Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-zlgnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T16:36:42.425Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Explaining Economic Crises: Are There Collective Representations?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Paul Thagard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper uses the economic crisis of 2008 as a case study to examine the explanatory validity of collective mental representations. Distinguished economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz attribute collective beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to organizations such as banks and governments. I argue that the most plausible interpretation of these attributions is that they are metaphorical pointers to a complex of multilevel social, psychological, and neural mechanisms. This interpretation also applies to collective knowledge in science: scientific communities do not literally have collective representations, but social mechanisms do make important contributions to scientific knowledge.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , October 2010 , pp. 266 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Acharya, V. V. and Richardson, M.. (eds.) 2009. Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Akerlof, G. A. and Shiller, R. J.. 2009. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. R. 2010. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 7th ed. New York: Worth.Google Scholar
Bechtel, W. 2008. Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. A.. 2005. “Explanation: A Mechanistic Alternative.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 36: 421–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bouvier, A. 2004. “Individual Beliefs and Collective Beliefs in Sciences and Philosophy: The Plural Subject and the Polyphonic Subject Accounts.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34: 382–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunge, M. 2003. Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Churchland, P. M. 2007. Neurophilosophy at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Churchland, P. S. 2002. Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Churchland, P. S. and Sejnowski, T.. 1992. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, J. M. and Herbert, J.. 2008. “Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 6167–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Craver, C. F. 2007. Explaining the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dayan, P. and Abbott, L. F.. 2001. Theoretical Neuroscience: Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Eliasmith, C. and Anderson, C. H.. 2003. Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gilbert, M. 2000. Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Glimcher, P. W., Camerer, C., Poldrack, R. A., and Fehr, E.. (eds.) 2009. Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Goldman, A. 1999. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., and Rapson, R. L.. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iacoboni, M. 2008. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A.. 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47: 263–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A.. (eds.) 2000. Choices, Values, and Frames. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keynes, J. M. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Krugman, P. 2009. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Kusch, M. 2002. Knowledge by Agreement: The Programme of Communitarian Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., and Welch, N.. 2001. “Risk as Feelings.” Psychological Bulletin 127: 267–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McCauley, R. N. 2007. “Reduction: Models of Cross-Scientific Relations and Their Implications for the Psychology-Neuroscience Interface.” In Thagard, P. (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, pp. 105–58. Amsterdam: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCauley, R. N. 2009. “Time Is of the Essence: Explanatory Pluralism and Accommodating Theories about Long-Term Processes.” Philosophical Psychology 22: 611–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCauley, R. N. and Bechtel, W.. 2001. “Explanatory Pluralism and the Heuristic Identity Theory.” Theory & Psychology 11: 736–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newell, A. 1990. Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Panksepp, J. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parisien, C. and Thagard, P.. 2008. “Robosemantics: How Stanley the Volkswagen Represents the World.” Minds and Machines 18: 169–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reinhart, C. M. and Rogoff, K. S.. 2009. This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rolls, E. R. 2005. Emotion Explained. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shiller, R. 2005. Irrational Exuberance. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Simon, H. A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Smith, E. E. and Kosslyn, S. M.. 2007. Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, J. E. 2010. Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Thagard, P. 1988. Computational Philosophy of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. 1999. How Scientists Explain Disease. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. 2000. Coherence in Thought and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. 2006. Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. 2009. “Why Cognitive Science Needs Philosophy and Vice Versa.” Topics in Cognitive Science 1: 237–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thagard, P. 2010. The Brain and the Meaning of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. and Aubie, B.. 2008. “Emotional Consciousness: A Neural Model of How Cognitive Appraisal and Somatic Perception Interact to Produce Qualitative Experience.” Consciousness and Cognition 17: 811–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thagard, P. and Wood, J.. 2010. “Who Are You? The Self as a System of Multilevel Interacting Mechanisms.” Unpublished manuscript. University of Waterloo.Google Scholar
van, Fraassen B. C. 2002. The Empirical Stance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Wray, K. B. 2007. “Who Has Scientific Knowledge?” Social Epistemology 21: 337–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar