Don Ross

The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large in public discourse. Complex systems theory offers a range of powerful new tools to analyse the stability of social institutions in general, and democracy in particular. What makes a democracy stable? And which processes potentially lead to instability of a democratic system? This paper offers a complex systems perspective on this question, informed by areas of the mathematical, natural, and social sciences. We explain the meaning of the term 'stability' in different disciplines and discuss how laws, rules, and regulations, but also norms, conventions, and expectations are decisive for the stability of a social institution such as democracy.

Ainslie’s picoeconomics of gambling provides the basis for a case study of the way in which mentalistic and neuroscientific models of behaviour can be used to complement one another in furnishing relatively complete explanations. Ainslie’s model explains the complex ambivalence experienced and reported by addicts. However, this ambivalence is also experienced, with respect to certain consumption targets by non-addicts. Attention to the neurocellular dynamics of addictive choice is necessary to explain a further property of addiction, namely, preoccupation and crowding out of attention to alternative activities and objects of thought. All addicts suffer from overdrafts of willpower accounts in Ainslie’s sense; but not all people whose wills are bankrupt with respect to a consumption target are addicted to that target. Furthermore, deficits of willpower can _cause_ addiction – but only to targets over which agents can exercise fine control of consumption intervals.

In various contributions over many years, I have argued that the core methodology of mainstream microeconomics can best be defended by reference to Dennett’s intentional stance. This elucidating relationship is mutual: we can also learn about the logic of the intentional stance as a basis for behavioural science by examining it in action in economics. This examination directs attention to a specific broad theme in the history of the behavioural sciences, the subtle relationship between behaviourism and realism about intentional concepts.

Recent scientific findings about human decision making would seem to threaten the traditional concept of the individual conscious will. The will is threatened from "below" by the discovery that our apparently spontaneous actions are actually controlled and initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness, and from "above" by the recognition that we adapt our actions according to social dynamics of which we are seldom aware. In Distributed Cognition and the Will, leading philosophers and behavioral scientists consider how much, if anything, of the traditional concept of the individual conscious will survives these discoveries, and they assess the implications for our sense of freedom and responsibility. The contributors all take science seriously, and they are inspired by the idea that apparent threats to the cogency of the idea of will might instead become the basis of its reemergence as a scientific subject. They consider macro-scale issues of society and culture, the micro-scale dynamics of the mind/brain, and connections between macro-scale and micro-scale phenomena in the self-guidance and self-regulation of personal behavior. Contributors: George Ainslie, Wayne Christensen, Andy Clark, Paul Sheldon Davies, Daniel C. Dennett, Lawrence A. Lengbeyer, Dan Lloyd, Philip Pettit, Don Ross, Tamler Sommers, Betsy Sparrow, Mariam Thalos, Jeffrey B. Vancouver, Daniel M. Wegner, Tadeusz W. ZawidzkiDon Ross is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Finance, Economics, and Quantitative Methods at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. David Spurrett is Professor of Philosophy at the Howard College Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Harold Kincaid is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. G. Lynn Stephens is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

There is a strong formal analogy between proposition‐wise supervenience of collective doxastic rationality on individual doxastic rationality and supervenience of social choice functions on individual choice functions. In light of this analogy, the basis for List and Pettit's impossibility theorems can fruitfully be compared with the basis for Arrow's. This helps to explain why List and Pettit can derive no impossibility theorem for set‐wise supervenience. However, there are empirical reasons for doubting that set‐wise supervenience of collective doxastic rationality on individual doxastic rationality is necessary; a systematic feedback relationship between the former and some individual behavioral dispositions is probably sufficient to dissolve mysteries about group agency. Group doxastic rationality need not supervene on individual rationality.

