2024 Jerome S. Simon Lectures (Cailin O’Connor, California, Irvine)

We are pleased to announce Cailin O’Connor as our esteemed speaker for the 2024 Jerome S. Simon Lectures. Dr. O’Connor, a professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, works in the philosophy of biology and behavioral sciences, the philosophy of science more generally, and in evolutionary game theory. Her books include Modeling Scientific Communities (Cambridge University Press, 2023); The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2020; with James Owen Weatherall); Games in the Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2020); and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2019).

The lectures are in-person events, but if you would like to join via Zoom, you may do so.

Lecture 1

(September 24, 3-5 PM)

Title

Why Social Contracts Are Not Fair

Abstract

Many theorists have employed game theory to model the emergence of stable social norms, or natural “social contracts.” One branch of this literature uses bargaining games to show why many societies have norms and rules for fairness. In cultural evolutionary models, fair bargaining emerges endogenously because it is an efficient way to divide resources. But these models miss an important element of real human societies – divisions into groups or social categories. Once such groups are added to cultural evolutionary models, fairness is no longer the expected outcome.  Instead “discriminatory norms” often emerge where one group systematically gets more when dividing resources. I show why the addition of categories to bargaining models leads to unfairness, and discuss the role of power and minority status in this process. I also address how categories might emerge to support inequity, and the possibility of modeling social change. Altogether this work emphasizes that if one wishes to understand the naturalistic emergence of social contracts, one must account for the presence of categorical divisions, and unfairness, as well as for norms of fairness.

Lecture 2

(September 25, 3-5 PM)

Title

Signaling, Fairness, and Social Categories

Abstract

Philosophers and economists have used cultural evolutionary models of bargaining to understand issues related to fairness and justice, and especially how fair and unfair conventions and norms might arise in human societies. One line of this research shows how the presence of social categories in such models allows for inequitable equilibria that are not possible in models without social categories. This is taken to help explain why in human groups with social categories inequity is often the rule rather than the exception. But in previous models, it is typically assumed that these categories are rigid, easily observable, and binary. In reality, social categories are not always so tidy. We introduce evolutionary models where the tags connected with social categories can be flexible, variable, or difficult to observe, i.e., where these tags can carry different amounts of information about group membership. We show how alterations to these tags can undermine the stability of unfair conventions. We argue that these results can inform projects intended to ameliorate inequity, especially projects that seek to alter the properties of category markers.

Lecture 3

(September 26, 3-5 PM)

Title

Measuring Conventionality

Abstract

Standard accounts of convention include notions of arbitrariness. But many have conceived of conventionality as an all or nothing affair. In this paper I develop a framework for thinking of conventions as coming in degrees of arbitrariness. In doing so I introduce an information theoretic measure intended to capture the degree to which a solution to a social problem could have been otherwise. I discuss its use to cultural evolutionary explanation, and its possible uses to thinking about constraints in evolution by natural selection. And in particular, I discuss its relevance to thinking about gendered division of labor.

About the Simon Lectures

One of the department’s several endowed lecture series, the Jerome S. Simon Lectures are a biennial series of colloquia given by a philosopher of international distinction. After a brief hiatus, we are thrilled to reinvigorate the series in 2021. Past Simon lecturers have included David Velleman (Michigan), David Wiggins (Oxford University), Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh), Barbara Herman (UCLA), John Campbell (UC-Berkeley), Donald Rutherford (UC-San Diego), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck, London), Samuel Scheffler (NYU), Holly M. Smith (Rutgers), and Rainer Forst (Goethe University, Frankfurt).