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Dear HES Listers, 
 
I am organizing a conference (July 2003) on Dewey, Hayek, and Embodied Cognition.  The
tentative program is listed below.
 
Elias L. Khalil 
 
Behavioral Research Council 
A Division of American Institute for Economic Research 
 
Third Annual Symposium on the Foundations of the Behavioral Sciences 
"Dewey, Hayek and Embodied Cognition: Experience, Beliefs and Rules" 
 
July 18-20, 2003 
AIER Campus 
Great Barrington, Mass. 
 
Statement and Aim 
 
The living, breathing, knowing organism is present. To add a"`mind" to him is to try to
double him up. It is double-talk; and double-talk doubles no facts.
[Dewey & Bentley, Knowing and the Known.  In Rollo Handy and E.C. Harwood (eds.), Useful
Procedures of Inquiry.  Great Barrington, MA: Behavioral Research Council, (1949) 1973, p.
141].
 
The Behavioral Research Council of the American Institute for Economic Research is
sponsoring a conference whose aim is to discuss the role of experience, beliefs and rules
in human behavior in light of recent findings in the cognitive neurosciences.  The
proceedings of the conference will be published in a book. Two texts will act as starting
points, namely, John Dewey and Arthur Bentley's Knowing and the Known (1949) and Friedrich
Hayek's The Sensory Order (1952). Both works in many ways have anticipated "embodied
cognition," a recent development in the cognitive sciences that views the brain/mind as
doubly embedded: embedded in the body and embedded in the environment. That is, the
brain/mind cannot be seen as an organ in-itself, but rather as a mediator that unites the
organism with its environment. The works of Dewey/Bentley and Hayek argue that cognition
is based on classificatory, quasi-Kantian systems that inform the inquirer on how to
experience the environment. The apparent problem is that such classificatory systems
cannot be definitely confirmed or refuted on the basis of empirical findings. Such a
problem, which has not been seriously tackled by rational choice theorists, has been
gaining attention by philosophers of the mind in light of advances in the cognitive
neurosciences.
 
In specific, the papers will tackle the following questions: If human behavior is based on
experience, as Dewey argues, why do agents develop beliefs, conceptual schemes, and
metaphysical propositions which cannot be refuted or affirmed empirically? In general, why
do humans develop abstract rules, such as the ones concerning truth and justice, if
pragmatism is taken seriously?  How do experience and accompanied neural activity give
rise to beliefs? And, vice versa, how do such beliefs and neural activity, as Hayek
proposed, formulate experience? Also, what concerns economists, if beliefs and brain
activity formulate one's experience, can beliefs still be justified on rationality
grounds-or is Bayesian updating unfounded?
 
The 2003 conference will include economic theorists, cognitive psychologists, philosophers
of mind, legal theorists, and neuroscientists. The conference might be a launching pad for
"cognitive economics," i.e., how opportunities are conceived and created in the economy.
This can be the basis of explaining entrepreneurship-a phenomenon long neglected by
economists.
 
 
*  Registration and submission of contributed papers, please visit www.brc-aier.org or
contact:
 
Elias L. Khalil ([log in to unmask]) 
Director, Behavioral Research Council 
AIER 
PO Box 1000 
Great Barrington, MA  01230 
USA 
TEL:  413-528-1216 ext. 3124 
FAX: 413-528-0103 
 
 
A Partial List of Participants: 
 
(* contributed papers) 
 
Bruce Caldwell ("The Evolution of Hayek's Thought") 
Professor of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro 
 
Thomas C. Dalton ("Value, Belief and Inquiry: A Deweyan Perspective") 
Senior Research Associate, College of Liberal Arts, California Polytechnic State
University
 
Kurt Dopfer ("Embodied Cognition in an Evolving Economic Environment: Genetic 
Invariants and Adoptable Rules") 
Professor of International and Development Economics, Department of Economics, University
of St. Gallen, Switzerland
 
Jean-Pierre Dupuy ("Embodied Social Cognition") 
Professor, Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, École Polytechnique, France 
Professor, Departments of French/Italian and Political Science, Stanford University 
 
Gerald Edelman ("TBA") 
(1972 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine) 
Chairman, Department of Neurobiology, The Scripps Research Institute 
 
Edward Feser ("Naturalism, Evolution, and Hayek's Philosophy of Mind") Department of
Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University
 
Geoffrey M. Hodgson ("Instinct and Habit Over Reason: Dewey, Hayek and Veblen") 
Research Professor, University of Hertfordshire, UK 
 
* Elias L. Khalil ("Human Sacrifice, Conspiracy Theory, and Other Beliefs: Evolutionary,
Rational and Transactional Views")
Director, Behavioral Research Council, AIER 
 
Elisabeth Krecké ("TBA") 
Faculty of Applied Economics, Université d'Aix-Marseille  III, France 
 
Rodolfo Llinás ("TBA") 
Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman, Department of Physiology
and Neuroscience, New York University School of Medicine
 
Howard Margolis ("Habits of Mind: Ideas as Possessions") 
Professor, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago 
 
Bart Nooteboom ("TBA") 
Professor of Organizational Dynamics, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Rotterdam, Netherlands
 
Douglass C. North ("TBA") 
(1993 Nobel Prize for Economics) 
Director, Center for Study of Political Economy, Washington University 
 
Mark Perlman ("Competing and Complementary Authority Systems.") 
University Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh 
 
John Pickering ("Signs and Beliefs: Hayek's Inquiry and Biosemiotics") 
Lecturer, Department of Psychology, Warwick University, UK 
 
Richard Posner ("TBA") 
Judge, US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals 
Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School 
 
Salvatore Rizzello ("Knowledge as a Path-dependence Process: 
Microfoundations and Economic Implications") 
Associate Professor of History of Economic Thought and Economics, Faculty of Law
Coordinator, Centre for Cognitive Economics
University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy 
 
Frank X. Ryan ("Neuroscience and Dewey's Critique of Behaviorism") 
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Kent State University 
 
John R. Searle ("TBA") 
Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language 
Department of Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley 
 
Vernon Smith ("TBA") 
(2002 Nobel Prize for Economics) 
Professor of Economics and Law 
Research Scholar, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science George Mason University 
 
Ulrich Witt ("The Cognitive Underpinnings of the Generation of Novelty") 
Director, Evolutionary Economics Group, Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic
Systems
Professor, Department of Economics, University of Jena, Germany 
 
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