Alexander, J. McKenzie 
ORCID: 0000-0002-2663-6993
(2009)
Social deliberation: Nash, Bayes, and the partial vindication of Gabriele Tarde.
Episteme, 6 (2).
pp. 164-184.
ISSN 1742-3600
Abstract
At the very end of the 19th century, Gabriele Tarde wrote that all society was a product of imitation and innovation. This view regarding the development of society has, to a large extent, fallen out of favour, and especially so in those areas where the rational actor model looms large. I argue that this is unfortunate, as models of imitative learning, in some cases, agree better with what people actually do than more sophisticated models of learning. In this paper, I contrast the behaviour of imitative learning with two more sophisticated learning rules (one based on Bayesian updating, the other based on the Nash-Brown-von Neumann dynamics) in the context of social deliberation problems. I show for two social deliberation problems, the Centipede game and a simple Lewis sender-receiver game, that imitative learning provides better agreement with what people actually do, thus partially vindicating Tarde.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://www.episteme.eu.com/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2009 Edinburgh University Press |
| Divisions: | Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Feb 2010 15:20 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Dec 2024 23:31 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/27044 |
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