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the extensive discussion of hermeneutics by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Indeed, the central question treated by Habermas and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School of critical social theory is the inherent tension between truth-seeking and open access to existing institutions that have the power to interpret knowledge within a particular domain. The same point has been made in the history of science by Thomas Kuhn. For Kuhn the “primacy of paradigms” is a statement not just about the stability of existing intellectual frameworks in particular fields of knowledge but also about the stakes in maintaining allegiance to the status quo of individual scientists who control access to the processes and institutions that validate claims and methods of inquiry in their respective fields.

5 The interested reader can find the full Stern Report at http://www.occ.gov.uk/activities/stern.htm.

Chapter 9 Camerer: Neuroeconomics

1 In this context, functional refers to the fact that subjects are performing some task so that brain activity during the task can be analyzed for clues about the function being performed by the activated regions in question.

2 According to the authors of the original “ultimatum game” article (W. Güth, R. Schmittberger, and B. Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3, no. 4 [1982]: 367-388), equilibrium offers were often rejected in one-stage games. Other researchers who studied a two-stage version concluded that equilibrium offers could emerge under suitable learning conditions (K. Binmore, A. Shaked, and J. Sutton, “Testing Noncooperative Bargaining Theory: A Preliminary Study,” American Economic Review 75, no. 5 [1985]: 1178-1180). A more elaborate experiment performed with two-, three-, and five-stage games found that players appeared to play as if they were self-interested but looked only two stages ahead (Janet Neelin, Hugo Sonnenschein, and Matthew Speigel, “A Further Test of Noncooperative Bargaining Theory: Comment,” American Economic Review 78, no. 4 [September 1988]: 824-836). That is, using the game structure above, their subjects often offered $2.50, which is the equilibrium offer if the game was truncated to two stages rather than to three.

3 See Crawford (2008) for a summary.

4 In other words, it is possible that they generally knew more about New York temperatures, such that the maximum of p (low in NY) and p (high in NY) was higher than the maximum of p (low in Dushanbe) and p (high in Dushanbe), but in actuality they were not more accurate about the high-information bets.

Chapter 10 Oullier: The Useful Brain

1 Note that by distinguishing between physical and mental boxes I’m providing you with a clear illustration of my own strong tendency to make boxes!

2 J.A.S. Kelso and D.A. Engstrøm, The Complementary Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); L. Pessoa, “On the Relationship Between Emotion and Cognition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008): 148-158.

3 See, for example, Colin Camerer’s chapter in this book.

4 M. MacMillan, An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

5 A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam Publishing, 1994).

6 This approach is still used in courts to (attempt to) prove someone’s penal (ir)responsibility to the actions he or she committed. See J. Rosen, “The Brain on the Stand,” New York Times, March 11, 2007.

7 P. W. Glimcher et al., Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain (London: Academic Press, 2008).

8 A.G. Sanfey et al., “The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game,” Science 300, no. 5626 (2003): 1755-1758.

9 Functional magnetic resonance imaging is the brain imaging technique that is used to make those beautiful 3D pictures of the brain with color blobs that one often sees in the media. These blobs are supposed to indicate where brain activity is significantly higher when tasks are compared. For readers who are not familiar with this methodology a few things need to be