ABSTRACT
Recent philosophy of neuroscience has seen strong interest in the formal methods for constitutive inference, such as a Bayes net approach, a Boolean method, and an abductive approach, all of which serve to establish whether or not a mechanistic component is constitutively relevant for an investigated phenomenon in neuroscience and social science. However, the philosophical debate remains somewhat disconnected from current interdisciplinary research, including research in social neuroeconomics. In this chapter, I remedy this disconnect between philosophy and science by developing a case study from recent research of social decision making, which I consider a paradigm case of social neuroeconomic research. I defend the claim that the Boolean and the Bayesian approaches can help to make sense of the aims and goals of the applied methods, whilst the abductive approach remains somewhat detached from the case at hand.
