ИСТИНА

In our presentation, we would like to draw your attention to one almost completely unnoticed epistemological aspect of neuroeconomics (NE). Having arisen as a new radical natural science-based methodological program in economics and is often criticized for biological reductionism, NE is little by little becoming very strong and unusual form of economical imperialism. Economic imperialism, in the most general sense understood as expansion of economic models, concepts and explanation of all constructions beyond the limits of economy - is a widely discussed matter of the last few decades. Indeed, the theoretical apparatus of mainstream contemporary economics, i.e. rational choice theory, is domain-general. Its formalism does not explicitly refer to economic phenomena at all. An ‘agent’ may maximize under ‘constraints’ its ‘utility function’ with regard to anything: military victory, social prestige, electoral gain. Accordingly, the theory is easily exportable to any domain that features agents making constrained choices. This means, in addition to economic matters, most of the rest of social sciences, political philosophy as well as many parts of biology. According to our opinion, NE contributes to the economic imperialism progress by developing an important tendency. We would describe it as universalization of economic (rational) behavior by means of making it natural, by taking it from the level of History to the level of Nature. Thus, NE readily turns to research of the so-called "economic behavior" among animals. Such approach has significant value, as it gives us evidence of the universal character of mechanisms, underlying economic behavior. Indeed, according to many neuroeconomists animal models are an indispensable complement to the model on human economic decision making. And there are similarities in economic and evolutionary theories of human and animal decision making, as the optimality principle is that both classes of theories have in common. In the long run this enables us to make a conclusion that economic behavior (which is the same as rational or optimal behavior) is biological by its nature and does not need to be socially explained. As economic behavior is present not only among humans, but also among animals, we can say that utility maximization, competition, exchange etc. are not social phenomena or theoretical constructions, but evolutional achievements of the biosphere. Human forms are just the most complicated and perfect, but underlying principles are natural and not exclusively human. Supported by many modern evolutional biologists, the fusion of biological and social science concepts (such as, on the one hand, species, organism, ecosystem etc., and, on the other hand - selflessness, market, service etc.) opens opportunities not only for cooperation between biologists, ethologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists and experts from social science, but also for assimilation of disciplines, as discourses are not just combination of technical notions, but mainly epistemology, each of which aims for universal character. Another important example is the change of basic dichotomy 'emotional-rational' for the 'emotional-deliberative', which helps to free economical methodology from the mystery of human rationality. 'Deliberative – emotional' dichotomy describes the observable animal forms of behavior rather than social (emotional is immediate, instinctive action, while deliberative is action, forestalled by orienting reflex). However, this dichotomy loses understating of emotional behavior, having a huge role in the real consumer behavior, which marketing experts are aware of. Purchase of a "cute red car" does not presuppose immediacy or absence of reflection (it can easily be deliberative). However, it does not correlate with rational calculation of optimizing rationality. Rationality in this case becomes external to an agent in a sense that it belongs to the interpreter rather than to an agent of the action. And if rationality belongs to the observer, everything is rational when the observer can rationalize it, - so animals are rational. This way rationality becomes a part of nature (just because we do not ask nature and simply presuppose that our way of seeing is inner rule of things). So if it is, we can conclude that the things we used to observe as a part of social but not biological world, are of the same nature with those of the natural science’s agenda. It means that ‘economic behavior’ is not (only) a social but natural phenomena, and consequently it spreads far over the borders of regular economical field. Thus NE is an attempt to reinterpret object domains not bound historically with social science by means of economic models and concepts. This expanding of economics object domain aims at takeover of strange lands.