We propose a logic to reason about data collected by a num- ber of measurement systems. The semantic of this logic is grounded on the epistemic theory of measurement that gives a central role to measure- ment devices and calibration. In this perspective, the lack of evidences (in the available data) for the truth or falsehood of a proposition requires the introduction of a third truth-value (the undetermined). Moreover, the data collected by a given source are here represented by means (...) of a possible world, which provide a contextual view on the objects in the domain. We approach (possibly) conflicting data coming from different sources in a social choice theoretic fashion: we investigate viable opera- tors to aggregate data and we represent them in our logic by means of suitable (minimal) modal operators. (shrink)

To investigate the relationship between logical reasoning and majority voting, we introduce logic with groups Lg in the style of Gentzen’s sequent calculus, where every sequent is indexed by a group of individuals. We also introduce the set-theoretical semantics of Lg, where every formula is interpreted as a certain closed set of groups whose members accept that formula. We present the cut-elimination theorem, and the soundness and semantic completeness theorems of Lg. Then, introducing an inference rule representing majority voting to (...) Lg, we introduce logic with majority voting Lv. Formalizing the discursive paradox in judgment aggregation theory, we show that Lv is inconsistent. Based on the premise-based and conclusion-based approaches to avoid the paradox, we introduce logic with majority voting for axioms Lva, where majority voting is applied only to non-logical axioms as premises to construct a proof in Lg, and logic with majority voting for conclusions Lvc, where majority voting is applied only to the conclusion of a proof in Lg. We show that both Lva and Lvc are syntactically complete and consistent, and we construct collective judgments based on the provability in Lva and Lvc, respectively. Then, we discuss how these systems avoid the discursive paradox. (shrink)

Judgment-aggregation theory has always focused on the attainment of rational collective judgments. But so far, rationality has been understood in static terms: as coherence of judgments at a given time, defined as consistency, completeness, and/or deductive closure. This paper asks whether collective judgments can be dynamically rational, so that they change rationally in response to new information. Formally, a judgment aggregation rule is dynamically rational with respect to a given revision operator if, whenever all individuals revise their judgments in light (...) of some information (a learnt proposition), then the new aggregate judgments are the old ones revised in light of this information, i.e., aggregation and revision commute. We prove an impossibility theorem: if the propositions on the agenda are non-trivially connected, no judgment aggregation rule with standard properties is dynamically rational with respect to any revision operator satisfying some basic conditions on revision. Our theorem is the dynamic-rationality counterpart of some well-known impossibility theorems for static rationality. We also explore how dynamic rationality might be achieved by relaxing some of the conditions on the aggregation rule and/or the revision operator. Notably, premise-based aggregation rules are dynamically rational with respect to so-called premise-based revision operators. (shrink)

The theory of collective agency and intentionality is a flourishing field of research, and our understanding of these phenomena has arguably increased greatly in recent years. Extant theories, however, are still ill-equipped to explain certain aspects of collective intentionality. In this article we draw attention to two such underappreciated aspects: the failure of the intentional states of collectives to supervene on the intentional states of their members, and the role of non-human factors in collective agency and intentionality. We propose a (...) theory of collective intentionality which builds on the ‘interpretationist’ tradition in metasemantics and the philosophy of mind as initiated by David Lewis and recently developed further by Robbie Williams. The collective-level analogue of interpretationism turns out to look different in some ways from the individual-level theory, but is well-suited to accommodating phenomena such as hybrid collective intentionality. Complemented with Kit Fine’s theory of variable embodiment, such a theory also provides a diachronic account of intentional collectives. (shrink)

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires deliberation. In formal social choice theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused primarily on the aggregation of individual opinions into collective decisions, typically through voting. While the literature on deliberation has an optimistic flavour, the literature on social choice is more mixed. It is centred around several paradoxes and impossibility results identifying conflicts between different intuitively plausible desiderata. In (...) recent years, there has been a growing dialogue between the two literatures. This paper discusses the connections between them. Important insights are that (i) deliberation can complement aggregation and open up an escape route from some of its negative results; and (ii) the formal models of social choice theory can shed light on some aspects of deliberation, such as the nature of deliberation-induced opinion change. (shrink)

