Wednesday, January 18, 2023

GOOD NEWS

I just learned that I will be able to give a series of lectures in the next few months in the UNC philosophy department on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy. As things now stand, I shall  be giving six weekly two hour lectures.  The department has found me a handicap accessible classroom and I am good to go. It will be fun to be back in the classroom yet again.


Here is the flyer I wrote yesterday announcing the lectures:


The Use and Abuse

Of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy

A series of lectures

by Robert Paul Wolff

 

In the past 100 years or so, the ancient disciplines of ethics and political philosophy have been significantly changed by the incorporation of formal materials introduced from logic, mathematics, and economics. Rational choice theory, collective choice theory, and Game Theory have all played a significant role in recent literature, perhaps most notably in the work of John Rawls.

 

Sometimes the introduction of these formal materials has made for greater precision and power in argumentation, but all too often the result has been confusion rather than clarity, and ideological rationalization rather than greater understanding. In fields as far apart as legal theory, nuclear deterrence theory, and political philosophy inadequate understanding of the formal methods has resulted in ideological rationalization of questionable normative claims.

 

The purpose of these lectures is twofold: First, to present the foundations of these formal methods with sufficient precision and clarity so that students can master them and really understand what they are about; and Second, to give examples of the ways in which these materials have been misused through inadequate understanding.

 

In the first part of the lectures, we will develop formally the concept of a utility function, distinguishing ordinal from cardinal utility functions, and we will explore some of the difficulties and complexities of these notions. We will then look closely at the so-called “paradox of majority rule” and examine in some detail Kenneth Arrow’s proof of a powerful theorem generalizing the Condorcet paradox. We will also go through a proof of an interesting theorem by Duncan Black concerning single peaked preference orders. We will then move on to a formal development of the elements of Game Theory as first developed by John von Neumann.  Included in this discussion will be a formal development of the oft referenced but usually misunderstood notion of a zero-sum game.  We shall, with any luck, also put to rest the confusions concerning the so-called “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

 

In the second part of the lectures, we shall take a look at some of the misuses of this formal material. Our principal focus will be on a formal analysis of the central argument lying at the heart of John Rawls’s famous book, A Theory of Justice.


3 comments:

  1. Prof. Wolff,

    Are these lectures going to be recorded to join your other lectures on you tube, or are there procedural requirements, e.g., consent of the students attending, which preclude this? If there are no such impediments, I would encourage that this be done so that we can all share in seeing and hearing them.

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  2. In case you have not come across it previously, Tom Slee's No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is a wonderful presentation of basic game theory, including zero sum games & the prisoners' dilemma.

    Extracts of reviews (with links to the whole review) here.

    Sample from Alex Tabarrok: Slee’s book is the best of the anti-market books: it is well written, serious, and knowledgeable about economics. In fact, I regard Slee’s book as an excellent primer on asymmetric information, free riding, externalities, herding, coordination problems and identity – Economics 301 for all those budding young Ezra Klein’s of the world who think that Economics 101 isn’t quite right.

    To which Brad Delong responded: Alex Tabarrok’s reading Tom Slee’s No One Makes Your Shop at Wal-Mart and consequent throwing the book against the wall and desiring to kick Tom Slee in the shins has boosted Tom’s book’s amazon.com sales rank by a factor of ten.

    If it will boost the book’s ranking further, I will promise to throw one of my two copies out my sixth-floor office window and to trap Tom Slee in the Evans Hall middle south elevator for no less than thirty minutes–it is a very nice book.


    The first chapter here

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  3. I'm looking forward to see these lectures someday on YouTube. I'm especially interested in debunking 'social choice theory', because it seems totally uncritically taken paradigm for all political science nowadays.

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