Over the last few years there seems to have been a sharp increase in the number of books that want to spread the news that economics is, or at least can be, fun. This paper sets out to explain in what senses economics is supposed to be fun. In particular, the books in what I will call the...

Neuroeconomics rightly has been claimed to be a natural extension of bioeconomics. One of the things bioeconomics investigates is what behavioral dispositions and what behavioral patterns evolutionary processes have produced. Neuroeconomics extends this to the study of evolved mechanisms that...

Advocates of neuroeconomics sometimes argue that one of the most surprising findings in neuroeconomic studies is that expected utilities are literally computed in the brain. This claim is scrutinized closely in the paper. Not surprisingly, the tenability of the claim is shown to depend...

This Special Issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology brings together a selection of papers presented at the Conference Neuroeconomics: Hype or Hope?, which was hosted by the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE) in November 2008 in Rotterdam. The conference speakers...

The paper sets out to identify main tenets of evolutionary psychology (EP) - with its characteristic slogan that ‘our present skulls still house a stone age mind’ - and Sober and Wilson’s multi-level selection theory (MST) - that seeks to rehabilitate group selection in evolutionary...

Although it is laudable that evolutionary economists have a greater concern for ontological issues than many of their brethren, considerations concerning ontology cannot play a decisive role in adjudicating theoretical disputes. Attempts to formulate an appropriate ontology for evolutionary...

It is argued that the ‘routines as genes’ analogy is misleading in several respects. Neither genes nor routines program behaviour, if this is taken to involve, first, that they determine behaviour and, second, that they do so in a way that excludes conscious, deliberate choice. On a proper...

It is argued that the ‘routines as genes’ and the ‘routines as skills’ analogies are misleading in several respects. Neither genes, nor skills, nor routines program behavior, if this is taken to involve, first, that they do so in a way that excludes conscious, deliberate choice and,...

This paper is a follow-up on two earlier debates I was part of. One debate is documented in a special issue of The Journal of Economic Methodology, edited by Matthias Klaes and called Symposium: Ontological Issues in Evolutionary Economics (2004) The other one is reported in a special issue of...

Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in their own subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism (GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen, and the Continuity Hypothesis (CH), put forward by Ulrich Witt. As a first...