Neuroeconomics: Constructing identity

The paper asks whether neuroeconomics will make instrumental use of neuroscience to adjudicate existing disputes in economics or be more seriously transformed by neuroscience in ways that might transform economics. The paper pursues the question by asking how neuroscience constructs an understanding of individuals as whole persons. The body of the paper is devoted to examining two approaches: Don Ross's neurocellular approach to neuroeconomics and Joseph Dumit's cultural anthropological science organization approach. The accounts are used to identify boundaries on single individual explanations. Within that space Andy Clark's external scaffolding view and Nathaniel Wilcox's socially distributed cognition view are employed.