This book is a unique introductory overview of decision theory. It is completely non-technical, without a single formula in the book. Written in a crisp and clear style it succinctly covers the full range of philosophical issues of rationality and decision theory, including game theory, social choice theory, prisoner's dilemma and much else. The book aims to expand the scope and enrich the foundations of decision theory. By addressing such issues as ambivalence, inner conflict, and the constraints imposed upon us (...) by our attachments to others, Frederic Schick reveals that our thinking is often more subtle than standard theories of rationality allow. Only a theory that respects that subtlety can illumine what is otherwise puzzling. The book contains many examples drawn from history and literature dealing with subjects such as love, war, friendship, and crime. (shrink)

Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.

welcomed by a new generation of students and scholars in all branches of learning.

THOMAS SCHELLING taught us that in ordinary human affairs, conflict and common interest are ubiquitously intertwined. For when it comes to variety, the occasion of pure conflict (known to some of its friends as the zerosum game) is as under-represented in human affairs as the occasion of undiluted common interest (known as the pure coordination game). The undiluted extremes are the exceptions, when it comes to counting kinds, while the mixed-motive kind of occasion is the rule. Things look a bit (...) different, however, when one looks at sheer numbers of true-life occasions, as I will explain. Schelling also taught us that in the diverse space of mixed-motive affairs, intermediate between pure conflict and pure coordination, there is more true-life collaborative behavior—more trustings and promise-keepings—than our prescriptive decision theories can accommodate, never mind explain. This collaborative behavior, as long ago another Thomas—Thomas Hobbes—was painfully aware, requires some explaining precisely because of the presence of ineliminable conflict of interest. The problem confronting those who aspire to explain such collaboration is to identify weighty motivations in its favor, in the face of the weighty, but countervailing motivations. What shall concern me here is not the collaboration that transpires in the face of conflict of interest, but the success which meets us more than halfway in those limiting cases of pure coordination, so as (for example) not to collide in roadways and corridors. For in sheer quantity, the occasions for pure coordination outnumber the occasions for anything else perhaps a hundredfold. (shrink)

1Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305‐2155, USAThe Evolution of Agency and Other Essays Kim Sterelny Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2001 xvi + 310 Hardback£42.50, $60.00 Paperback£15.95, $22.00.

The authors demonstrate that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.

The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with (...) our social instincts. The complex societies of the past few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective “work-arounds” to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis. (shrink)

The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with (...) our social instincts. The complex societies of the last few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective “work-arounds” to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis. (shrink)

Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which altruism is included among the basic rational requirements on desire and action. Altruism itself depends on the recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.

Hurley here revives a classical idea about rationality in a modern framework, by developing analogies between the structure of personality and the structure of society in the context of contemporary work in philosophy of mind, ethics, decision theory and social choice theory. The book examines the rationality of decisions and actions, and illustrates the continuity of philosophy of mind on the one hand, and ethics and jurisprudence on the other. A major thesis of the book is that arguments drawn from (...) the philosophy of mind may be used to undermine widely-held subjectivist positions in ethics and politico-economic theory. The work is inspired by the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Davidson, but goes on to connect their arguments about interpretation with formal work in decision theory and social choice theory, and with the theory of adjudication. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how children's imagination makes a continuing contribution to their cognitive and emotional development.

This book presents a collection of linked essays written by one of the leading philosophers of biology, Kim Sterelny, on the topic of biological evolution. The first half of the book explores most of the main theoretical controversies about evolution and selection. Sterelny argues that genes are not the only replicators: non-genetic inheritance is also extremely important, and is no mere epiphenomenon of gene selection. The second half of the book applies some of these ideas in considering cognitive evolution. Concentrating (...) on the mental capacities of simpler animals rather than those of humans, Sterelny argues for a general distinction between detection and representation, and that the evolution of belief, like that of representation, can be decoupled from the evolution of preference. These essays, some never before published, form a coherent whole that defends not just an overall conception of evolution, but also a distinctive take on cognitive evolution. (shrink)

"Intelligence" has long been considered to be a feature unique to human beings, giving us the capacity to imagine, to think, to deceive, to make complex connections between cause and effect, to devise elaborate stategies for solving problems. However, like all our other features, intelligence is a product of evolutionary change. Until recently, it was difficult to obtain evidence of this process from the frail testimony of a few bones and stone tools. It has become clear in the last 15 (...) years that the origins of human intelligence can be investigated by the comparative study of primates, our closest non-human relatives, giving strong impetus to the case for an "evolutionary psychology", the scientific study of the mind. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so much (...) greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

THE FIRST EDITION of this book was based primarily on experience with adult male psychopaths hospitalized in a closed institution. Though a great many other psychopaths had come to my attention, most of the patients who were observed over years and from whom emerged the basic concepts presented in 1941 were from this group. During the next decade a much more diverse group became available. Female patients, adolescents, people who had never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, all in large (...) numbers, became available for study and afforded an opportunity to observe the disorder in a very wide range of variety and of degree. This additional clinical experience, helpful comment in the reviews of the first edition, enlightening discussion with colleagues, and an improved acquaintance with the literature all contributed to modify concepts formulated approximately ten years earlier. In attempting to revise the book for the second edition (1950), I found it was impossible to do justice to the subject by minor additions, deletions, and modifications. It was necessary to write a new and much larger book. (shrink)

This is a revision of game theory which takes account of agents' own descriptions of their situations, and which allows people to reason as members of groups.

In this pithy and highly readable book, Brian Skyrms, a recognised authority on game and decision theory, investigates traditional problems of the social contract in terms of evolutionary dynamics. Game theory is skilfully employed to offer new interpretations of a wide variety of social phenomena, including justice, mutual aid, commitment, convention and meaning. The author eschews any grand, unified theory. Rather, he presents the reader with tools drawn from evolutionary game theory for the purpose of analysing and coming to understand (...) the social contract. The book is not technical and requires no special background knowledge. As such, it could be enjoyed by students and professionals in a wide range of disciplines: political science, philosophy, decision theory, economics and biology. (shrink)

The 'Evolution of Cooperation' addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. (...) This unexpected victory proved that cooperation - one might even say altruism - is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. (shrink)

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within (...) it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. -/- Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology. (from the HUP website). (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

We explore the idea that a group or ‘team’ of individuals can be an agent in its own right and that, when this is the case, individual team members use team reasoning, a distinctive mode of reasoning from that of standard decision theory. Our approach is to represent team reasoning explicitly, by means of schemata of practical reasoning in which conclusions about what actions should be taken are inferred from premises about the decision environment and about what agents are seeking (...) to achieve. We use this theoretical framework to compare team reasoning with the individual reasoning of standard decision theory, and to compare various theories of team agency and collective intentionality. (shrink)

Version 3.0 12/02/00. Submitted to R.M. Nesse The Evolution of Subjective Commitment, Russell Sage Foundation. Please do not cite without author’s permission.  by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. Comments welcome! Word count 14,487.