Managing Performative Models

Scientific models can be performative: they can causally affect the phenomena they are intended to represent. The existing literature offers two responses. The appraisal view emphasizes that performativity can sometimes be a good-making model attribute, e.g., when predictions steer the public’s behavior in desirable ways. The mitigation view seeks to endogenize agents’ behavioral response to model-issued forecasts to get rid of performativity instead. This paper argues that neither approach is fully compelling: the appraisal view encounters severe concerns about moral values illegitimately encroaching on how modelers construct and use models, while the mitigation view fails to acknowledge that endogenization is itself a choice that involves substantive value-judgments relating to the desirability of certain social outcomes

Riscophrenia and "animal spirits": clarifying the notions of risk and uncertainty in environmental problems

This article seeks to clarify the concepts of risk and uncertainty, restricting its focus to environmental problems and to three strands of reflection. Firstly, I suggest that we should apply the label riscophrenia to the tendency to envisage most environmental problems excessively in terms of probabilistic risk, erecting the concept to a core dogma of certainty based on the image it offers of (alleged) safety and control of the random. Looking at the most serious environmental problems of the twenty-first century through the prism of "animal spirits" is above all an exercise which shows that unpredictability and uncertainties are constituent elements of human existence and social life. Secondly, I argue that the assessment of uncertainty has political and normative implications. I hold that uncertainty may make it possible to invoke precautionary, not just preventive, measures, and that alternative "contextualised" research strategies, open to a variety of points of view, are possible. Lastly, I claim that the language of risk and its excessive application is generally laden with a type of ambiguity which tends not to emphasize society's current problems, and so facilitates the continuation rather than the questioning of our society's dominant technocratic and technological model

Interactive intentionality and norm formation

The paper aims at complementing Searle's social ontology with an epistemology capable of illustrating institution formation. To this purpose, I discuss Searle's conception of constitutive rules and show that it requires the specifications of normative powers and purposes identifying status functions to be taken as given. However, such specifications arise from underlying normative commitments that may be various and possibly conflicting. Hence, in order to account for the formation of institutions, it is necessary to understand how status function declarations may emerge from alternative normative commitments. I make the hypothesis of “interactive intentionality,” as an interactive and deliberative mode of practical reasoning, to describe the processes of convergence on definite constitutive rules. These processes show how interactive intentionality may frame both commitment and enforcement, thus providing some insights to make rule-based and equilibrium-based accounts of institutions epistemologically commensurable

On the normative status of mixed strategies

Flipping a coin to decide what to do is a common feature of everyday life. Mixed strategies, as these are called, have a thorny status in normative decision theories. This paper explores various ways to justify choosing one's actions at random. I conclude that it is hard to make sense of this behavior without dealing with some difficult consequences

Endogenizing government policy variables and synthesizing quantitative economic policy modeling and rational expectations hypothesis

The theory of quantitative economic policy (QEP) rationalizes the public policy process. It assumes all people, those in the private and in the public sectors, are rational, informed, and goal oriented. The QEP fails to account for effects of people\u27s expectations of public policy choices upon their behavior. The rational expectations hypothesis (REH) assumes that economic agents in both public and private sectors have a good deal of information on economic events and form expectations of future events;Synthesizing QEP and REH involves endogenizing government policy variables. The synthesis casts doubt on the validity of some claims to conceptual superiority of the REH under the hierarchical information structure. The synthesis allows us to derive specification errors of treating policy instruments as exogenous rather than endogenous variables and also to revisit Lucas\u27 critique of econometric policy evaluation and finds that when the public choices are endogenous, Lucas\u27 critique is not applicable because the private sector can not form proper expectations about policy choices;Empirical study for 1954-1985 used Taylor\u27s macroeconomic model of the United States to investigate effects of varying underlying assumptions on the synthesis and supports the claim that the endogenized policy variables should be included in government preference function because excluding them leads to unacceptable policy rules in economic sense. The numerical results show that prediction errors of quarterly money supply rules are smaller than those of annual money supply rules

Accounting for Framing-Effects - an informational approach to intensionality in the Bolker-Jeffrey decision model

We suscribe to an account of framing-effects in decision theory in terms of an inference to a background informationa by the hearer when a speaker uses a certain frame while other equivalent frames were also available. This account was sketched by Craig McKenzie. We embed it in Bolker-Jeffrey decision model (or logic of action) - one main reason of this is that this latter model makes preferences bear on propositions. We can deduce a given anomaly or cognitive bias (namely framing-effects) in a formal decision theory. This leads to some philosophical considerations on the relationship between the rationality of preferences and the sensitivity to descriptions or labels of states of affairs (intensionality) in decision-making.information-processing and decision-making, framing-effects, intensionality, Bolker-Jeffrey

Mixing Dyadic and Deliberative Opinion Dynamics in an Agent-Based Model of Group Decision-Making

International audienceIn this article, we propose an agent-based model of opinion diffusion and voting where influence among individuals and deliberation in a group are mixed. The model is inspired from social modeling, as it describes an iterative process of collective decision-making that repeats a series of interindividual influences and collective deliberation steps, and studies the evolution of opinions and decisions in a group. It also aims at founding a comprehensive model to describe collective decision-making as a combination of two different paradigms: argumentation theory and ABM-influence models, which are not obvious to combine as a formal link between them is required. In our model, we find that deliberation, through the exchange of arguments, reduces the variance of opinions and the proportion of extremists in a population as long as not too much deliberation takes place in the decision processes. Additionally, if we define the correct collective decisions in the system in terms of the arguments that should be accepted, allowing for more deliberation favors convergence towards the correct decisions

Naturalizing institutions: Evolutionary principles and application on the case of money

In recent extensions of the Darwinian paradigm into economics, the replicator-interactor duality looms large. I propose a strictly naturalistic approach to this duality in the context of the theory of institutions, which means that its use is seen as being always and necessarily dependent on identifying a physical realization. I introduce a general framework for the analysis of institutions, which synthesizes Searle's and Aoki's theories, especially with regard to the role of public representations (signs) in the coordination of actions, and the function of cognitive processes that underly rule-following as a behavioral disposition. This allows to conceive institutions as causal circuits that connect the population-level dynamics of interactions with cognitive phenomena on the individual level. Those cognitive phenomena ultimately root in neuronal structures. So, I draw on a critical restatement of the concept of the meme by Aunger to propose a new conceptualization of the replicator in the context of institutions, namely, the replicator is a causal conjunction between signs and neuronal structures which undergirds the dispositions that generate rule-following actions. Signs, in turn, are outcomes of population-level interactions. I apply this framework on the case of money, analyzing the emotions that go along with the use of money, and presenting a stylized account of the emergence of money in terms of the naturalized Searle-Aoki model. In this view, money is a neuronally anchored metaphor for emotions relating with social exchange and reciprocity. Money as a meme is physically realized in a replicator which is a causal conjunction of money artefacts and money emotions. --Generalized Darwinism,institutions,replicator/interactor,Searle,Aoki,naturalism,memes,emotions,money