Plenty of this is fine, if speculative, but the narrative that weaves it together rings false. Human society has always depended on forces outside of its control, but something as broad as "the paths we walk as a species" is overdetermined and not reducible to a single process.
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Replying to @anti_minotaur @metadiogenes and
Human society in what sense of the human and society? Under material conditions, under historical self-consciousness, under formal definitions what the human or society mean?
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @metadiogenes and
Human society as a historical entity, and its historical course, so closest to formal definitions.
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Replying to @anti_minotaur @metadiogenes and
Yes, that's Hegel-Marx gradient. But then how to reformulate this question, namely, that of history, according to new sciences given that Marx identified the recognition of history as a fully scientific enterprise?
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @metadiogenes and
What Marx did with the introduction of the critique of ideology delimits the social sciences. The wissenschaft of history is ultimately a product of interests, (though this is not the same as relativism, because he also held that not also interests are equal).
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Replying to @anti_minotaur @metadiogenes and
Yes, but then we can't cut at the joints of the pathologies of history if we haven't understood the exact mechanisms that give rise to individual interests like rational choice theory.
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @metadiogenes and
Rational choice theory is the exact sort of thing I'm criticizing. It reduces the shimmering complexity of society into arithmetic. It really doesn't matter whether you're calling it rational choice, evolutionary processes, or the wisdom of the ancients; it's the same story.
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Replying to @anti_minotaur @metadiogenes and
It's not even arithmetic. Arithmetic is neutral. What happens in rational choice theory is the over-stretching of biased micro-choice to macro-behaviors upon which neoliberalism makes its case.
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @anti_minotaur and
Reza (or anyone)—what are the best accounts of the rise of Rational Choice? (There are some great history of science things, e.g., "Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy", but that one, at least, is more of a historical account, not a philosophical one.)
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo @anti_minotaur and
Jason Blakely's book 'How Economics Becomes Ideology: The Uses and Abuses of Rational Choice Theory' is not bad but I will dig up some good shorter texts on this topic.
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In my opinion, there are two canonical ways to challenge RCT. One is the Brandomian critique of the rational in 'rational choice theory' and the other is the problem of levels as explained by neuroeconomists and complexity theorists like for example Carl Craver.
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @SimonDeDeo and
Both are necessary. While the Brandomian critique challenges RCT at the micro-level (individual choice), Craver's critique targets the over-extension of micro-individual choices to macro-market choices.
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @SimonDeDeo and
I’ve read some Brandom (& thought it was very good!), but how does his framework help provide a critique of RCT?
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