There is a broad consensus in the leading general literature on norms and norm-change that norms are conditional, and based on descriptive and normative expectations. Expectations are a sub-set of beliefs. Hence some primary barriers to norm-change arise from dynamics among beliefs, and between beliefs and preferences. However, the literature has under-examined the distinction between two such barriers, preference falsification and pluralistic ignorance. We clarify the implications of the distinction for two leading conceptual frameworks (due to Kuran and Bicchieri, respectively), and ultimately for explicit models, of norms and norm change. We furthermore explain how, once this clarification is in place, the two models are naturally reconciled by interpreting the concepts of belief – and also preference – that they incorporate as based on attribution from Dennett’s intentional stance.

The paper compares Ladyman and Ross’s version of naturalized metaphysics, Rainforest Realism, with the comprehensive scientific metaphysics recently articulated by a physicist, David Deutsch. Major similarities of the two positions are described and discussed, illustrating the relevance of metaphysics to science. However, a failure of consistent naturalism on Deutsch’s part is also identified and criticized: Deutsch promotes the Everettian multiverse interpretation of quantum physics on the basis of a philosophical commitment to classical determinism. Deutsch also fails to appreciate that a broadly realistic attitude to physical theory does not require denying that some important scientific achievements involve using models and their elements as instruments. Both of these errors are traced to an overly strict dichotomy between pure formalism and empirically interpreted content. In quantum mechanics, Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation fails to be a fully fledged ‘interpretation’ according to currently dominant philosophical opinion. Ladyman and Ross criticize this opinion. The deep structure of the world is arguably not mathematical but statistical, and there is no such thing as ‘purely formal statistics’. The principles of statistics are generalizations of recurrent patterns found in data; and such structuring of data is the core business of both science and its metaphysical unification. Contrary to Deutsch’s claims, Enlightenment optimism about the capacity for limitless expansion of knowledge is compatible with the hypothesis that the world is irreducibly and fundamentally stochastic. Among great philosophers, C. S. Peirce anticipated this hypothesis. Ladyman and Ross’s metaphysics can be re-described in terms of it, as follows: the world is the totality of non-redundant statistics, not of things.

Much work in game theory concerns mechanisms by which players can infer information about the utilities and beliefs of other players based on actions within games and pre-play signals. When game theory is applied to interactions among people, such analysis interprets them as ‘mindreading’. Recent work in cognitive science, however, suggests that human coordination rests more centrally on ‘mindshaping’, where interactants determine preferences jointly. As mindshaping is strategic, there is motivation to extend game theory to accommodate it. Conditional Game Theory (CGT) is a strategic theory of mindshaping. We show how it can be used to help players of standard games identify correlated equilibrium, and thus solve games. We then extend CGT to address a challenge to the relevance of correlated equilibrium to empirical choice data, by showing how pre-play analysis using CGT can reconcile the Harsanyi Doctrine – assumed common priors among Bayesian players – with rank-dependent choice as observed in economic experiments.

Political scientists have conventionally assumed that achieving democracy is a one-way ratchet. Only very recently has the question of “democratic backsliding” attracted any research attention. We argue that democratic instability is best understood with tools from complexity science. The explanatory power of complexity science arises from several features of complex systems. Their relevance in the context of democracy is discussed. Several policy recommendations are offered to help stabilize current systems of representative democracy.

I investigate the extent to which there might be, now or in the future, non-human animals that partake in the kind of fully human-style consciousness that has been taken by many philosophers to be the basis of normative personhood. I first sketch a conceptual framework for considering the question, based on a range of philosophical literature on relationships between consciousness, language and personhood. I then review the standard basis for largely a priori skepticism about the possibility that any non-human animal could experience FHSC and be a person to any extent, and indicate empirically motivated grounds for rejecting such skepticism, at least with respect to a select group of hypersocial candidate species with communication systems we do not currently know are not languages: corvids, parrots, elephants, and toothed whales. Relevant facts about elephants are reviewed in some detail, as a mini case study. While it is suggested that elephants might partake in the sort of consciousness characteristic of personhood to some extent, grounds are given for expecting that this extent is sharply limited by comparison with normal humans. As these grounds are mainly aspects of elephants’ external niche, however, rather than known limitations in their inboard cognitive or representational capacities, the surprising conclusion emerges that elephants might acquire FHSC, and thereby become persons, if they can be brought into conversation with humans, a possibility opened by considerations canvassed in the paper.

