The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A

The Economics of Identity and Creativityaims to sythesize naturalistic evolutionary theory while discussing new developments in economics. The author's approach reexamines fundamental assumptions about how a capitalist economy works, from the relation between producers and consumers to the functioning of intellectual property rights. In the creative economy, the author argues, identities merge with the flow of creative action. To explain these changes, he draws upon a range of theories from analytical philosophy to biology, and from economics to sociology.The first part of the book examines the role of language in the naturalistic approach to cultural science. Hermann-Pillath draws on Darwinian evolutionary theory to map a concept of knowledge. Part Two offers a systematic approach to creativity and identity from the naturalistic point of view developed in Part One. Here the author builds a theory of creativity from the ideas of conceptual blending in the cognitive sciences.Herrmann-Pillath presents a theory of identity based on analytical philosophy, and looks at the problems in fixing the boundaries of an individual identity both in biological evolutionary theory and brain sciences. He takes the concept of identity through the current economic approaches, examining the distinction between social and personal identity. This fascinating interdisciplinary work provides a precise argument that the foundations of economics can be found in cultural science, and it has evolved to become the cultural institution at the core of the modern economy.

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath is academic director at the East-West Centre for Business Studies and Cultural Science, and professor of business economics at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. He is the author of numerous works, mostly in German, and his research interests include evolutionary economics, international trade, economic transition, and economic methodology.

Introduction	p. 1
The Creative Economy and the naturalistic turn in the study of culture and the economy	p. 13
Economics, Language and the Creative Economy	p. 16
Evolutionary economics and the blind spot of economics: creativity	p. 16
Incomplete conceptual transfers from biology to economics	p. 18
The two senses of naturalism	p. 19
Language: embedding minds in the world	p. 22
Practising naturalism: towards an analysis of the Creative Economy	p. 25
The Creative Economy as a transformation of the creative economy	p. 28
Naturalising Knowledge	p. 32
Holism versus atomism in the analysis of knowledge	p. 32
The embeddedness of knowledge: the case of technology	p. 35
Radical uncertainty and Arrow's impossibility theorem about the optimal search for new knowledge	p. 37
The principle of bimodality: all knowledge is physical	p. 40
We do not know what we know	p. 42
Externalism as the philosophical setting of cultural science	p. 45
Scaffolding rationality	p. 46
Evolving agent identities and endogenous agency	p. 48
Naturalising knowledge means Darwinising knowledge	p. 50
Brains, Neuromemes and Evolution
Darwinian principles of cultural science	p. 52
Restart: holism versus atomism in cultural science	p. 52
Principles of generalised Darwinism	p. 55
Wittgenstein naturalised	p. 58
From memes to neuromemes	p. 61
Imitation and neuromemetic reproduction	p. 64
The hypercycle as generalised structural mechanism of evolution	p. 67
The ultimate consilience of Darwinism and cultural analysis	p. 71
Signal Selection, Social Network Markets and Cultural Science	p. 73
The creative industries as a laboratory case for cultural science	p. 73
Social network markets	p. 76
All consumption is consumption of signs	p. 78
The other dimension of Darwinism: signal selection	p. 81
The historical specificity of the creative industries	p. 84
The universality of Darwinism and the embeddedness of the sciences	p. 86
An externalist theory of identity and creativity in economics	p. 90
Forms, Identities and the Ontological Creativity of Language	p. 92
Creativity and identity: conceptual companions	p. 92
A case in point: product innovation in business	p. 93
Organisational forms and identities	p. 96
Form as intermediate theoretical concepts in evolutionary analysis	p. 99
The dynamics of emergence: external and internal selection	p. 103
The analytical inseparability of meanings and rules	p. 108
New meanings are new things	p. 112
An evolving world, made from human actions	p. 115
The Stuff of Novelty Blends, metaphors and the creative brain	p. 118
The basic operation of the conceptual blend	p. 118
Blending and the growth of knowledge	p. 121
Performativity as ontological creativity of language	p. 123
The neuroscience foundation of blends and metaphors	p. 126
Blending naturalised: neural Darwinism	p. 130
The world is part and parcel of the brain	p. 133
Creating things with words	p. 136
Technological evolution proceeds via sequences of blends	p. 139
Decentring knowledge evolution	p. 142
The Bio-Logic of Identity	p. 144
Identity is the foundational ontological concept	p. 144
Individuum est ineffabile	p. 146
The turn from essentialism to population thinking	p. 149
The inexactness of the boundaries of the body	p. 150
The brain is a fragmented system of systems	p. 154
The extended brain and its two selves	p. 157
The limits of knowing yourself	p. 159
Externalism and adaptation	p. 162
The evolutionary model of the individual	p. 165
The Economics of Identity	p. 169
Game theory with identities	p. 169
Group selection, identities and language	p. 172
From I to we	p. 175
The Akerlof and Kranton approach to identity economics	p. 178
Social identity versus personal identity	p. 181
Anchoring the economics of identity in language analysis	p. 184
Identities are outside us: what it means for economics	p. 186
Identity, Institutional Creativity and the Creative Economy	p. 191
Institutions as artefacts in the externalist approach to identity	p. 191
Institutions are observer-relative facts	p. 194
Cognition and the evolution of money	p. 198
Add externalism: blending the artefacts of money	p. 202
Neuromemetic foundations of the use of memory	p. 205
The market as an artefact	p. 208
Institutional creativity in the Creative Economy	p. 211
References	p. 217
Acknowledgements	p. 241
Index	p. 243
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A Cultural Science Approach

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