Suchergebnisse

Self-centred based explanations such as invisible-hand accounts look like armchair constructions with no relevance to the real world. Whether and how they nonetheless provide an insight into social reality is a puzzling matter. Philip Pettit's idea of self-interest virtually bearing on choices offers the prospect of a solution. In order to assess the latter we first distinguish between three variants of invisible-hand explanations, namely: a normative, an historical and a theoretical one. We then show that, while the model of virtual self-interest is a helpful gloss on each variant, it may not convincingly succeed, pace Pettit, in reconciling the economic mind with the common mind.

The unintendedness of the phenomenon that is to be explained is a constraint visible in the various applications and clarifications of invisible-hand explanations. The article casts doubt on such a requirement and proposes a revised account. To have a role in an invisible-hand process, it is argued, agents may very well act with a view to contributing to the occurrence of the social outcome that is to be explained, provided they see what they do as an aggregation of their individual actions rather than as something they jointly perform.

In Searle's social ontology, collective intentionality is an essential component of all institutional facts. This is because the latter involve the assignment of functions, namely "status functions," on entities whose physical features do not guarantee their performance, therefore requiring our acceptance that it be performed. One counter-example to that claim can be found in Carl Menger's individualistic account of the money system. Menger's commitment to the self-interest assumption, however, prevents him from accounting for the deontic dimensions of institutional facts.

The invisible hand is a theory that shows that legislators, collective agreements and moral concerns are not indispensable to the emergence of social outcomes. It instead describes social outcomes as the unintended consequences of many self-interested actions on the part of individuals. Invisible-hand explanations however often raise criticisms. They are seen as falling short in two ways. First, they unpersuasively present the outcome they explain as an unintended consequence of agents' behaviour. Second, they are based on various unrealistic assumptions—that rulers have no impact, that collective agreements do not take place, that agents have no moral concerns —which cast doubt on the explanatory power of their model. The dissertation addresses these two issues. It begins by elucidating why the class of unintended consequences is likely to fail to fulfil its classificatory role. I then inquire whether invisible-hand explanations require that agents not intend the outcome to be accounted for. It moves on to explore the explanatory power of invisible-hand explanations. An invisible-hand explanation, according to some of its friends, does not get the facts right because it does not pick out the actual cause of the social outcome. Rather it points out its virtual cause and, hence, explains its resilience. On an alternative and more promising conception, invisible-hand explanations may well superficially resemble unsubstantiated fiction but they in fact leave aside the accidental features that compose the social realm in favour of its essential elements. It is therefore when one unsuitably expects the invisible hand to fully explain spatio-temporal social facts that one misses its explanatory value. Expanding on that view, I propose to approach invisible-hand explanations as philosophical explanations, that is, as elucidating the logical structure of social reality. They point out all that is needed for its functioning, neglecting its superfluous elements. I finally contrast the invisible-hand conception of social reality with Searle's theory of institutional facts. Both understand the institutional reality as one that involves the imposition of functions. But while Searle argues that such imposition needs collective intentionality to be performed, Menger shows how to dispense with the latter. Unlike Searle, however, the relation Menger sees between these functions and the satisfaction of individual interests prevents him from convincingly accounting for the normative dimensions of institutional reality.

AbstractWhat are economic exchanges? The received view has it that exchanges are mutual transfers of goods motivated by inverse valuations thereof. As a corollary, the standard approach treats exchanges of services as a subspecies of exchanges of goods. We raise two objections against this standard approach. First, it is incomplete, as it fails to take into account, among other things, the offers and acceptances that lie at the core of even the simplest cases of exchanges. Second, it ultimately fails to generalize to exchanges of services, in which neither inverse preferences nor mutual transfers hold true. We propose an alternative definition of exchanges, which treats exchanges of goods as a special case of exchanges of services and which builds in offers and acceptances. According to this theory: (i) The valuations motivating exchanges are propositional and convergent rather than objectual and inverse; (ii) All exchanges of goods involve exchanges of services/actions, but not the reverse; (iii) Offers and acceptances, together with the contractual obligations and claims they bring about, lie at the heart of all cases of exchange.