We introduce a number of logics to reason about collective propositional attitudes that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment aggregation show. The proposed logics for modelling collective attitudes are based on a substructural propositional logic that allows for circumventing inconsistent outcomes. Individual and collective propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, desires, obligations, are then modelled by means of minimal modalities (...) to ensure a number of basic principles. In this way, a viable consistent modelling of collective attitudes is obtained. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework to examine the relationship between models and observations. To make our analysis precise,models are reduced to first-order theories that represent both terminological knowledge – e.g., the laws that are supposed to regulate the domain under analysis and that allow for explanations, predictions, and simulations – and assertional knowledge – e.g., information about specific entities in the domain of interest. Observations are introduced into the domain of quantification of a distinct first-order theory that describes their nature (...) and their organization and takes track of the way they are experimentally acquired or intentionally elaborated. A model mainly represents the theoretical knowledge or hypotheses on a domain, while the theory of observations mainly represents the empirical knowledge and the given experimental practices. We propose a precise identity criterion for observations and we explore different links between models and observations by assuming a degree of independence between them. By exploiting some techniques developed in the field of social choice theory and judgment aggregation, we sketch some strategies to solve inconsistencies between a given set of observations and the assumed theoretical hypotheses. The solutions of these inconsistencies can impact both the observations – e.g., the theoretical knowledge and the analysis of the way observations are collected or produced may highlight some unreliable sources – and the models – e.g. empirical evidences may invalidate some theoretical laws. (shrink)

This work contributes to the theory of judgement aggregation by discussing a number of significant non-classical logics. After adapting the standard framework of judgement aggregation to cope with non-classical logics, we discuss in particular results for the case of Intuitionistic Logic, the Lambek calculus, Linear Logic and Relevant Logics. The motivation for studying judgement aggregation in non-classical logics is that they offer a number of modelling choices to represent agents’ reasoning in aggregation problems. By studying judgement aggregation in logics that (...) are weaker than classical logic, we investigate whether some well-known impossibility results, that were tailored for classical logic, still apply to those weak systems. (shrink)

Cerreia-Vioglio et al. :341–375, 2011) have proposed a very general axiomatisation of preferences in the presence of ambiguity, viz. Monotonic Bernoullian Archimedean preference orderings. This paper investigates the problem of Arrovian aggregation of such preferences—and proves dictatorial impossibility results for both finite and infinite populations. Applications for the special case of aggregating expected-utility preferences are given. A novel proof methodology for special aggregation problems, based on model theory, is employed.

Among the possible solutions to the paradoxes of collective preferences, single-peakedness is significant because it has been associated to a suggestive conceptual interpretation: a single-peaked preference profile entails that, although individuals may disagree on which option is the best, they conceptualize the choice along a shared unique dimension, i.e. they agree on the rationale of the collective decision. In this article, we discuss the relationship between the structural property of singlepeakedness and its suggested interpretation as uni-dimensionality of a social choice. (...) In particular, we offer a formalization of the relationship between single-peakedness and its conceptual counterpart, we discuss their logical relations, and we question whether single-peakedness provides a rationale for collective choices. (shrink)

In studies of multi-agent interaction, especially in game theory, the notion of equilibrium often plays a prominent role. A typical scenario for the belief merging problem is one in which several agents pool their beliefs together to form a consistent "group" picture of the world. The aim of this paper is to define and study new notions of equilibria in belief merging. To do so, we assume the agents arrive at consistency via the use of a social belief removal function, (...) in which each agent, using his own individual removal function, removes some belief from his stock of beliefs. We examine several notions of equilibria in this setting, assuming a general framework for individual belief removal due to Booth et al. We look at their inter-relations as well as prove their existence or otherwise. We also show how our equilibria can be seen as a generalisation of the idea of taking maximal consistent subsets of agents. (shrink)

