'Embedded and enactive dimensions of economic institutions' by Riccardo Viale
4 March 2025, 17:00 (Rome Time) - Phinance Online Seminars
Embedded and enactive dimensions of economic institutions
by Riccardo Viale (Milano Bicocca, Herbert Simon Society)
4 March 2025
Phinance, the Philosophy & Finance Network organizes Phinance Online Seminars
17:00 Riccardo Viale (Bicocca, Herbert Simon Society) Embedded and enactive dimensions of economic institutions
17:40 Debate
Chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)
The extended cognition approach proposed by Andy Clark, when applied to economic institutions, raises several critical issues. Clark argues that the explanatory burden of economic behavior is carried by overall system dynamics, rendering individual psychology relatively unimportant. In his view, neoclassical economic theory remains valid because preferences are shaped by external conditions rather than internal cognitive processes. This perspective downplays the role of agent cognition in markets, suggesting that economic agents could function as zero-intelligence traders (ZI traders), as theorized by Gode and Shyam (1993).
In contrast, in this talk Riccardo Viale argues that market institutions are not static constraints but dynamic and flexible norms and values that shape economic behavior (North, 1990). Economic action is fundamentally enactive, emerging from interactions with other agents and shaped by economic institutions. This process involves embodied heuristics and adaptive rationality, leading to problem-solving behaviors that are not rigidly determined by institutional structures but influenced by a range of cognitive phenomena. From this perspective, economic agents do not merely follow imposed rules but actively engage with and modify their institutional environments through embedded, enactive, and embodied cognition.
An open debate follows the meeting.