From social choice to multi-criterial evaluation: The case of theory choice in science

Abstract: Kenneth Arrow’s "general possibility theorem" limits the possibilities for democratic social choice.  It tells us that under what have seemed plausible assumptions, there is no way to derive a social ordering from voters' preferences.  Consequences for multi-criterial evaluation have been explored by May, in connection with the intrapersonal determination of preferences, and by Arrow and Raynauld in industrial decision making.  Samir Okasha has recently argued that Arrow's theorem applies as well to choice among scientific theories on the basis of their comparative fit to data, simplicity, scope and other Kuhnian theoretical values.  In this talk, I will show that it is irrelevant to the case.  Possible orderings of theories by relevant criteria are so severely restricted that the analogue in theory choice of Arrow's assumption is false.  Indeed, positive results from the theory of social choice tell us that sometimes quite simple and intuitive choice procedures are available.  In a range of cases, for example, we can count one theory better than another if it is better by more criteria than not.  The theory of social choice does not so much limit the possibilities for theory choice as tell us where some of them lie. 

Michael Morreau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. He works mainly in Philosophical Logic and the Philosophy of Language, but has also worked in Artificial Intelligence. He has written on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, most recently on vagueness, as well as on theoretical and practical reasoning. He has received grants from the Army Research Laboratories and from the National Science Foundation. Before coming to Maryland, Morreau worked at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (IMS) in Stuttgart, Germany; he has since held visiting positions there, at Bar Ilan University, and at the University of Amsterdam.

This seminar is being jointly hosted with the Department of Philosophy.