We analyse the computational complexity of three problems in judgment aggregation: (1) computing a collective judgment from a profile of individual judgments (the winner determination problem); (2) deciding whether a given agent can influence the outcome of a judgment aggregation procedure in her favour by reporting insincere judgments (the strategic manipulation problem); and (3) deciding whether a given judgment aggregation scenario is guaranteed to result in a logically consistent outcome, independently from what the judgments supplied by the individuals are (the (...) problem of the safety of the agenda). We provide results both for specific aggregation procedures (the quota rules, the premisebased procedure, and a distance-based procedure) and for classes of aggregation procedures characterised in terms of fundamental axioms. (shrink)

This paper argues that talk of ‘the aim of science’ should be avoided in the philosophy of science, with special reference to the way that van Fraassen sets up the difference between scientific realism and constructive empiricism. It also argues that talking instead of ‘what counts as success in science as such’ is unsatisfactory. The paper concludes by showing what this talk may be profitably replaced with, namely specific claims concerning science that fall into the following categories: descriptive, evaluative, normative, (...) and definitional. There are two key advantages to this proposal. First, realism and its competitors may be understood to consist of highly nuanced variants. Second, scientific realism and its competitors may be understood as something other than ‘all or nothing’ theses about science. More particularly, one may accept that there are general claims concerning science in some of the identified categories, but deny that there are such claims in the others. (shrink)

We introduce a conceptual model for reaching group decisions. Our model extends a well-known, single-agent cognitive model, the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model. The RPD model includes a recognition phase and an evaluation phase. Group extensions of the RPD model, applicable to a group of RPD agents, have been considered in the literature, however the proposed models do not formalize how distributed and possibly inconsistent information can be combined in either phase. We show how such information can be utilized by aggregating (...) it using a specific social choice method, namely judgment aggregation. Our model is applicable to hierarchical groups of agents containing at least one RPD agent. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation theory, or rather, as we conceive of it here, logical aggregation theory generalizes social choice theory by having the aggregation rule bear on judgments of all kinds instead of merely preference judgments. It derives from Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox and List and Pettit’s discursive dilemma, two problems that we distinguish emphatically here. The current theory has developed from the discursive dilemma, rather than the doctrinal paradox, and the final objective of the paper is to give the latter (...) its own theoretical development along the line of recent work by Dietrich and Mongin. However, the paper also aims at reviewing logical aggregation theory as such, and it covers impossibility theorems by Dietrich, Dietrich and List, Dokow and Holzman, List and Pettit, Mongin, Nehring and Puppe, Pauly and van Hees, providing a uniform logical framework in which they can be compared with each other. The review goes through three historical stages: the initial paradox and dilemma, the scattered early results on the independence axiom, and the so-called canonical theorem, a collective achievement that provided the theory with its specific method of analysis. The paper goes some way towards philosophical logic, first by briefly connecting the aggregative framework of judgment with the modern philosophy of judgment, and second by thoroughly discussing and axiomatizing the ‘general logic’ built in this framework. (shrink)

The contributions to the Special Issue on Multiple Belief Change, Iterated Belief Change and Preference Aggregation are divided into three parts. Four contributions are grouped under the heading "multiple belief change" (Part I, with authors M. Falappa, E. Fermé, G. Kern-Isberner, P. Peppas, M. Reis, and G. Simari), five contributions under the heading "iterated belief change" (Part II, with authors G. Bonanno, S.O. Hansson, A. Nayak, M. Orgun, R. Ramachandran, H. Rott, and E. Weydert). These papers do not only pick (...) up the particular questions raised, but also extend and modify the framework of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson. Part III deals with preference aggregation and consists of one contribution (by F. Herzberg and D. Eckert). (shrink)

Following Lauwers and Van Liedekerke (1995), this paper explores in a model-theoretic framework the relation between Arrovian aggregation rules and ultraproducts, in order to investigate a source of impossibility results for the case of an infinite number of individuals and an aggregation rule based on a free ultrafilter of decisive coalitions.

