18 May 2022
Sheila Dow
Session 7a ‘Cognition and Sentiment: from Adam Smith to the future of Economics’
Speaker: Sheila Dow; Professor of Economics, University of Stirling
“…At the beginnings of modern economics, Adam Smith, with David Hume, had developed a theory of human nature, including a theory of mind, as providing the basis for all knowledge under conditions of uncertainty…Here we attempt to take these ideas forward in order to address the systemic and structural issues faced by modern economies. The reference point for this discussion is the Market Mind Hypothesis, including the notion of a practical mind/body duality.”
Sheila Dow is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Stirling, Scotland and adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria in Canada. Her main research focus is on the fields of the methodology of economics, the history of economic thought, money and banking, and macroeconomics. We look forward to welcoming her fresh take on economics at the MMH symposium.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Sheila has published papers on numerous heterodox topics that are relevant for the MMH. One, for example, discussed the work by others on Freud and his relevance for economics. I commented to her, for example, that Freud has nothing to say about numbers (kind of important in investing e.g. prices), whereas Jung (inspired by his friendship and collaboration with the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli) realised that the numerical archetypes are the prime archetypes which we related in our research to the modern cognitive concept of number sense. We met and discussed this and other topics at the INET conference in Edinburgh in 2017, like heterodox theories generally about which she wrote an excellent overview. At the symposium I’m looking forward to her discussion of science’s separation issue as well as Hayek’s “practical dualism”.”
Duncan Pritchard
Session 7b ‘Sociotechnical Extended Market Knowledge’
Speaker: Duncan Pritchard; UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, UC Irvine
“Our interest is in understanding the ‘market mind’ as a sociotechnical cognitive system, akin to the kind of sociotechnical cognitive systems that we find in certain kinds of highly collaborative and technologically dependent scientific inquiry…”
Duncan Pritchard; UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, UC Irvine. Duncan mainly works in epistemology, and has written on most of the topics in this field, including scepticism, theory of knowledge, virtue epistemology, modal epistemology, epistemic luck/risk, social epistemology, understanding, inquiry, and know-how. Duncan’s expertise bring crucial scope to the Market Mind Hypothesis theory.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Epistemology is crucial for economics, if only to judge mainstream’s claims of complete or perfect knowledge. Some acknowledged this. Reflecting on what economics attempts to do, Frank Knight (1925), for example, exclaimed “From a logical point of view therefore, one who aspires to explain or understand human behaviour must be, not finally but first of all, an epistemologist”. There is IMMO no better epistemologist than Duncan. He introduced me to topics like epistemic luck/risk and value-driven epistemology. He also arranged for my first (visiting) scholarship at the University of Edinburgh, recognising early on the relevance of the concept of the market mind in the context of 4E cognition. His talk about market knowledge from a sociotechnical perspective fits our theme and audience.”
See the full agenda here | Find the pre-symposium material here
