Online research in philosophy

The paper is essentially a short version Spohn "Strategic Rationality" which emphasizes in particular how the ideas developed there may be used to shed new light on the iterated prisoner's dilemma (and on iterated Newcomb's problem).

Hamilton games-theoretic conflict model, which applies Maynard Smith's concept of evolutionarily stable strategy to the Prisoner's Dilemma, gives rise to an inconsistency between theoretical prescription and empirical results. Proposed resolutions of thisproblem are incongruent with the tenets of the models involved. The independent consistency of each model is restored, and the anomaly thereby circumvented, by a proof that no evolutionarily stable strategy exists in the Prisoner's Dilemma.

1 Background for the Uninitiated RICHMOND CAMPBELL Paradoxes are intrinsically fascinating. They are also distinctively ...

Rachlin basically marshals three reasons behind his unconventional claim that altruism is a subcategory of self-control and that, hence, the prisoner's dilemma is the appropriate metaphor of altruism. I do not find any of the three reasons convincing. Therefore, the prisoner's dilemma metaphor is unsuitable for explaining altruism.

The claim of neutrality made on behalf of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” has been re-enforced by Kay Mathiesen’s creation of “TheAltruist’s Dilemma.” That this represents a neutral variation on “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” is compromised, however, by the failure of “The Altruist’s Dilemma” to deal with altruism in a full sense. The difference illustrates how, in contrast to its professed neutrality, “ThePrisoner’s Dilemma” involves very definite views of humanity and the nature of life itself. This is confirmed by Mathiesen’s misreading of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”.

As levels of trust decrease and the necessity for trust increase in our society, we are increasingly driven toward the untoward, even disastrous, outcomes of the prisoner's dilemma. Yet despite the growing evidence that (re)building conditions of trust is increasingly mandatory in our era, modern moral philosophy (by default) and the social sciences (implicitly) legitimize an instrumental rationality which is the root problem. The greatest danger is that as conditions of trust are rationalized away through the progressive institutionalization of an instrumental rationality, we are driven towards the most virulent form of the prisoner's paradox — ethical relativism and its nihilistic consequences.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a popular device used by researchers to analyze such institutions as business and the modem corporation. This popularity is not deserved under a certain condition that is widespread in college education. If we, as management educators, take seriouslyour parts in preparing our students to participate in the institutions of a democratic society, then the Prisoner’s Dilemma-as clever a rhetoricaldevice as it is-is an unacceptable means to that end. By posing certain questions about the prisoners in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I show that management educators have created a Prisoners Dilemma, whereby they intellectually imprison themselves and their students by continuingto appeal to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. These questions are not encouraged by the advocates of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Experiments in which subjects play simultaneously several finite two-person prisoner's dilemma supergames with and without an outside option reveal that: (i) an attractive outside option enhances cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game, (ii) if the payoff for mutual defection is negative, subjects' tendency to avoid losses leads them to cooperate; while this tendency makes them stick to mutual defection if its payoff is positive, (iii) subjects use probabilistic start and endeffect behavior.

Biologists rely extensively on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game to model reciprocal altruism. After examining the informal conditions necessary for reciprocal altruism, I argue that formal games besides the standard iterated Prisoner's Dilemma meet these conditions. One alternate representation, the modified Prisoner's Dilemma game, removes a standard but unnecessary condition; the other game is what I call a Cook's Dilemma. We should explore these new models of reciprocal altruism because they predict different stability characteristics for various strategies; for instance, I show that strategies such as Tit-for-Tat have different stability dynamics in these alternate models.