In the theory of judgment aggregation, it is known for which agendas of propositions it is possible to aggregate individual judgments into collective ones in accordance with the Arrow-inspired requirements of universal domain, collective rationality, unanimity preservation, non-dictatorship and propositionwise independence. But it is only partially known (e.g., only in the monotonic case) for which agendas it is possible to respect additional requirements, notably non-oligarchy, anonymity, no individual veto power, or implication preservation. We fully characterize the agendas for which there (...) are such possibilities, thereby answering the most salient open questions about propositionwise judgment aggregation. Our results build on earlier results by Nehring and Puppe (2002), Nehring (2006), Dietrich and List (2007a) and Dokow and Holzman (2010a). (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...) Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be (...) "holistic": It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine "holism thesis" on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the theory of judgment aggregation, a growing interdisciplinary research area. The theory addresses the following question: How can a group of individuals make consistent collective judgments on a given set of propositions on the basis of the group members' individual judgments on them? I begin by explaining the observation that initially sparked the interest in judgment aggregation, the so-called "doctinal" and "discursive paradoxes". I then introduce the basic formal model of judgment aggregation, (...) which allows me to present some illustrative variants of a generic impossibility result. I subsequently turn to the question of how this impossibility result can be avoided, going through several possible escape routes. Finally, I relate the theory of judgment aggregation to other branches of aggregation theory. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of the theory of judgment aggregation, I hope to introduce the theory in a succinct and pedagogical way, providing an illustrative rather than exhaustive coverage of some of its key ideas and results. (shrink)

Standard impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation over logically connected propositions either use a controversial systematicity condition or apply only to agendas of propositions with rich logical connections. Are there any serious impossibilities without these restrictions? We prove an impossibility theorem without requiring systematicity that applies to most standard agendas: Every judgment aggregation function (with rational inputs and outputs) satisfying a condition called unbiasedness is dictatorial (or effectively dictatorial if we remove one of the agenda conditions). Our agenda conditions are tight. (...) When applied illustratively to (strict) preference aggregation represented in our model, the result implies that every unbiased social welfare function with universal domain is effectively dictatorial. (shrink)

Pettit (2006) argues that deferring to majority testimony is not generally rational: it may lead to inconsistent beliefs. He suggests that “another ... approach will do better”: deferring to supermajority testimony. But this approach may also lead to inconsistencies. In this paper, I describe conditions under which deference to supermajority testimony ensures consistency, and conditions under which it does not. I also introduce the concept of “consistency of degree k”, which is weaker than full consistency by ruling out only “blatant” (...) inconsistencies in an agent’s beliefs while permitting less blatant ones, and show that, while super-majoritarian deference often fails to ensure full consistency, it is a route to consistency in this weaker sense. (shrink)

This paper addresses how multiple individual credences on logically related issues should be aggregated into collective binary beliefs. We call this binarizing belief aggregation. It is vulnerable to dilemmas such as the discursive dilemma or the lottery paradox: proposition-wise independent aggregation can generate inconsistent or not deductively closed collective judgments. Addressing this challenge using the familiar axiomatic approach, we introduce general conditions on a binarizing belief aggregation rule, including rationality conditions on individual inputs and collective outputs, and determine which rules (...) (if any) satisfy different combinations of these conditions. Furthermore, we analyze similarities and differences between our proofs and other related proofs in the literature and conclude that the problem of binarizing belief aggregation is a free-standing aggregation problem not reducible to judgment aggregation or probabilistic opinion pooling. (shrink)

