The growing acceptance and success of experimental economics has increased the interest of researchers in tackling philosophical and methodological challenges to which their work increasingly gives rise. I sketch some general issues that call for the combined expertise of experimental economists and philosophers of science, of experiment, and of inductive‐statistical inference and modeling. †To contact the author, please write to: 235 Major Williams, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061‐0126; e‐mail: [email protected].

In recent years, several authors have reconstructed the relationship between 20th-century economic theory and neuro-psychological research in terms of a three-stage narrative of initial unity, increasing separation, and ongoing reunification. In this article, I draw on major developments in economic theory and neuro-psychological research to provide a descriptive and normative critique of this reconstruction. Moreover, I put forward a reconstruction of the relationship between economics and neuro-psychology that, I claim, better fits both the available empirical evidence and the methodological foundations (...) of these disciplines. In doing so, I argue that recent calls to develop a unified interdisciplinary framework for modeling choice are premised on disputable presuppositions concerning both the domain of economic theory and the relationship between this theory’s axiomatic foundations and empirical findings about the neuro-psychological substrates of choice. (shrink)