It is Shackle's view that human conduct is chosen with a view to its consequences. But these are in the future, which cannot be directly known. Expectation will confine itself to what is deemed possible, but this leaves it free to entertain widely diverse and rival hypotheses. How can such skeins of mutually conflicting ideas serve the formation of individual or institutional policy? This is the chief question this book examines.

This book proposes a new approach to economics, management and organization that should help in making economic organization ‘wise’, ‘innovative’ and ‘robust’ in an uncertain and risky world. Although the modern economy and society is ‘knowledge intensive’, Anna Grandori argues that the dominant economic, organizational and behavioural models neglect to a large extent the problem of valid knowledge construction and effective knowledge governance. The book integrates inputs from economics and behavioural science with insights from the philosophy of knowledge to define new micro-foundations: neither a calculative, deductive and omniscient ‘rational actor’; nor an experiential, adaptive and biased ‘behavioural actor’; but a knowledgeable and imaginative ‘epistemic actor’. The implications for contracts and organizations, sustained also by insights from law, are shown to be far reaching, including a new view of the nature of the firm as an entity-establishing agreement under which to discover uses of resources under uncertainty, and as a democratic institution.

36 Game theory's exclusion of tactical surprise -- 37 Kaleidic economics -- 38 Economic theory unbound -- Index

The effective use of development economic theories in practice is limited, the authors contend, by the lack of explicit criterion for judging their scientific content. The directional progress of critical research and teaching is also constrained by this deficiency. This study advances a meta-theory designed to assist in evaluating the scientific validity of theories in economic development and how these theories can be improved to assist social practice. Using this model, the study then examines existing theories, dividing them into explanatory and prescriptive theories. The explanatory theories include the stage-based theories of Marx, Schumpeter, and Rostow, and factor-based theories, including capital-based, human-capital-based, and technology-based theories. The prescriptive theories include explanatory-theory-based prescriptions, interventionist prescriptive theories, and theories of economic planning. In conclusion, the authors contend that modern analysis of development economics is plagued with logical ills, misleading notions, and a weak theoretical structure that lacks scientific appeal. Most of the theories, except for those of Marx and Schumpeter, neglect an analysis of the mechanism of change.

This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain must be given due recognition in linguistic theory, on a par with domains such as time and number. The relevant domain is coherent, but at the same time complex in that it consists of two subdomains: one which comprises degree-of-certainty meanings, and one which comprises information-source meanings. The book offers three arguments for giving recognition to such a meaning domain. The first argument concerns the clustering of linguistic expressions with epistemic meaning into morphosyntactically delimited systems of elements. The second argument has to do with the variation pertaining to the coding of epistemic meanings, as highlighted in a semantic map of epistemic expressions. The third argument turns upon the scope properties of epistemic meanings and the morphosyntactic reflections of these properties. Finally, the book proposes a unified cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning in terms of which it attempts to account for the properties of the epistemic meaning domain as well as of individual epistemic meanings.