The existing literature on the rational underdetermination problem often construes it as one resulting from the ubiquity of objective values. It is therefore sometimes argued that subjectivists need not be troubled by the underdetermination problem. But on closer examination, it turns out, they should. Or so I will argue. The task of the first half of this paper is explaining why. The task of the second half is finding a subjectivist solution the rational underdetermination problem. The basic problem, I argue, (...) is as follows. Idealizing subjectivism generates too many ideal selves to deliver determinate or commensurable options regarding what non-ideal deliberating agents ought to do. My solution: these idealized options should be assessed from the only perspective we can, in fact, occupy, namely, that of our non-ideal, actual selves. Deciding what to do therefore becomes, in part, an exercise in deciding who to be. But one might now worry this just moves the arbitrariness bump in the rug. Privileging the perspective of our actual self seems contrary to the rationale for idealizing in the first place. I consider two solutions to the problem, one democratic, the other modelled on trusteeship. In the end, I argue, our actual self has complete freedom to choose the ideal self it grants rational authority. In the final part of the paper, I present my positive proposal as a solution to the underdetermination problem confronting the idealizing subjectivist and then argue that, so understood, this account vindicates a tidied-up version of how some reflective people already do deliberate in their everyday lives. This, in turn, suggests that a decision-procedure closely connected to the account is both possible and attractive. (shrink)

We analyse the incentives of individuals to misrepresent their truthful judgments when engaged in collective decision-making. Our focus is on scenarios in which individuals reason about the incentives of others before choosing which judgments to report themselves. To this end, we introduce a formal model of strategic behaviour in logic-based judgment aggregation that accounts for such higher-level reasoning as well as the fact that individuals may only have partial information about the truthful judgments and preferences of their peers. We find (...) that every aggregation rule must belong to exactly one of three possible categories: it is either (i) immune to strategic manipulation for every level of reasoning, or (ii) manipulable for every level of reasoning, or (iii) immune to manipulation only for everykth level of reasoning, for some natural number kgreater than 1. (shrink)

How we can reliably draw inferences from data, evidence and/or experience has been and continues to be a pressing question in everyday life, the sciences, politics and a number of branches in philosophy (traditional epistemology, social epistemology, formal epistemology, logic and philosophy of the sciences). In a world in which we can now longer fully rely on our experiences, interlocutors, measurement instruments, data collection and storage systems and even news outlets to draw reliable inferences, the issue becomes even more pressing. (...) While we were working on this question using a formal epistemology approach Landes and Osimani (2020); De Pretis et al. (2019); Osimani and Landes (2020); Osimani (2020), we realised that the width of current active interests in the notion of reliability was much broader than we initially thought. Given the breadth of approaches and angles present in philosophy (even in this journal Schubert 2012; Avigad 2021; Claveau and Grenier 2019; Kummerfeld and Danks 2014; Landes 2021; Trpin et al. 2021; Schippers 2014; Schindler 2011; Kelly et al. 2016; Mayo-Wilson 2014; Olsson and Schubert 2007; Pittard 2017), we thought that it would be beneficial to provide a forum for an open exchange of ideas, in which philosophers working in different paradigms could come together. Our call for expression of interest received a great variety of promised manuscripts, the variety is reflected in the published papers. They range from fields far away from our own interests such as quantum probabilities de Ronde et al. (2021), evolvable software systems Primiero et al. (2021), to topics closer to our own research in the philosophy of medicine Lalumera et al. (2020), psychology Dutilh et al. (2021), traditional epistemology Dunn (2021); Tolly (2021) to finally close shared interests in formal epistemology Romero and Sprenger (2021) even within our own department Merdes et al. (2021). Our job is now to reliably inform you about all the contributions in the papers in this special issue. Unfortunately, that task is beyond our capabilities. What we can and instead do is to summarise the contributed papers to inform your reliable inference to read them all in great detail. (shrink)

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment aggregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this introduction is to show how ideas from the familiar theory of preference aggregation can be extended to this more general case. We first translate a proof of Arrow's impossibility theorem into the new setting, so as to motivate some of the central concepts and conditions leading to analogous (...) impossibilities, as discussed in the symposium. We then consider each of four possible escape-routes explored in the symposium. (shrink)

