Welcome to Common currencies. This blog is
dedicated to an ongoing research project of mine. The project is about the
claim that there is, or must be, a ‘common currency’ for the options available
to an agent.
For a rough and intuitive sense of what a 'common currency' might be, see this page: The (very) basic big idea.
For a rough and intuitive sense of what a 'common currency' might be, see this page: The (very) basic big idea.
Claims
about common currencies arise in various broadly behavioural and cognitive
sciences, including economics, behavioural economics, behavioural ecology (or
ethology), cognitive neuroscience, and neuroeconomics. I call any claim that there is, or must be, a common currency a 'currency thesis'.
Currency theses arise in
what I think are strikingly different ways. Sometimes they appear in connection with claims
about fitness, or subjective utility. Sometimes the issues that provoke talk of
a common currency have more to do with control systems in general, or brains (including human brains) more specifically.
I’m
interested in mapping the various claims made about common currencies, and the
arguments both for and against different currency theses. This is a fairly large and partly comparative project, drawing on
sources in a collection of disciplines. It is also a somewhat quirky project,
in the sense that the interesting comparative questions I detect in this area
are not - at least yet - an established topic in the philosophy of (cognitive) science.
I’m going
to document some parts of the project on this site as I proceed with it. The idea is
to include:
- Descriptions of the main arguments in favour of, and against, a common currency,
- Moves intended to develop a framework for distinguishing importantly distinct claims about a common currency,
- Descriptions and evaluations of inferences from one kind of currency to another,
- Notes on key sources (historical and contemporary),
- Working drafts of some of my own papers on these questions as they take shape,
- Half-baked ideas that seem worth trying to get written down,
- Other stuff I think of as I go along...
(The banner picture was taken about 2/3 of the way up Kilimanjaro in 2007. It has no specific relationship to the topic, I just thought it made a nice banner.)
Perhaps you could start by defining what the "common currency" phrase means? A quick shufti at google left me none the wiser.
ReplyDelete(And yes, the intersection of philosophy, cognition, human behaviour and possibly physics is very interesting to me, so I expect to follow this blog regularly :))
Warm Regards
Good question. Thanks. Part of why I can't give a quick answer is that the different fields in which one finds talk about a common currency don't mean the same thing but it. I'll document some of the variations in future postings. But the general idea is that a currency is some scale in which the values of all (or the relevant) available options are represented. So an economist might call the currency utility of some kind. And a biologist might think of it as the fitness value of the action/behaviour. I'm working on some postings that will try to introduce some of the variation and others that will discuss the main variants individually...
ReplyDeleteHello again Lelanthran. Hopefully my most recent posting will go some way towards responding to your question: http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/currencies-can-be-ultimate-or-proximal.html
ReplyDeleteI've recently posted a short piece on 'The (very) basic big idea' and added a link to this 'Welcome' page.
ReplyDelete