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LTT: K. Werner
October 12, 2021 @ 12:10 pm - 1:30 pm EDT
Konrad Werner, University of Warsaw, Poland
Defining Institutions: A Shared Objective of the Social and Cognitive Sciences
ABSTRACT: There is consensus in the field of economics (economic history) and the social sciences more generally that institutions matter significantly when it comes to why certain nations, societies or states prosper while others don’t. However, there is no agreement as to what institutions themselves are, which not only hinders our understanding of what the above statement actually implies, but also prevents its practical implementation. I would like to show that how we define institutions determines how another, more practical question is to be answered – namely, what a country should do to become richer. That said, I will argue that the way one thinks of institutions hinges, among other things, on the way one thinks of cognition. Finally, I would like to speculate on how our understanding of institutions changes once we shift from the more or less traditional representationalist account to the emergent embodied cognition paradigm. From the perspective of the philosophy of science, all these considerations are supposed to illustrate the necessary interdisciplinarity of the institutional approach.
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