Performativity, Identity and Economic Naturalism: A Comment on John Davis’ “Economics, Neuroeconomics, and the Problem of Identity”

Abstract This paper is an extensive comment on John Davis’ paper “Economics, Neuroeconomics, and the Problem of Identity“ published in this very journal (Vol. 136, No. 1). So far, the methodological assessments of neuroeconomics by economists vacillate between the Scylla of neuro-reductionism and the Charybdis of Friedman’s instrumentalism. Following Davis’ approach to identity economics, I argue that there is a third way shown by methodological approaches to the neurosciences which are non-reductionist and highlight complex multi-level explanations, including external interactions, such as in distributed cognition theories. I suggest that newly emerging areas of study – such as social neuroscience – can be traced back to G.H Mead’s theory of the individual, with important implications for economics. JEL Codes: B41, D87