ABSTRACT
The previous sections have shown that Veblen moulded his conception of evolution and cognition in an original manner with respect to pragmatism. He did not share Peirce’s and James’s faith in the adaptability of human habits to the environment and emphasised the delays and incongruities that dominate the development of social institutions. He also worked out a theory of knowledge that linked intentionality not so much to a person’s propensity to act with a view to an end as to his tendency to attribute an end to natural external objects. The following section will examine the relationships between Veblen’s theories and the evolutionistic contents that have taken shape in some emerging disciplines. Twomey and Foss have provided significant indications of the ways in which Veblen’s tenets can be brought within contemporary evolutionism. Twomey has shown that the conception of the active, composite mind, which, in his opinion, Veblen borrowed from the pragmatists, has now re-emerged in the latest forms of psychology and artificial intelligence, while Foss has demonstrated that even without engaging ‘in much rational reconstruction of Veblen’s ideas’ one can see a number of ‘similarities’ between them and evolutionary studies of the firm tied to the so-called ‘competence-based approach’ (1998: 480). By contrast, the dissimilarities between Veblen’s arrangement and that of the pragmatists that were brought out in the third section suggest that the placement of his theories should be at least partly different from that proposed by Twomey. When reinterpreting the pragmatistic paradigm of the mind in the light of Kant’s finalism, Veblen stripped it of the ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ traits that have now re-emerged in psychology, and confined it within the meanderings of a conventional and somewhat obsolete philosophy. We shall not enter, therefore, into a detailed discussion of recent psychological evolutionism in the search for contents bearing Veblen’s stamp. Instead we shall set out to determine whether, as Foss suggests, recent evolutionary theories of economics embody any of the original traits of Veblen’s teachings.