In representative democracies, referendum voting and parliamentary elections provide two fundamentally different methods for determining the majority opinion. We use three mathematical paradoxes – so-called majority voting paradoxes – to show that referendum voting can reverse the outcome of a parliamentary election, even if the same group of voters have expressed the same preferences on the issues considered in the referendums and the parliamentary election. This insight about the systemic contrarieties between referendum voting and parliamentary elections sheds a new light (...) on the debate about the supplementary value of referendums in representative democracies. Using this insight, we will suggest legal conditions for the implementation of referendums in representative democracies that can pre-empt the conflict between the two methods for determining the majority opinion. (shrink)

The paper develops an interface between syntax-based logical models of awareness and dynamic epistemic logic. The framework is shown to be able to accommodate a variety of notions of awareness and knowledge, as well as their dynamics. This, it is argued, offers a natural formal environment for the analysis of epistemic phenomena typical of multi-agent information exchange, such as how agents become aware of relevant details, how they perform inferences and how they share their information within a group. Technically, the (...) logics presented are all simple refinements of the logic of public announcements. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation is naturally applied to the modeling of collective attitudes. In the individual case, we represent agents as having not just beliefs, but also as supporting them with reasons. Can the Judgment Aggregation help model a concept of collective reason? I argue that the resources of the standard judgment aggregation framework are insufficiently general. I develop a generalization of the framework that improves along this dimension. In the new framework, new aggregation rules become available, as well as a natural (...) account of collective reasons. (shrink)

My focus is on aggregation of individual value rankings of alternatives to a collective value ranking. This is compared with aggregation o individual prefrences to a collective preference. While in an individual preference ranking the alternatives are ordered in accordance with one’s preferences, the order in a value ranking expresses one’s comparative evaluation of the alternatives, from the best to the worst. I suggest that, despite their formal similarity as rankings, this difference in the nature of individual inputs in two (...) aggregation scenarios has important implications: The kind of procedure that looks fine for aggregation of judgments is inappropriate for aggregation of preferences. The procedure I have in mind consists in similarity maximization, or – more precisely – in minimization of the average distance from individual inputs. When applied to judgment aggregation, this procedure can also be approached from the epistemic perspective: the questions are posed concerning its advantages as a truth-tracker. From that perspective, what matters is not only the probability of the outcome of the procedure being true, but also the expected verisimilitude of the outcome: its expected distance from truth. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate various possible (Bayesian) precisifications of the (somewhat vague) statements of “the equal weight view” (EWV) that have appeared in the recent literature on disagreement. We will show that the renditions of (EWV) that immediately suggest themselves are untenable from a Bayesian point of view. In the end, we will propose some tenable (but not necessarily desirable) interpretations of (EWV). Our aim here will not be to defend any particular Bayesian precisification of (EWV), but rather to (...) raise awareness about some of the difficulties inherent in formulating such precisifications. (shrink)

By means of multi-agent simulations, it investigates the truth and consensus-conduciveness of controversial debates. The book brings together research in formal epistemology and argumentation theory.

