Who should have a right to participate in a polity’s decision-making? Although the answers to this ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory remain controversial, it is widely believed that the enfranchisement of tourists and children is unacceptable. Yet, the two most prominent inclusion principles in the literature – Robert Goodin’s ‘all (possibly) affected interests’-principle and the ‘all subjected to law’-principle – both enfranchise those groups. Unsurprisingly, democratic theorists have therefore offered several reasons for nonetheless exempting tourists and children from the (...) franchise. In this paper, I argue that their attempts fail. None of the proposed rationales can do the job without having unacceptable implications for the voting rights of other groups. I then develop a new specification of the affected interests-view, one that avoids such problems. According to my life plan-principle, a person is entitled to participate in a polity’s decision-making if and only if its decisions will actually affect her autonomously chosen life plans, or prevent her from developing or revising plans of that kind. I show that this principle straightforwardly avoids enfranchising tourists and children, and thus improves upon its two prominent rivals. The paper ends by considering and rejecting two objections to my new principle. (shrink)

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were (...) at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

Reissuing works originally published between 1949 and ‘79, this set presents a rich selection of renowned scholarship across the subject, touching also on ethics, religion, and psychology and other behavioural science. Classic previously out-of-print works are brought back into print here in this set of important discourse and theory.

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to (...) give readers new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to (...) give readers new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

This 20 volume Routledge Revivals collection brings together a selection of groundbreaking Philosophy titles, from the rich and diverse Routledge backlist. With titles published between 1933 and 1991, this is a truly wide-ranging selection, encompassing works by distinguished authors such as: Simone Weil, Hilary Putnam, Franz Brentano, Anthony Kenny, Karl Jaspers and Israel Scheffler. Dealing with everything from the notion of freewill, to concepts of time and space, to theories of morality, this set offers a collection of the best of (...) Routledge publishing in the field of Philosophy from across the Twentieth Century. Please note that all titles have been previously available for sale individually through the Routledge Revivals programme. (shrink)

Originally published between 1982 and 1991 the 3 volumes in this set Reflect the diversity in Hegelianism and every branch of philosophy which he contributed to. Examine Hegel's work in relation to Marx and Wittgenstein Discuss Hegel's social theory Examine British Hegelian thinking and the lines of its development Offer an interpretation of Hegelian theory that is relevant for the understanding of modern republican constitutions.

When can a group legitimately form its own state? Under international law, some groups can but others cannot. But the standard is unclear, and traditional legal analysis has failed to elucidate it. In The Theory of Self-Determination, leading scholars chart new territory in our theoretical conception of self-determination. Drawing from diverse scholarship in international law, philosophy, and political science, they attempt to move beyond the prevailing nationalist conceptions of group definition. At issue are such universal questions as: (...) when does a group qualify as a 'people'? Does history matter? Or is it a question of ethnic status? Are these matters properly solved by popular vote? Anchored in modern analytical political philosophy but with implications for a wide range of scholarship, this volume will prove essential for scholars and practitioners of international law, global justice, and international relations. (shrink)

Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others (...) and ourselves. Jost lays out the wide range of evidence for his groundbreaking theory and examines its implications for our communities and our democracy. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he provides an accessible account of system justification theory and its insights. System justification helps to explain deep contradictions, including the feeling among some women that they don’t deserve the same salaries as men and the tendency of some poor people to vote for policies that increase economic inequality. The theory illuminates the most pressing social and political issues of our time—why has it been so hard to combat anthropogenic climate change?—as well as some of the most intimate—why do some black children prefer white dolls to black ones and why do some people stay in bad relationships? Jost’s theory has far-reaching implications, and he offers numerous insights that political activists and social justice advocates can use to promote change. (shrink)

