Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. "The Intentional Stance" brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters - its first and the final three - appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection - an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind.Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of "Brainstorms" and "Elbow Room." "The Intentional Stance," along with these works, is a Bradford Book.

The Intentional Stance

It has been conjectured that no system of voting can preclude strategic voting-the securing by a voter of an outcome he prefers through misrepresentation of his preferences. In this paper, for all significant systems of voting in which chance plays no role, the conjecture is verified. To prove the conjecture, a more general theorem in game theory is proved: a gameform is a game without utilities attached to outcomes; only a trivial game form, it is shown, can guarantee that whatever the utilities of the players may be, each player will have a dominant pure strategy. I SHALL PROVE in this paper that any non-dictatorial voting scheme with at least three possible outcomes is subject to individual manipulation. By a "voting scheme," I mean any scheme which makes a community's choice depend entirely on individuals' professed preferences among the alternatives. An individual "manipulates" the voting scheme if, by misrepresenting his preferences, he secures an outcome he prefers to the "honest" outcome-the choice the community would make if he expressed his true preferences. The result on voting schemes follows from a theorem I shall prove which covers schemes of a more general kind. Let a gameform be any scheme which makes an outcome depend on individual actions of some specified sort, which I shall call strategies. A voting scheme, then, is a game form in which a strategy is a profession of preferences, but many game forms are not voting schemes. Call a strategy dominant for someone if, whatever anyone else does, it achieves his goals at least as well as would any alternative strategy. Only trivial game forms, I shall show, ensure that each individual, no matter what his preferences are, will have available a dominant strategy. Hence in particular, no non-trivial voting scheme guarantees that honest expression of preferences is a dominant strategy. These results are spelled out and proved in Section 3. The theorems in this paper should come as no surprise. It is well-known that many voting schemes in common use are subject to individual manipulation. Consider a "rank-order" voting scheme: each voter reports his preferences among the alternatives by ranking them on a ballot; first place on a ballot gives an alternative four votes, second place three, third place two, and fourth place one. The alternative with the greatest total number of votes wins. Here is a case in which an individual can manipulate the scheme. There are three voters and four alternatives; voter a ranks the alternatives in order xyzw on his ballot; voter b in order wxyz; and voter c's true preference ordering is wxyz. If c votes honestly, then, the winner is his second choice, x, with ten points. If c pretends that x is his last choice by giving his preference ordering as wyzx, then x gets only eight points, and c's first choice, w, wins with nine points. Thus c does best to misrepresent his

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall11/papers/Gibbard73.pdf

Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result

http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/Satterthwaite_(JET75).pdf

Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions

Economics has much to do with incentives--not least, incentives to work hard, to produce quality products, to study, to invest, and to save. Although Adam Smith amply confirmed this more than two hundred years ago in his analysis of sharecropping contracts, only in recent decades has a theory begun to emerge to place the topic at the heart of economic thinking. In this book, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort present the most thorough yet accessible introduction to incentives theory to date. Central to this theory is a simple question as pivotal to modern-day management as it is to economics research: What makes people act in a particular way in an economic or business situation? In seeking an answer, the authors provide the methodological tools to design institutions that can ensure good incentives for economic agents. This book focuses on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract--the essence of management and contract theory. How does the owner or manager of a firm align the objectives of its various members to maximize profits? Following a brief historical overview showing how the problem of incentives has come to the fore in the past two centuries, the authors devote the bulk of their work to exploring principal-agent models and various extensions thereof in light of three types of information problems: adverse selection, moral hazard, and non-verifiability. Offering an unprecedented look at a subject vital to industrial organization, labor economics, and behavioral economics, this book is set to become the definitive resource for students, researchers, and others who might find themselves pondering what contracts, and the incentives they embody, are really all about.

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The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model

* Preface to the First Edition * Preface to the Second Edition * Textual References * Introduction * Sense and Tone * Quantifiers * The Hierarchy of Levels * Proper Names * Sense and Reference *Appendix: Note on an Attempted Refutation of Frege * Some Theses of Frege's on Sense and Reference * The Reference of Incomplete Expressions * The Incompleteness of Concepts and Functions * Indirect Reference * Assertion * Thoughts * Truth-value and Reference *Appendix: Note on Many-valued Logics * Can Truth be Defined? * Abstract Objects * Quantification * Identity * Original Sinn * The Evolution of Frege's Thought * Frege's Place in the History of Philosophy * Bibliography * Index

Frege: Philosophy of Language

Michael Dummett's new book is the greatly expanded and recently revised version of his distinguished William James Lectures, delivered in 1976. Dummett regards the construction of a satisfactory theory of meaning as the most pressing task of contemporary analytical philosophy. He believes that the successful completion of this difficult assignment will lead to a resolution of problems before which philosophy has been stalled, in some instances for centuries. These problems turn on the correctness or incorrectness of a realistic view of one or another realm--the physical world, the mind, the past, mathematical reality, and so forth. Rejection of realism amounts to adoption of a variant semantics, and often of a variant logic, for the statements in a certain sector of our language. Dummett does not assume the correctness of any one logical system but shows how the choice between different logics arises at the level of the theory of meaning and depends upon the choice of one or another general form of meaning-theory. In order to determine the correct shape for a meaning-theory, we must attain a clear conception of what a meaning-theory can be expected to do. Such a conception, says Dummett, will form "a base camp for an assault on the metaphysical peaks: I have no greater ambition in this book than to set up a base camp."

The logical basis of metaphysics

* Acknowledgments * Preface * Note *1. Truth *2. Presupposition *3. The Structure of Appearance *4. Nominalism *5. Constructionalism *6. George Boole *7. Frege on Functions *8. Frege's Philosophy *9. Frege's Distinction between Sense and Reference *10. Realism *11. Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics *12. The Philosophical Significance of Godel's Theorem *13. Platonism *14. The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic *15. Wang's Paradox *16. Is Logic Empirical? *17. The Justification of Deduction *18. Can an Effect Precede its Cause? *19. Bringing About the Past *20. A Defence of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time *21. The Reality of the Past *22. The Significance of Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis *23. The Social Character of Meaning *24. Oxford Philosophy *25. Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be? * Details of Publication * Index

Truth and other enigmas

Introductory remarks 1. Preliminaries 2. Elementary intuitionistic mathematics 3. Choice sequences and spreads 4. The formalization of intuitionistic logic 5. The semantics of intuitionistic logic 6. Some further topics 7 Concluding philosophical remarks Bibliography Index

Elements of Intuitionism

§1. In [1] Godel proves the non-existence of a finite matrix characteristic for the intuitionist propositional calculus IC by the use of the finite matrices , where n is a natural number and

Michael Dummett

Papers

Frege: Philosophy of Language

The logical basis of metaphysics

Truth and other enigmas

Elements of Intuitionism

A Propositional Calculus with Denumerable Matrix