We consider the potential contribution of economics to an interdisciplinary research partnership between sociology and neuroscience. We correct a misunderstanding in previous literature over the understanding of humans as ‘social animals’, which has in turn led to misidentification of the potential relevance of game theory and the economics of networks to the social neuroscience project. Specifically, it has been suggested that these can be used to model mindreading. We argue that mindreading is at best a derivative and special basis for social coordination, whereas the general and pervasive phenomenon on which it depends is mindshaping. We then outline the foundations of Conditional Game Theory as a mathematical model of mindshaping, which extends game theory without displacing its classic solution concepts, and which exploits economists’ experience in modeling networks.

We consider motivations for acknowledging that people participate in multiple levels of economic agency. One of these levels is characterized in terms of subjective utility to the individual; another, frequently observed, level is characterized in terms of utility to social groups with which people identify. Following Bacharach, we describe such groups as ‘teams’. We review Bacharach’s theory of such identification in his account of ‘team reasoning’. While this conceptualization is useful, it applies only to processes supported by deliberation. As this is only one of a range of causal mechanisms underlying behaviour by humans and other strategic agents, a more general account is desirable. We then argue that Stirling’s account of ‘conditional games’ achieves the desired generalization.

Evidence of risk aversion in laboratory settings over small stakes leads to a priori implausible levels of risk aversion over large stakes under certain assumptions. One core assumption in statements of this calibration puzzle is that small-stakes risk aversion is observed over all levels of wealth, or over a â sufficiently largeâ range of wealth. Although this assumption is viewed as self-evident from the vast experimental literature showing risk aversion over laboratory stakes, it actually requires that lab wealth be varied for a given subject as one evaluates the risk attitudes of the subject. We consider evidence from a simple design that tests this assumption, and find that the assumption is strikingly rejected for a large sample of subjects from a population of college students. We conclude that the implausible predictions that flow from these assumptions do not apply to one specialized population widely used to study economic behavior in laboratory experiments.

Recently, philosophers have developed an extensive literature on social ontology that applies methods and concepts from analytic metaphysics. Much of this is entirely abstracted from, and unconcerned with, social science. However, Epstein (2015) argues explicitly that analytic social metaphysics, provided its account of ontological ‘grounding’ is repaired in specific ways, can rescue social science from explanatory impasses into which he thinks it has fallen. This version of analytic social ontology thus directly competes with radically naturalistic alternatives, in a way that helps to clarify what makes some metaphysics genuinely scientific (that is, part of the scientific enterprise and worldview). I consider this competition, marshal considerations against the value to social science of analytic metaphysics, and sketch a contrasting scientific metaphysics for understanding the implications of revisionist social ontology in unified scientific ontology.

The study of social norms sprawls across all of the social sciences but the the concept lacks a unified conception and formal theory. We synthesize an account that can be applied generally, at the social scale of analysis, and can be applied to empirical evidence generated in field and lab experiments. More specifically, we provide new analysis on representing norms for application in empirical political science, and in parts of economics that do not follow the recent trend among some behavioral economists to build models of the cognitive and motivational states of individuals taken “one at a time”. Foundational sources for our project are Bicchieri (2006, 2017), Kuran (1995), and Stirling (2012, 2016). From Bicchieri take that a norm exists in a social structure when a significant networked subset of individuals share descriptive and injunctive expectations that it regulates their interactions. From Kuran we take the insight that prevailing norms may come to be widely disliked by participants in networks but survive because norm suppress public displays of disenchantment. From Stirling we apply conditional game theory (CGT) to provide the technical resources for building our model of a norm-regulated social interaction. The example we use is a multi-player Investment/Trust Game.