Mechanistic Integration of Social Sciences and Neurosciences: Context and Causality in Social Neuroeconomics

Abstract

Mechanistic philosophy of science is flourishing in the context of the neurosciences and the life sciences one the one hand, and sociology on the other hand. This paper suggests a conceptual frame that links the two approaches in building a concise methodological and philosophical foundation of social neuroeconomics. My argument rest on externalist philosophy of mind, enriched by recent advances in cognitive sciences about embodied and distributed cognition; my workhorse for demonstrating relevance for empirically grounded theories is empathy. I posit that population-level mechanisms and neuronal-level mechanism are causally connected via ‘representations’ in a most general sense (language, symbolic media, ritualized actions etc.), and suggest a model of ‘context’ as a causal mechanism. ‘Context’ has emerged as an important concept in social and cultural neuroscience. This avoids the fallacy of integrating the social and the brain via reducing social phenomena to neurophysiological mechanisms. I further detail this model in suggesting a ‘dynamical selectionist systems’ approach in which mechanisms on the neuronal level are contextualized via semiotically mediated functions on the population level.

Keywords: mechanistic explanation; empathy; social neuroscience; context; semiotic mechanisms; population-level processes; dynamical selectionist systems

JEL Classification: B41; D87; D91