This paper argues that, in attempting to provide accurate explanations of economic behavior, economists have to account, in the structures of their models, for the cultural backgrounds of the agents in question. In particular, utility and profit maximization (or their equivalent) cannot be used...

Several social scientists, including `evolutionary economists', have expressed scepticism of `biological analogies' and rejected the application of `Darwinism' to socio-economic evolution. Among this group, some have argued that self-organisation is an alternative to biological analogies or...

Both the Information Theoretic Economics and Austrian Economics investigate the impact on market activity of problems of information and knowledge. The conceptions of information and knowledge they employ, however, as well as their respective views on and treatment of economic agency, are quite...

Equilibrium analysis pervades mathematical social science. This paper calls into question the explanatory significance of equilibrium by offering an extremely simple game, most of whose equilibria are unattainable in principle from any of its initial conditions. Moreover, the number of...

Stories form an integral part of models. An economic model can not be fully characterized simply by knowing its structure: the model can only be completely described when we know how it works and what it can do. This activity of manipulating a model requires a narrative device, such as a...

In order to vindicate rational-choice theory as a mode of explaining social patterns in general - social patterns beyond the narrow range of economic behaviour - we have to recognize the legitimacy of explaining the resilience of certain patterns of behaviour: that is, explaining, not...

Commonsense rational choice explanations exploit a form of intentional causation, an idealized version of which underpins the formal rational modelling of modern economic theory. Following John Searle, it is argued that the deliberations and activities of economic actors do not bottom out in...