In philosophy and the social sciences, social software is an interdisciplinary research program that borrows
mathematical tools and techniques from game theory and computer science in order to analyze and design
social procedures. The goals of research in this field are modeling social situations, developing theories of correctness, and designing social procedures.
[Pacuit (2005), p.10]
Work under the term social software has been going on since about 1996, and conferences in Copenhagen, London, Utrecht and New York, have been partly or wholly devoted to it. Much of the work is carried out at the
City University of New York
The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges and seven pr ...
under the leadership of
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh (born November 20, 1936) is an Indian-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory. He is a Distinguished Professor at Bro ...
, who was influential in the development of the field.
Goals and tools
Current research in the area of social software include the analysis of social procedures and examination of them for fairness, appropriateness, correctness and efficiency. For example, an election procedure could be a simple majority vote,
Borda count
The Borda count is a family of positional voting rules which gives each candidate, for each ballot, a number of points corresponding to the number of candidates ranked lower. In the original variant, the lowest-ranked candidate gets 0 points, th ...
, a Single Transferable vote (STV), or Approval voting. All of these procedures can be examined for various properties like monotonicity. Monotonicity has the property that voting for a candidate should not harm that candidate. This may seem obvious, true
under any system, but it is something which can happen in STV. Another question would be the ability to elect a Condorcet winner in case there is one.
Other principles which are considered by researchers in social software include the concept that a procedure for fair division should be Pareto optimal, equitable and envy free. A procedure for auctions should be one which would encourage bidders to bid their actual valuation – a property which holds with the Vickrey auction.
What is new in social software compared to older fields is the use of tools from computer science like program logic,
analysis of algorithms
In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms—the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that r ...
and epistemic logic. Like programs, social procedures dovetail into each other. For instance an airport provides runways for planes to land, but it also provides security checks, and it must provide for ways in which buses and taxis can take arriving passengers to their local destinations. The entire mechanism can be analyzed in the way in which a complex computer program can be analyzed. The Banach-Knaster procedure for dividing a cake fairly, or the
Brams
Brams is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Steven Brams (born 1940), American game theorist and political scientist
* Ingeborg Brams (1921–1989), Danish film, radio, television, and theatre actress
See also
* Brahms (surnam ...
and Taylor procedure for fair division have been analyzed in this way. To point to the need for epistemic logic, a building not only needs restrooms, for obvious reasons, it also needs signs indicating where they are. Thus epistemic considerations enter in addition to structural ones. For a more urgent example, in addition to medicines, physicians also need tests to indicate what a patient's problem is.
See also
*
Dynamic logic
*
Epistemic logic Epistemic modal logic is a subfield of modal logic that is concerned with reasoning about knowledge. While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applic ...
*
Fair division
Fair division is the problem in game theory of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an entitlement to them so that each person receives their due share. That problem arises in various real-world settings such as division of i ...
*
Game theory
*
Mechanism design
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts a ...
*
No-trade theorem
In financial economics, the no-trade theorem states that if
# markets are in a state of efficient equilibrium
# there are no noise traders or other non-rational interferences with prices
# the structure by which traders or potential traders acq ...
*
Social procedure
*
Social technology
Social technology is a way of using human, intellectual and digital resources in order to influence social processes. For example, one might use social technology to ease social procedures via social software and social hardware, which might incl ...
Notes
Further reading
*
John Searle
John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mari ...
, ''The Construction of Social Reality'' (1995) New York : Free Press, c1995.
*
Rohit Parikh, “Social Software,” ''Synthese'', 132, Sep 2002, 187–211.
* Eric Pacuit and
Rohit Parikh, "Social Interaction, Knowledge, and Social Software", in ''Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm'', ed. Dina Goldin, Sott Smolka, Peter Wegner, Springer 2007, 441–461.
*
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian- British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is cons ...
, ''Philosophical Investigations,'' Macmillan, 1953.
*
Jaakko Hintikka
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish philosopher and logician.
