Social Software
Encyclopedia
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 procedure
Social procedure
The term Social Procedure is sometimes applied to any of the procedures carried out by people in various areas of society, such as legislative assemblies, judicial systems, and resource arbiters, such as banks or other lending organizations...

s. The goals of research in this field are modeling social situations, developing theories of correctness, and designing social procedures.

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
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

 under the leadership of Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

, who was influential in the development of the field.

Goals and tools of social software

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
Borda count
The Borda count is a single-winner election method in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. The Borda count determines the winner of an election by giving each candidate a certain number of points corresponding to the position in which he or she is ranked by each voter. Once all...

, 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
Analysis of algorithms
To analyze an algorithm is to determine the amount of resources necessary to execute it. Most algorithms are designed to work with inputs of arbitrary length...

 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 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.

Primary references

  • John Searle
    John Searle
    John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...

    , The Construction of Social Reality (1995) New York : Free Press, c1995.
  • Rohit Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

    , “Social Software,” Synthese, 132, Sep 2002, 187-211.
  • Eric Pacuit and Rohit Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

    , "Social Interaction, Knowledge, and Social Software", in Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm, ed. Dina Goldin, Sott Smolka, Peter Wegner, Springer 2007, 441-461.

Other references

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein
    Ludwig Wittgenstein
    Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

    , Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1953.
  • Jaakko Hintikka, 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.
  • Paul Milgrom and Nancy Stokey, Information, trade and common knowledge, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 26:1, pp. 17–27, 1982.
  • J. Geanakoplos and H. Polemarchakis, We Can't Disagree Forever, J. Economic Theory, 28 (1982), 192-200.
  • R. Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

     and P. Krasucki, Communication, Consensus and Knowledge, J. Economic Theory 52 (1990) pp. 178–189.
  • W. Brian Arthur
    W. Brian Arthur
    William Brian Arthur is an economist credited with influencing and describing the modern theory of increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets...

    . Inductive reasoning and bounded rationality. Complexity in Economic Theory, 84(2):406-411, 1994.
  • Ronald Fagin
    Ronald Fagin
    Ronald Fagin is the Manager of the Foundations of Computer Science group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is best known for his pioneering work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge...

    , Joseph Halpern
    Joseph Halpern
    Joseph Yehuda Halpern is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Most of his research is on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty....

    , Yoram Moses
    Yoram Moses
    Yoram Moses 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, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1986...

     and Moshe Vardi, 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
    David Harel is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years.-Biography:...

    , Dexter Kozen
    Dexter Kozen
    Dexter Campbell Kozen is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is currently Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A...

     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
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

    , 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.
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

     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
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

     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
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
    Rohit Jivanlal Parikh , is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory...

    , 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.

See also

  • Social procedure
    Social procedure
    The term Social Procedure is sometimes applied to any of the procedures carried out by people in various areas of society, such as legislative assemblies, judicial systems, and resource arbiters, such as banks or other lending organizations...

  • Social technology
    Social technology
    The term Social Technology was first used at the University of Chicago by Albion Woodbury Small and Charles Richmond Henderson around the end of the 19th century. Small and Henderson were close colleagues, and it is hard to tell who used the term first...

  • Epistemic 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 applications in many fields, including philosophy,...

  • Game Theory
    Game theory
    Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

  • Mechanism Design
    Mechanism design
    Mechanism design is a field in game theory studying solution concepts for a class of private information games...

  • Fair Division
    Fair division
    Fair division, also known as the cake-cutting problem, is the problem of dividing a resource in such a way that all recipients believe that they have received a fair amount...

  • No-trade Theorem
    No-trade theorem
    In financial economics, the no-trade theorem states that if markets are in a state of efficient equilibrium, if there are no noise traders or other non-rational interferences with prices, and if the structure by which traders or potential traders acquire information is itself common knowledge, then...

  • Dynamic Logic
    Dynamic logic (modal logic)
    Dynamic logic is an extension of modal logic originally intended for reasoning about computer programs and later applied to more general complex behaviors arising in linguistics, philosophy, AI, and other fields.-Language:...


External links

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