection argument and the relation between 'rational' explanations of economics and explanations in natural sciences.
Most economists would agree that the notion of rationality is fundamental for their science. But what do they mean by "rationality"? Roughly, most of them would answer that it refers to the idea that economic agents maximise their utility or, still more typically since the 1950s or so, that they are strictly consistent in their choices. But such idealised conceptions of rationality imply highly unrealistic assumptions that economists usually justify with the help of arguments whose shortcomings are discussed and illustrated in this book. Unsurprisingly, such assumptions have contributed to the fact that neoclassical economics has more and more distanced itself from its original function, namely to explain the workings of human economic societies.
This book proposes solutions to these problems. In fact, rationality plays a crucial role in economics because it is the key of most economic explanations. Therefore analyses of rationality in this book are oriented towards revealing in which conditions the rationality assumption makes valuable explanations possible and what kinds of explanation are then involved. The last part of the book discusses and exemplifies alternative kinds of explanation in economics and applies to economics the most illuminating theories of scientific explanation developed in natural sciences. In all these discussions, the point is not so much to denounce neoclassical analyses than to argue for a significant reinterpretation of their implicit philosophical foundations.
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