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On ‘common-sense ontology’: a comment on the paper by Frank Hindriks and Francesco Guala

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2015

ROBERT SUGDEN
ROBERT SUGDEN*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
*
*Email: r.sugden@uea.ac.uk
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Abstract:

This note comments on Hindriks and Guala's ‘unified theory of institutions’. One of the components that Hindriks and Guala seek to unify, and which they claim is unsatisfactory on its own, is the analysis of conventions that derives from the work of Lewis. I argue that the Lewisian approach provides simple and powerful explanations of many regularities in the social behaviour of humans and other animals. Those explanations can be seen as good social science even if, as Hindriks and Guala argue, they do not fit with common-sense ontology.

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 489 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2015 

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