Brian Skyrms

This is a state-of-the-art collection of essays on the relation between probabilities, especially conditional probabilities, and conditionals. It provides new negative results that sharply limit the ways conditionals can be related to conditional probabilities. There are also positive ideas and results that will open up new areas of research. The collection is intended to honor Ernest W. Adams, whose seminal work is largely responsible for creating this area of inquiry. In addition to describing, evaluating, and applying Adams's work, these contributions extend his ideas in directions he may or may not have anticipated, but that he certainly inspired. This volume should be of interest to a wide range of philosophers of science, as well as to computer scientists and linguists.

"This book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts hunting hare, where the risk of noncooperation is small but the reward is equally small, with hunting the stag, where maximum cooperation is required but the reward is much greater. Rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit." "The possibility of a successful solution depends on the coevolution of cooperation and social structure. Brian Skyrms focuses on three factors that affect the emergence of such structure and the facilitation of collective action: location (interactions with neighbors), signals (transmission of information), and association (the formation of social networks)."--Jacket.

Signals

In this pithy and highly readable book, Brian Skyrms, a recognized authority on game theory and decision theory, investigates traditional problems of the social contract in terms of evolutionary dynamics. Game theory is skillfully employed to offer quite 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 analyzing 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.

ix, 222 p

In the social sciences norms are sometimes taken to play a key explanatory role. Yet norms differ from group to group, from society to society, and from species to species. How are norms formed and how do they change? This "state-of-the-art" collection of essays presents some of the best contemporary research into the dynamical processes underlying the formation, maintenance, metamorphosis, and dissolution of norms. The volume combines formal modeling with more traditional analysis, and considers biological and cultural evolution, individual learning, and rational deliberation. In filling a significant gap in the current literature this volume will be of particular interest to economists, political scientists, and sociologists, in addition to philosophers of the social sciences.

"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact." --

"Important essays by a leading expert in the field Trailblazing work at the scientific end of philosophy Brian Skyrms presents eighteen essays which apply adaptive dynamics (of cultural evolution and individual learning) to social theory. Altruism, spite, fairness, trust, division of labor, and signaling are treated from this perspective. Correlation is seen to be of fundamental importance. Interactions with neighbors in space, on static networks, and on co-evolving dynamics networks are investigated. Spontaneous emergence of social structure and of signaling systems are examined in the context of learning dynamics."--Back cover.