In a voting context, when the preferences of voters are described by linear orderings over a finite set of alternatives, the Maximin rule orders the alternatives according to their minimal rank in the voters’ preferences. It is equivalent to the Fallback bargaining process described by Brams and Kilgour (Group Decision and Negotiation 10:287–316, 2001). This article proposes a characterization of the Maximin rule as a social welfare function (SWF) based upon five conditions: Neutrality, Duplication, Unanimity, Top Invariance, and (...) Weak Separability. In a similar way, we obtain a characterization for the Maximax SWF by using Bottom Invariance instead of Top Invariance. Then, these results are compared to the axiomatic characterizations of two famous scoring rules, the Plurality rule and the Antiplurality rule. (shrink)

The voting power of a voter—the extent to which she can affect the outcome of a collective decision—is often quantified in terms of the probability that she is critical. This measure is extended to a series of power measures of different ranks. The measures quantify the extent to which a voter can be part of a group that can jointly make a difference as to whether a bill passes or not. It is argued that the series of these (...) measures allow for a more appropriate assessment of voting power, particularly of a posteriori voting power in case the votes are stochastically dependent. Also, the new measures discriminate between voting games that cannot be distinguished in terms of the probability of only criticality. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of the strategies and theories of democratic participation in Nigeria that breed institutional marginality and bad governance due to shortfalls in pursuing the values of justice and empowerment as core democratic characteristics. The same democratic principles such as voting, parliament, constitution, judiciary, that are suggestive of gains such as responsible use, and peaceful transfer of power may not have translated fully into sociopolitical empowerment for responsibility and representation in evolving democratic practice in Nigeria due (...) to problems of agency and political ideology. Democratic theorizing and participation in Nigeria has defied orthodox presuppositions seen in the disrespect for basic rights and the disregard for the rule of law in democracy that allow for fair play within and among the elites and political grassroots. Thus this study investigates the Nigerian predicament as a model or case study, raising questions about the reasons for the systematic disempowerment of groups. (shrink)

To this day, a hundred and fifty years after Mendeleev's discovery, the overal structure of the periodic system remains unaccounted for in quantum-mechanical terms. Given this dire situation, a handful of scientists in the 1970s embarked on a quest for the symmetries that lie hidden in the periodic table. Their goal was to explain the table's structure in group-theoretical terms. We argue that this symmetry program required an important paradigm shift in the understanding of the nature of chemical elements. (...) The idea, in essence, consisted of treating the chemical elements, not as particles, but as states of a superparticle. We show that the inspiration for this came from elementary particle physics, and in particular from Heisenberg's suggestion to treat the proton and neutron as different states of the nucleon. We provide a careful study of Heisenberg's last paper on the nature of elementary particles, and explain why the Democritean picture of matter no longer applied in modern physics and a Platonic symmetry-based picture was called for instead. We show how Heisenberg's Platonic philosophy came to dominate the field of elementary particle physics, and how it found its culmination point in Gell-Mann's classification of the hadrons in the eightfold way. We argue that it was the success of Heisenberg's approach in elementary particle physics that sparked the group-theoretical approach to the periodic table. We explain how it was applied to the set of chemical elements via a critical examination of the work of the Russian mathematician Abram Ilyich Fet the Turkish-American physicist Asim Orhan Barut, before giving some final reflections. (shrink)

This book starts from the premise that methodology has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory.

I propose a `stage theory’ of groups: a group is a fusion of group-stages, where a group-stage is a plurality of individuals at a world and a time. The stage theory consists of existence conditions, identity conditions, and parthood conditions for groups.

In their article, Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky present an alternative to market theories of voting behavior. Contrary to market theories which view the voter as acting to maximize the expected self-interest, the alternative view sees voting as fundamentally an act of self-expression: “Voting, like speech, is an expressive activity providing an outlet for one's moral sentiments. We suggest that it is the expressive return to a vote that frequently determines the behavior of individuals in large-number electorates.”.