We can formalize judgments as logical formulas. Judgment aggregation deals with judgments of several agents, which need to be aggregated to a collective judgment. There are several logical formalizations of judgment aggregation. This paper focuses on a modal formalization which nicely expresses classical properties of judgment aggregation rules and famous results of social choice theory, like Arrow’s impossibility theorem. A natural deduction system for modal logic of judgment aggregation is presented in this paper. The system is sound and complete. As (...) an example of derivation, a formal proof of Arrow’s impossibility theorem is given. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected issues often leads to collective inconsistency. This study examines two collective decision-making procedures designed to avoid such inconsistency—one premise-based and the other conclusion-based. While the relative desirability of the two procedures has been studied extensively from a theoretical perspective, the preference of individuals regarding the two procedures has been less studied empirically. In the present study, a scenario-based questionnaire survey of participant preferences for the two procedures was conducted, taking into consideration prevailing (...) social norms in the society to which the participants belong and the heterogeneity of the participants’ past experiences. Results show that a minority opinion not matching a prevailing social norm is more likely to be supported when the conclusion-based procedure is used. This can be explained by a basic property of the conclusion-based procedure: The procedure does not require voters to reveal their reasons for reaching a particular conclusion. This property proves appealing for participants who have a minority opinion. Such a finding is highly relevant to future studies on strategic behaviors in choosing a collective decision-making procedure. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation studies how individual opinions on a given set of propositions can be aggregated to form a consistent group judgment on the same propositions. Despite the simplicity of the problem, seemingly natural aggregation procedures fail to return consistent collective outcomes, leading to what is now known as the doctrinal paradox. The first occurrences of the paradox were discovered in the legal realm. However, the interest of judgment aggregation is much broader and extends to political philosophy, epistemology, social choice theory, (...) and computer science. The aim of this paper is to provide a concise survey of the discipline and to outline some of the most pressing questions and future lines of research. (shrink)

In recent years, judgement aggregation has emerged as an important area of social choice theory. Judgement aggregation is concerned with aggregating sets of individual judgements over logically connected propositions into a set of collective judgements. It has been shown that even seemingly weak conditions on the aggregation function make it impossible to find functions that produce rational collective judgements from all possible rational individual judgements. This implies that the step from individual judgements to collective judgements requires trade-offs between different desiderata, (...) such as universal domain, rationality, epistemological quality, and unbiasedness. These dilemmas challenge us to decide which conditions we should relax. The typical application for judgement aggregation is the problem of group decision making. Juries and expert committees are the stock examples. However, the relevance of judgement aggregation goes beyond these cases. In this survey I review some core results in the field of judgement aggregation and social epistemology and discuss their implications for the analysis of distributed thinking. (shrink)

This paper examines the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. A central feature of the analysis is a condition that we term the ‘avoidance potential’, which gives precision to the idea that moral responsibility implies a reasonable demand that an agent should have acted otherwise. We show how our theory can allocate moral responsibility to individuals in complex collective action problems, an issue that sometimes goes by the name of ‘the problem of many hands’. We also show how it allocates (...) moral responsibility in the classic Frankfurt example. (shrink)

The point of departure in my story is the contrast between two models of democratic voting process: popular democracy and what might be called committee democracy. On one interpretation, voting in popular democracy is a procedure whose function is to aggregate the individuals’ preferences to something like a collective preference, while in committee democracy what is being aggregated are committee members’ judgments. The relevant judgments on the agenda often address an evaluative question. It is such value judgments that this paper (...) focuses on. The question is how their aggregation differs from aggregation of preferences. I focus on the case in which the two aggregation scenarios exhibit a far-reaching structural similarity: more precisely, the case in which, in the judgment aggregation scenario, the individual inputs are value rankings. This means that, formally, the individual judgments in this case have the same structure as preference rankings over a given set of alternatives, but while in a preference ranking the alternatives are ordered in accordance with one’s preferences, a value ranking expresses one’s comparative evaluation of the alternatives: say, this alternative is best, those two alternatives are second-best, that alternative is third-best, etc. I suggest that this difference in the nature of individual inputs in two aggregation scenarios has important implications for the task of aggregation. In particular, distance-based methods that look fine for the aggregation of judgments turn out to be inappropriate for the aggregation of preferences: Minimization of distance from individual inputs violates the Pareto condition. When applied to judgment aggregation, distance-based methods can also be approached from the epistemic standpoint: the questions canl be posed concerning their advantages as a truth-tracker. In this context, what matters is not only the probability of the outcome of the aggregation procedure being true, but also the expected verisimilitude of the outcome: its expected distance from truth. (shrink)