Neuro-externalism:

the view from Hegel

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath25

Abstract

In one dominant interpretation of neuroeconomic methodology, neuroeconomic explanations are reductionist

relative to economic concepts such as subjective utility. However, these ‘bottom up’ approaches stand in tension
with many results of experimental research which reveal the significance of ‘top down’ causal explanations, such
as the role of categorizations of people in triggering emphatic mechanisms. I argue that the two directions of
explanations can be synthesized in the alternative methodology of ‘neuro-externalism’. Neuro-externalism builds
on recent theorizing in cognitive sciences, especially on grounded cognition and the extended mind, and argues
that human cognition involves external facts in a constitutive way, including Ego’s own actions towards this
external environment. This view has a long intellectual history and leads back to the concept of ‘spirit’ in Hegel.
Hegel posited a dialectical interaction between ‘inner’ mental phenomena and ‘outer’ expressions and products
of these phenomena. He argued that pure subjectivity remains fundamentally incomplete as a foundation of
human agency, and that only external structures (‘objective spirit’) constitute persons as human agents. This
philosophical argument seems highly relevant for the adequate understanding of many results of recent
psychological and neuroscience research on human behavior which seem to stay in stark tension with a full
reduction to ‘internal’ states of the brain, for example: the cue-dependence of somatic responses to drugs such as
nicotine; the anchoring of current choices in past choices that were triggered by purely arbitrary determinants;
the strong impact of environmental contexts on the perception of food intake; or the possibility and relevance of
self-deceit, among many others. In all these cases, agency as expressed in actualized choices can only be
sufficiently explained by the interaction, i.e. dialectics, between internal mechanisms and external structures.
Then, if the human agent is not co-extensive with the brain as an organ, reductionist models in neuroeconomics
are doomed to fail in principle. Yet, this observation at the same time reinstates the importance of neuroscience
in economics, because the causal role of external structures in establishing agency can only be sufficiently
understood in making the neuronal mechanisms explicit.

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Corresponding author: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath - Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, E-Mail: c.herrmann-
pillath@fs.de.

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