In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person's mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant. Context — which stimulus triggers which response — matters a lot.
[This "behavioral economics" is much more realistic.] ^^^ CB; Yet, this new behaviorism is still, in Marx's term, a Robinsonade, based in the fictional typical individual, not in an analysis of _social_ relations. It is a reductionist explanation, reducing a social phenomenon to a "collection of individuals" with a type of "psychology". The "rational man'/ reasonable man " of classical economics and law is replaced with the "irrational/rational reasonable unreasonable person". But the error is not in attributing rationality, but in in reducing the social market to a collection of individual psyches, bouncing off of each other like Newtonian particles. It is an error of the old type of thinking the whole is the sum of its parts and particles. Ask Carrol how this is reflected in _Paradise Lost_ (smile). This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
