Problematic Situations, Preference Change, and Negotiations: A Philosophical Approach

For many of the large-scale problems facing humanity, individuals lack the power to address them on their own. We might call upon group agents such as states or corporations to solve them for us. Problems such as climate change, however, are of such a scope and magnitude that no single group agent can deal with them effectively. To achieve a cooperative solution, groups must negotiate with one another on how to address these problems. Contributing to our understanding of how humanity can deal with such large-scale problems, the present thesis offers a theory of negotiating group agents. After an introduction, chapters two, three, and four offer a philosophical reconstruction of the sociological Negotiated Order approach. At the core of these chapters is a pragmatist theory of motivational change in social contexts, which I contrast with standard rational choice theory. The Negotiated Order approach argues that many social phenomena, such as organisations, function based on motivational change occurring in the context of informal negotiations. Chapter five discusses group agency and argues that functionalist accounts of group agency are a promising approach for extending the Negotiated Order approach. The sixth and final chapter returns to the original motivation for developing a theory of negotiating group agents. It shows that in the case of climate change negotiations, the Negotiated Order account offers a different and promising perspective than standard rational choice models. In addition, the thesis includes an appendix which discusses Dewey’s theory of choice and proposes a way of formalising its pragmatist take on preference change

Organisations as Computing Systems

Organisations are computing systems. The university’s sports centre is a computing system for managing sports teams and facilities. The tenure committee is a computing system for assigning tenure status. Despite an increasing number of publications in group ontology, the computational nature of organisations has not been recognised. The present paper is the first in this debate to propose a theory of organisations as groups structured for computing. I begin by describing the current situation in group ontology and by spelling out the thesis in more detail. I then present the example of a sports centre to illustrate why one might intuitively think of organisations as computing systems. To substantiate the thesis, I introduce Piccinini’s restrictive analysis of physical computation. As I show, organisations meet all criteria for being computing systems. Organisations are structured groups with the function of manipulating medium-independent vehicles according to rules. Furthermore, I argue for the modal claim that this is a necessary feature of organisations. Having sketched the computational account of organisations, I compare it to other proposals in the literature

Two theories of group agency

Abstract: 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

It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a community-created encyclopedia that contains information about notable people from different countries, epochs and disciplines and aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. However, the narrow diversity of the Wikipedia editor community has the potential to introduce systemic biases such as gender biases into the content of Wikipedia. In this paper we aim to tackle a sub problem of this larger challenge by presenting and applying a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that while women on Wikipedia are covered and featured well in many Wikipedia language editions, the way women are portrayed starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We hope our work contributes to increasing awareness about gender biases online, and in particular to raising attention to the different levels in which gender biases can manifest themselves on the web

Contrafactives and Learnability

Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which(almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal ispart of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factivesare abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due toa difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learnthan that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experimentusing an artificial neural network. The results of this experiment support our hypothesis

Lifetime of double occupancies in the Fermi-Hubbard model

We investigate the decay of artificially created double occupancies in a repulsive Fermi-Hubbard system in the strongly interacting limit using diagrammatic many-body theory and experiments with ultracold fermions on optical lattices. The lifetime of the doublons is found to scale exponentially with the ratio of the on-site repulsion to the bandwidth. We show that the dominant decay process in presence of background holes is the excitation of a large number of particle hole pairs to absorb the energy of the doublon. We also show that the strongly interacting nature of the background state is crucial in obtaining the correct estimate of the doublon lifetime in these systems. The theoretical estimates and the experimental data are in fair quantitative agreement

SeCoDa: Sense Complexity Dataset

The Sense Complexity Dataset (SeCoDa) provides a corpus that is annotated jointly for complexity and word senses. It thus provides a valuable resource for both word sense disambiguation and the task of complex word identification. The intention is that this dataset will be used to identify complexity at the level of word senses rather than word tokens. For word sense annotation SeCoDa uses a hierarchical scheme that is based on information available in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. This way we can offer more coarse-grained senses than directly available in WordNet

Observation of Elastic Doublon Decay in the Fermi-Hubbard Model

We investigate the decay of highly excited states of ultracold fermions in a three-dimensional optical lattice. Starting from a repulsive Fermi-Hubbard system near half filling, we generate additional doubly occupied sites (doublons) by lattice modulation. The subsequent relaxation back to thermal equilibrium is monitored over time. The measured doublon lifetime covers two orders of magnitude. In units of the tunneling time h/J it is found to depend exponentially on the ratio of on-site interaction energy U to kinetic energy J. We argue that the dominant mechanism for the relaxation is a high order scattering process involving several single fermions as scattering partners. A many-body calculation is carried out using diagrammatic methods, yielding good agreement with the data.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, published versio