Life and career
Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa).
In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Hels ...
, ''Knowledge and Belief: an introduction to the logic of the two notions'', Cornell University press, 1962,
* D. Lewis, ''Convention, a Philosophical Study'', Harvard U. Press, 1969.
* R. Aumann, Agreeing to disagree, ''Annals of Statistics'', 4 (1976) 1236–1239.
*
* J. Geanakoplos and H. Polemarchakis, We Can't Disagree Forever, ''J. Economic Theory'', 28 (1982), 192–200.
*
R. Parikh and P. Krasucki, Communication, Consensus and Knowledge, ''J. Economic Theory'' 52 (1990) pp. 178–189.
*
W. Brian ArthurInductive reasoning and bounded rationality ''Complexity in Economic Theory'', 84(2):406-411, 1994.
*
Ronald Fagin
Ronald Fagin (born 1945) is an American mathematician and computer scientist, and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge.
Biography
Ron F ...
,
Joseph Halpern
Joseph Yehuda Halpern (born 1953) is an Israeli-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. Most of his research is on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty.
Biography
Halpern graduated in 1975 from University of Toronto wi ...
,
Yoram Moses Yoram Moses ( he, יוֹרָם מוֹזֶס) is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Yoram Moses received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981, a ...
and
Moshe Vardi
, honorific_suffix =
, image = Moshe Vardi IMG 0010.jpg
, birth_date =
, birth_place = Israel
, workplaces = Rice UniversityIBM Research Stanford University
, alma_mater =
, thesis_title = The ...
, ''Reasoning about Knowledge'', MIT Press 1995.
* Steven Brams and Alan Taylor, ''The Win-Win Solution: guaranteeing fair shares to everybody,'' Norton 1999.
*
David Harel
David Harel ( he, דוד הראל; born 12 April 1950) is a computer scientist, currently serving as President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 198 ...
,
Dexter Kozen
Dexter Campbell Kozen (born December 20, 1951) is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in compute ...
and
Jerzy Tiuryn, ''Dynamic Logic'', MIT Press, 2000.
* Michael Chwe, ''Rational ritual : culture, coordination, and common knowledge'', Princeton University Press, 2001.
* Marc Pauly, ''Logic for Social Software'', Ph.D. Thesis, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series 2001–10, {{ISBN, 90-6196-510-1.
*
Rohit Parikh, Language as social software, in ''Future Pasts: the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy'', Ed. J. Floyd and S. Shieh, Oxford U. Press, 2001, 339–350.
*
Parikh, R. and Ramanujam, R., A knowledge based semantics of messages, in ''J. Logic, Language, and Information'', 12, pp. 453 – 467, 2003.
* Eric Pacuit
Topics in Social Software: Information in Strategic Situations'' Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York (2005).
* Eric Pacuit,
Rohit Parikh and Eva Cogan, The Logic of Knowledge Based Obligation, ''Knowledge, Rationality and Action'', a subjournal of ''Synthese'', 149(2), 311 – 341, 2006.
* Eric Pacuit and
Rohit Parikh, Reasoning about Communication Graphs, in Interactive Logic, Edited by Johan van Benthem, Dov Gabbay and
Benedikt Lowe (2007).
* Mike Wooldridge, Thomas Ågotnes, Paul E. Dunne, and Wiebe van der Hoek. Logic for Automated Mechanism Design – A Progress Report. In ''Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07''), Vancouver, Canada, July 2007.
External links
Knowledge, Games and Beliefs Group City University of New York, Graduate Center.
Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen. May 27–29, 2004. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
Interactive Logic: Games and Social Software workshop King's College, London. November 4–7, 2005. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
Games, action and social software workshop Lorentz Center, Leiden University, Netherlands. 30 Oct 2006–3 Nov 2006. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
Social Software Mini-conference Knowledge, Games and Beliefs Group, City University of New York. May 18–19, 2007. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
Game theory
Logic