0 - Economics and language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
The psychologist Joel Davitz once wrote: “I suspect that most research in the social sciences has roots somewhere in the personal life of the researcher, though these roots are rarely reported in published papers” (Davitz, 1976). The first part of this statement definitely applies to this book. Though I am involved in several fields of economics and game theory, all my academic research has been motivated by my childhood desire to understand the way that people argue. In high school, I wanted to study logic, which I thought would be useful in political debates or in legal battles against evil once I fulfilled my dream of becoming a solicitor. Unfortunately, I became neither a lawyer nor a politician, and I have since come to understand that logic is not a very useful tool in these areas in any case. Nonetheless, I continued to explore formal models of game theory and economic theory, though not in the hope of predicting human behavior, not in anticipation of predicting the stock market prices, and without any illusion about the ability of capturing all of reality in one simple model. I am simply interested in the reasoning behind decision making and in the arguments people bring in debates. I am still puzzled, and even fascinated, by the magic of the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language. This brings me to the subject of this lecture – “Economics and Language.”
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- Economics and LanguageFive Essays, pp. 3 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000