Gallagher Shaun, Mastrogiorgio Antonio, Petracca Enrico
Department of Philosophy, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, United States.
Faculty of Law, Humanities and Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2019 Aug 19;10:1856. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01856. eCollection 2019.
An important part of what it means for agents to be situated in the everyday world of human affairs includes their engagement with economic practices. In this paper, we employ the concept of cognitive institutions in order to provide an enactive and interactive interpretation of market and economic reasoning. We challenge traditional views that understand markets in terms of market structures or as processors of distributed information. The alternative conception builds upon the notion of the market as a "scaffolding institution." Introducing the concept of market as a "socially extended" cognitive institution we go beyond the notion of scaffolding to provide an enactive view of economic reasoning that understands the market participant in terms of social interactive processes and relational autonomy. Markets are more than inert devices for information processing; they can be viewed as "highly scaffolded," where strong constraints and incentives predictably direct agents' behavior. Building on this idea we argue that markets emerge from (a) the economic interaction of both supply and demand sides, in continual and mutual interplay, and (b) more basic social interactions. Consumer behavior in the marketplace is complex, not only contributing to determine the market price, but also extending the consumer's cognitive processes to reliably attain a correct evaluation of the good. Moreover, this economic reasoning is socially situated and not something done in isolation from other consumers. From a socially situated, interactive point of view buying or not buying a good is something that enacts the market. This shifts the status of markets from external institutions that merely causally affect participants' cognitive processes to social institutions that constitutively extend these cognitive processes. On this view the constraints imposed by social interactions, as well as the possibilities enabled by such interactions, are such that economic reasoning is never just an individual process carried out by an autonomous individual, classically understood. In this regard, understanding the concept of relational autonomy allows us to see how economic reasoning is always embodied, embedded in, and scaffolded by intersubjective interactions, and how such interactions make the market what it is.
智能体置身于人类事务的日常世界意味着什么，其中一个重要部分包括它们对经济实践的参与。在本文中，我们运用认知制度的概念，以便对市场和经济推理进行一种生成性和交互性的阐释。我们挑战了传统观点，即从市场结构或作为分布式信息处理器的角度来理解市场。替代性概念建立在将市场视为“支架式制度”这一观念之上。引入将市场作为“社会扩展”认知制度的概念，我们超越了支架式观念，以提供一种经济推理的生成性观点，这种观点从社会交互过程和关系自主性的角度来理解市场参与者。市场不仅仅是用于信息处理的惰性装置；它们可被视为“高度支架式的”，在这种情况下，强大的约束和激励可预测地引导智能体的行为。基于这一观点，我们认为市场产生于：（a）供需双方的经济互动，处于持续且相互的作用之中；以及（b）更基本的社会互动。市场中的消费者行为是复杂的，不仅有助于决定市场价格，还扩展了消费者的认知过程，以可靠地获得对商品的正确评估。此外，这种经济推理是社会情境化的，并非与其他消费者孤立进行的。从社会情境化的交互角度来看，购买或不购买商品是对市场的一种塑造。这将市场的地位从仅仅因果性地影响参与者认知过程的外部制度，转变为构成性地扩展这些认知过程的社会制度。按照这种观点，社会互动所施加的约束以及此类互动所带来的可能性，使得经济推理绝不仅仅是一个由经典意义上自主个体进行的个体过程。在这方面，理解关系自主性的概念使我们能够明白经济推理如何总是体现在主体间互动之中、嵌入其中并由其构建，以及此类互动如何造就了市场的现状。
