•  43
    Safety in numbers: how social choice theory can inform avalanche risk management
    with Philip A. Ebert
    Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning (#): 1-17. 2022.
    Avalanche studies have undergone a transition in recent years. Early research focused mainly on environmental factors. More recently, attention has turned to human factors in decision making, such as behavioural and cognitive biases. This article adds a social component to this human turn in avalanche studies. It identifies lessons for decision making by groups of skiers from the perspective of social choice theory, a sub-field of economics, decision theory, philosophy and political science that…Read more
  •  36
    Designing grant-review panels for better funding decisions: Lessons from an empirically calibrated simulation model
    with Thomas Feliciani, Junwen Luo, Pablo Lucas, and Kalpana Shankar
    Research Policy 51 (4): 1-11. 2022.
    Objectives To explore how factors relating to grades and grading affect the correctness of choices that grant-review panels make among submitted proposals. To identify interventions in panel design that may be expected to increase the correctness of choices. Method Experimentation with an empirically-calibrated computer simulation model of panel review. Model parameters are set in accordance with procedures at a national science funding agency. Correctness of choices among research proposals is …Read more
  •  80
    Democracy without Enlightenment: A Jury Theorem for Evaluative Voting
    Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (2): 188-210. 2020.
    Panels, boards, and committees throughout society evaluate all manner of things by grading them, first individually and then collectively. Thus risks are prioritized, research proposals are funded, and candidates are shortlisted for jobs. It is not usual to pick winners in political elections by grading the candidates, but there are examples in history. This article takes up a question about the quality of judgments and decisions made by grading: under which conditions are they likely to be righ…Read more
  •  733
    An analogue of Arrow’s theorem has been thought to limit the possibilities for multi-criterial theory choice. Here, an example drawn from Toy Science, a model of theories and choice criteria, suggests that it does not. Arrow’s assumption that domains are unrestricted is inappropriate in connection with theory choice in Toy Science. There are, however, variants of Arrow’s theorem that do not require an unrestricted domain. They require instead that domains are, in a technical sense, ‘rich’. Since…Read more
  •  296
    The method of supergrading is introduced for deriving a ranking of items from scores or grades awarded by several people. Individual inputs may come in different languages of grades. Diversity in grading standards is an advantage, enabling rankings derived by this method to separate more items from one another. A framework is introduced for studying grading on the basis of observations. Measures of accuracy, reliability and discrimination are developed within this framework. Ability in grading i…Read more
  • What Some Generic Sentences Mean
    In Greg N. Carlson & Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds.), The Generic Book, University of Chicago Press. pp. 300--339. 1995.
  •  653
    A computer simulation is used to study collective judgements that an expert panel reaches on the basis of qualitative probability judgements contributed by individual members. The simulated panel displays a strong and robust crowd wisdom effect. The panel's performance is better when members contribute precise probability estimates instead of qualitative judgements, but not by much. Surprisingly, it doesn't always hurt for panel members to interpret the probability expressions differently. Indee…Read more
  •  616
    How common standards can diminish collective intelligence: a computational study
    with Aidan Lyon
    Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 22 (4): 483-489. 2016.
    Making good decisions depends on having accurate information – quickly, and in a form in which it can be readily communicated and acted upon. Two features of medical practice can help: deliberation in groups and the use of scores and grades in evaluation. We study the contributions of these features using a multi-agent computer simulation of groups of physicians. One might expect individual differences in members’ grading standards to reduce the capacity of the group to discover the facts on whi…Read more
  •  100
    Prima facie and seeming duties
    Studia Logica 57 (1). 1996.
    Sir David Ross introduced prima facie duties, or acts with a tendency to be duties proper. He also spoke of general prima facie principles, wwhich attribute to acts having some feature the tendency to be a duty proper. Like Utilitarians from Mill to Hare, he saw a role for such principles in the epistemology of duty: in the process by means of which, in any given situation, a moral code can help us to find out what we ought to do.After formalizing general prima facie principles as universally qu…Read more
  •  50
    Epistemic semantics for counterfactuals
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 21 (1). 1992.
  •  134
    The Hypothetical Syllogism
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (4): 447-464. 2009.
    The hypothetical syllogism is invalid in standard interpretations of conditional sentences. Many arguments of this sort are quite compelling, though, and you can wonder what makes them so. I shall argue that it is our parsimony in regard to connections among events and states of affairs. All manner of things just might, for all we know, be bound up with one another in all sorts of ways. But ordinarily it is better, being simpler, to assume they are unconnected. In so doing, we jump to the conclu…Read more
  •  1292
    It simply does not add up: Trouble with overall similarity
    Journal of Philosophy 107 (9): 469-490. 2010.
    Comparative overall similarity lies at the basis of a lot of recent metaphysics and epistemology. It is a poor foundation. Overall similarity is supposed to be an aggregate of similarities and differences in various respects. But there is no good way of combining them all.
  •  56
    The negative Ramsey test
    In André Fuhrmann & Michael Morreau (eds.), The Logic of Theory Change, Springer. 1991.
    The so called Ramsey test is a semantic recipe for determining whether a conditional proposition is acceptable in a given state of belief. Informally, it can be formulated as follows: (RT) Accept a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A also requires accepting C. In Gärdenfors (1986) it was shown that the Ramsey test is, in the context of some other weak conditions, on pain of triviality incompatible with th…Read more
  •  74
    Supervaluation Can Leave Truth-Value Gaps After All
    Journal of Philosophy 96 (3): 148-156. 1999.
    Among other good things, supervaluation is supposed to allow vague sentences to go without truth values. But Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have recently argued that it cannot allow this - not if it also respects certain conceptual truths. The main point I wish to make here is that they are mistaken. Supervaluation can leave truth-value gaps while respecting the conceptual truths they have in mind.
  •  77
    Fainthearted Conditionals
    Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 187. 1997.
  •  385
    What vague objects are like
    Journal of Philosophy 99 (7): 333-361. 2002.
  •  165
    Fitting words: Vague language in context
    with Alice Kyburg
    Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (6): 577-597. 2000.
  •  247
    Syntactical Treatments of Propositional Attitudes
    with Sarit Kraus
    Artificial Intelligence 106 (1): 161-177. 1998.
    Syntactical treatments of propositional attitudes are attractive to artificial intelligence researchers. But results of Montague (1974) and Thomason (1980) seem to show that syntactical treatments are not viable. They show that if representation languages are sufficiently expressive, then axiom schemes characterizing knowledge and belief give rise to paradox. Des Rivières and Levesque (1988) characterize a class of sentences within which these schemes can safely be instantiated. These sentences …Read more
  •  22
    For the Sake of the Argument (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (10): 540-546. 1998.
  •  162
    Other Things Being Equal
    Philosophical Studies 96 (2): 163-181. 1999.
  •  103
    Arrow's Theorem
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.
    Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—or “general possibility” theorem, as he called it—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective decision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are th…Read more
  •  175
    Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn Vindicated
    Mind 124 (493): 239-262. 2015.
    In a recent article, Okasha challenges Kuhn’s claim that there is no ‘neutral’ algorithm for theory choice. He argues using Arrow’s ‘impossibility’ theorem that — except under certain favourable conditions concerning the measurability and comparability of theoretical values — there are no theory choice algorithms at all, neutral or otherwise. But Okasha’s argument does not apply to important theory choice problems, among them the case of Copernican and Ptolemaic astronomy that much occupied Kuhn…Read more