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Gul and Pesendorfer provide the best-known and most strident of a set of recent backlashes by economists against methodological revolutions promoted by some behavioural economists and neuroeconomists. Philosophers are likely to read these responses as merely reactionary, especially as their rhetoric goes beyond what their explicit argumentation validly supports. The present paper identifies the accurate insight on Gul and Pesendorfer's part that explains the impact of their philosophically ragged polemic. This centers on importantly different concepts of choice in the psychological and economic literatures. The psychologist's idea of choice descends from a culturally familiar folk construct generally thought to lie within everyone's unreflective personal acquantance. By contrast, the economist's concept of choice refers to abstract sensitivity of behavioral patterns to changes in incentives, typically at the statistical level of populations. It is reasonable to regard this abstract idea as the basic subject matter of economics, just as Gul and Pesendorfer assert. Appreciating the difference between psychological choice and economic choice is crucial for understanding the methodologically schizophrenic character of neuroeconomics. Much of it merely identifies neural correlates of elements from models in the psychology of valuation. However, the neuroeconomics worthy of the name, as constructed by Glimcher and his collaborators, aims to unify economics and neuroscience. It so far fails to do so in an entirely satisfactory way because it falsely assumes that the conception of choice in psychology and economics is already shared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of the paper is to explore the potential for using fuzzy logic to analyse economic decision-making under Keynesian uncertainty, and in particular in circumstances where variety of opinion is important. Fuzzy logic is shown to apply where expectations may differ because the nature of the subject matter impedes any 'crisp' way of describing the underlying variables. The particular case of the speculative demand for money is considered, since it explicitly reflects variety of opinion as to whether interest rates are 'high' or 'low'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reader subscription pricing mechanism is the dominant method by which the publication of scholarly journals in economics is funded. This occurs despite the fact that the use of an author charge pricing mechanism, when used in conjunction with a reader charge pricing mechanism, is described in the neoclassical economics literature as a more efficient method for financing journals. The division between the actual financing of economics journals and the theoretical understanding of how journals should be financed highlights deficiencies within the neoclassical economists' understanding of the financing of scholarly journals. In this paper I discuss this divergence in theory and practice in how economists finance their scholarly communication process and the brief attempt by some neoclassical economists to bridge this divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keynesian concepts of probability and uncertainty emphasize the basis of knowledge available to economic decision makers. Conditions of uncertainty, which involve missing evidence or doubtful arguments, are distinguished from probable risk. Beyond this, on the basis of the claim that the future is yet to be created, some authors argue for further distinctions among different kinds of uncertainty. The paper reviews this particular argument, distinguishing it from Keynesian uncertainty theory generally, and provides a critique of its implication that, due to innovation, objective distributions of possible events do not generally exist at the time of economic decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]