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269Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A ReconciliationBritish Journal of Political Science 33 (1): 1-28. 2003.The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the con…Read more
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80Disaggregating deliberation's effects: an experiment within a deliberative pollBritish Journal of Political Science 40 (2): 333-347. 2010.Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then t…Read more
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1775Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A ReconciliationAmerican Political Science Review 107 (4): 629-643. 2013.Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view,…Read more
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174Social Choice TheoryStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.Social choice theory is the study of collective decision processes and procedures. It is not a single theory, but a cluster of models and results concerning the aggregation of individual inputs (e.g., votes, preferences, judgments, welfare) into collective outputs (e.g., collective decisions, preferences, judgments, welfare). Central questions are: How can a group of individuals choose a winning outcome (e.g., policy, electoral candidate) from a given set of options? What are the properties of d…Read more
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62Indeterminacy of translation reassessed: is the problem of translation an empirical matter?Philosophical Writings 9 23-38. 1998.
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1077Probabilistic Opinion PoolingIn Alan Hájek & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2016.Suppose several individuals (e.g., experts on a panel) each assign probabilities to some events. How can these individual probability assignments be aggregated into a single collective probability assignment? This article reviews several proposed solutions to this problem. We focus on three salient proposals: linear pooling (the weighted or unweighted linear averaging of probabilities), geometric pooling (the weighted or unweighted geometric averaging of probabilities), and multiplicative poolin…Read more
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434Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agentsOxford University Press. 2011.Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sci…Read more
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601When to defer to supermajority testimony — and when notIn Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 240-249. 2014.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 …Read more
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142Craig’s Theorem and the Empirical Underdetermination Thesis ReassessedDisputatio 7 (1): 28-39. 1999.This paper reassesses the question of whether Craig’s theorem poses a challenge to Quine's empirical underdetermination thesis. It will be demonstrated that Quine’s account of this issue in his paper “Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World” (1975) is flawed and that Quine makes too strong a concession to the Craigian challenge. It will further be pointed out that Craig’s theorem would threaten the empirical underdetermination thesis only if the set of all relevant observation conditionals c…Read more
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58I am grateful to Geoffrey Brennan, Campbell Brown, Franz Dietrich, Christian Elsholtz, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson and David Soskice for very helpful comments and suggestions; and to the participants of a Social and Political Theory seminar at the ANU in February 2003 and the participants of a conference panel of the Australasian Association of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide in July 2003 for comments and discussion
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544Are interpersonal comparisons of utility indeterminate?Erkenntnis 58 (2). 2003.On the orthodox view in economics, interpersonal comparisons of utility are not empirically meaningful, and "hence" impossible. To reassess this view, this paper draws on the parallels between the problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility and the problem of translation of linguistic meaning, as explored by Quine. I discuss several cases of what the empirical evidence for interpersonal comparisonsof utility might be and show that, even on the strongest of these, interpersonal comparisons ar…Read more
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109On the many as one: A reply to Kornhauser and SagerPhilosophy and Public Affairs 33 (4). 2005.In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many …Read more
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Ludwig Maximilians Universität, MünchenMunich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy
Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of ReligionProfessor -
Munich, Bavaria, Germany