4 - Adaptive Reflexive Individuals

Summary

Chapter 4 lays out the book’s adaptive, reflexive capability view of socially embedded individuals. An important reason we ought to see people as adaptive is that this provides a basis for explaining how they make choices and act in changing, often highly uncertain environments – large worlds rather than small Bayesian ones. When we accept that choice is context-dependent, we need to be able to explain individuals’ behavior in the most demanding circumstances they can face. An implication of this framing is that, as in Simon’s procedural rationality view, behaviorally speaking there is really no maximization – only continual adjustment over time. To capture all this, I use a stock flow, state description/process description characterization of adaptive individuals, and then model their behavior more specifically as a capability choice/action capability pattern of behavioral adjustment that works via a reflexive feedback loop. Given that this individual conception also needs to satisfy the two identity criteria I used in Part I to evaluate the standard Homo economicus individual conception, I then show how an adaptive, capability individual conception successfully individuates people as distinct and independent. In light of how undemocratic economic and social institutions limit people’s capability development, I also discuss the circumstances under which they can be reidentified as the same individuals over time.