The research reported here was the first empirical examination of strategic voting under the Sequential Voting by Veto (SVV) voting procedure, proposed by Mueller (1978). According to this procedure, a sequence of n voters must select s out of s+m alternatives (m=n=2; s>0). Hence, the number of alternatives exceeds the number of participants by one (n+1). When the ith voter casts her vote, she vetoes the alternative against which a veto has not yet been cast, and the (...) s remaining non-vetoed alternatives are elected. The SVV procedure invokes the minority principle, and it has advantages over all majoritarian procedures; this makes SVV a very desirable means for relatively small groups to make collective decisions. Felsenthal and Machover (1992) pointed out three models of voting under SVV: sincere, optimal, and canonical. The current research investigated, through laboratory experiments, which cognitive model better accounts for the voters' observed behavior and the likelihood of obtaining the optimal outcome as a function of the size of n (when s=1). The findings suggest that while voters under SVV use all three models, their choice is conditioned by group size. In the small groups (n=3), the canonical mode was a better predictor than the sincere model. In the larger groups (n=5), the sincere model was a better predictor than the canonical model. There is also evidence of players' learning during the experiment. (shrink)

A group is often construed as one agent with its own probabilistic beliefs (credences), which are obtained by aggregating those of the individuals, for instance through averaging. In their celebrated “Groupthink”, Russell et al. (2015) require group credences to undergo Bayesian revision whenever new information is learnt, i.e., whenever individual credences undergo Bayesian revision based on this information. To obtain a fully Bayesian group, one should often extend this requirement to non-public or even private information (learnt by (...) not all or just one individual), or to non-representable information (not representable by any event in the domain where credences are held). I pro- pose a taxonomy of six types of ‘group Bayesianism’. They differ in the information for which Bayesian revision of group credences is required: public representable information, private representable information, public non-representable information, etc. Six corre- sponding theorems establish how individual credences must (not) be aggregated to ensure group Bayesianism of any type, respectively. Aggregating through standard averaging is never permitted; instead, different forms of geometric averaging must be used. One theorem—that for public representable information—is essentially Russell et al.’s central result (with minor corrections). Another theorem—that for public non-representable information—fills a gap in the theory of externally Bayesian opinion pooling. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical critique of social choice theory insofar as it deals with the normative evaluation of voting and voting rules. I will argue that the very method of evaluating voting rules in terms of whether they satisfy various conditions is deeply problematic because introducing strategic behaviour leads to a violation of any condition that makes a difference between voting rules. I also argue that it is legitimate to make interpersonal comparisons of utilities (...) in voting theory. Combining a realistic account of voters’ behaviour with a utilitarian evaluation of the outcomes then leads to the judgment that strategic voting is beneficial. If it is, then Arrow's theorem does not have far-reaching consequences for democracy because one of its conditions is not normatively acceptable. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer the spanish translation with notes of three treatises of Ramon Llull : Artificium electionis personarum, the chapter XXIV of book II from Llibre d’Evast, d’Aloma e de Blaquerna named «En qual manera Natana fo eleta a abadessa» and De arte electionis. These three texts show a new election technique supported on the Ars magna methods. The translations are preceded by a short introduction explaining the place that such texts occupy in the whole lullian opus and (...) the advances of recents investigations. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

Critiques G. Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection , from the perspectives of social constructionism, contemporary theory of metaphor, and existential-phenomenological psychology. This theory provides a contemporary biological view of consciousness and the self. Edelman's notion of consciousness as purely biological, and his attempt to ground intentionality in the body, are reductionistic. It is suggested that phenomenological descriptions must be taken into the center of the problem of consciousness. An understanding of the relation of the experiential (...) basis of metaphor and its ensuing ontological status, can offer a view of the influence of particular biological metaphors which could help to eliminate their reification in psychology and induce their critique. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In representative democracies, referendum voting and parliamentary elections provide two fundamentally different methods for determining the majority opinion. We use three mathematical paradoxes – so-called majority voting paradoxes – to show that referendum voting can reverse the outcome of a parliamentary election, even if the same group of voters have expressed the same preferences on the issues considered in the referendums and the parliamentary election. This insight about the systemic contrarieties between referendum voting and parliamentary (...) elections sheds a new light on the debate about the supplementary value of referendums in representative democracies. Using this insight, we will suggest legal conditions for the implementation of referendums in representative democracies that can pre-empt the conflict between the two methods for determining the majority opinion. (shrink)

Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all their members at all (...) time. Second, we have access to the inner mechanisms of the groups agents, because members know what they have decided on. I construct a counterexample with these features allowing me to reject interpretivism about group agency in favour of functionalism. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation studies how individual opinions on a given set of propositions can be aggregated to form a consistent group judgment on the same propositions. Despite the simplicity of the problem, seemingly natural aggregation procedures fail to return consistent collective outcomes, leading to what is now known as the doctrinal paradox. The first occurrences of the paradox were discovered in the legal realm. However, the interest of judgment aggregation is much broader and extends to political philosophy, epistemology, social choice (...) theory, and computer science. The aim of this paper is to provide a concise survey of the discipline and to outline some of the most pressing questions and future lines of research. (shrink)

We examine collective decision-making in a jury voting game under the unanimity rule when voters have ambiguous beliefs. Unlike in existing studies (Ellis in Theoretical Economics 11:865–895, 2016; Fabrizi et al., in: AUT Economics Working Paper, 2021; Ryan in Theory and Decision 90:543–577, 2021), the locus of ambiguity is the likelihood function (signal precision) rather than the prior. This significantly alters the properties of symmetric equilibria. While prior ambiguity may induce multiple equilibria (Fabrizi et al., in: AUT Economics (...) Working Paper, 2021; Ryan in Theory and Decision 90:543–577, 2021) we show that, under likelihood ambiguity, there exists a unique non-trivial symmetric responsive equilibrium that takes the same form as in the absence of ambiguity (Feddersen and Pesendorfer in The American Political Science Review 92:23–35, 1998). Moreover, likelihood ambiguity partially offsets the pernicious effects of pivotality on decision quality: the frequency of Type I error (convicting the innocent) is typically lower than in the absence of ambiguity. (shrink)

We study model theory of fields with actions of a fixed finite group scheme. We prove the existence and simplicity of a model companion of the theory of such actions, which generalizes our previous results about truncated iterative Hasse–Schmidt derivations [13] and about Galois actions [14]. As an application of our methods, we obtain a new model complete theory of actions of a finite group on fields of finite imperfection degree.

We achieve several results. First, we develop a variant of the theory of absolute Galois groups in the context of many sorted structures. Second, we provide a method for coding absolute Galois groups of structures, so they can be interpreted in some monster model with an additional predicate. Third, we prove the “Weak Independence Theorem” for pseudo-algebraically closed (PAC) substructures of an ambient structure with no finite cover property (nfcp) and the property [Formula: see text]. Fourth, we describe Kim-dividing (...) in these PAC substructures and show several results related to the SOPnhierarchy. Fifth, we characterize the algebraic closure in PAC structures. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields (...) the development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

the theory of modal groups is an abstract theory that may be used to show formal similarities between various formulations of epistemic logics (eg Hintikka, Chisholm, and von Wright) and formal systems in other domains.

This is a survey, intended both for group theorists and model theorists, concerning the structure of pseudofinite groups, that is, infinite models of the first-order theory of finite groups. The focus is on concepts from stability theory and generalisations in the context of pseudofinite groups, and on the information this might provide for finite group theory.

Voting is a collective activity: it requires more than one person to win a vote. In a corporation, voting allows the winning idea to become an intention of the corporate group once the vote is concluded. In this paper, argue that unlike in corporate boards, in a democratic election, the voting process does not create a group intention. The difference between the two processes is an oft-overlooked moment directly after the corporate vote in which members (...) on the losing side ratify the decision of the group and move on with the group into the future. In state elections, because of the high cost of renouncing membership, there is typically no ratification moment. While different groups do have collective intentions prior to an electoral vote, the vote itself does not manifest the intention of a group agent such as ‘the People.’ This conclusion has implications for minority rights. (shrink)