Abstract
The focus of social simulation on representing the social world calls for an investigation of whether its implementations are inherently value-laden. In this article, I investigate what kind of thing implementation is in social simulation and consider the extent to which it has moral significance. When the purpose of a computational artefact is simulating human institutions, designers with different value judgements may have rational reasons for developing different implementations. I provide three arguments to show that different implementations amount to taking moral stands via the artefact. First, the meaning of a social simulation is not homogeneous among its users, which indicates that simulations have high interpretive malleability. I place malleability as the condition of simulation to be a metaphorical vehicle for representing the social world, allowing for different value judgements about the institutional world that the artefact is expected to simulate. Second, simulating the social world involves distinguishing between malfunction of the artefact and representation gaps, which reflect the role of meaning in simulating the social world and how meaning may or not remain coherent among the models that constitute a single implementation. Third, social simulations are akin to Kroes’ (Kroes, Technical artefacts: creations of mind and matter: a philosophy of engineering design, Springer, Dordrecht, 2012) techno-symbolic artefacts, in which the artefact’s effectiveness relative to a purpose hinges not only on the functional effectiveness of the artefact’s structure, but also on the artefact’s meaning. Meaning, not just technical function, makes implementations morally appraisable relative to a purpose. I investigate Schelling’s model of ethnic residential segregation as an example, in which different implementations amount to taking different moral stands via the artefact.
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Notes
See e.g. Edmonds and Meyer (2017) and JASSS—The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk.
These things need not be concrete objects or social structures in the external environment; they may be numbers, abstract structures, imaginary entities.
Arnold (2014), for example, contrasts the empirical usefulness of the Schelling model with the empirical uselessness of Axelrod’s reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma simulations of the evolution of cooperation. According to Arnold (2014), while the latter model has ‘remained entirely unsuccessful in terms of generating explanations for empirical instances of cooperation’ the assumptions on which the former model rests can be tested empirically. As regards the Schelling model, on Arnold's account, whether individuals have a threshold for how many neighbours of a different colour they tolerate, and whether they move to another neighbourhood if this threshold is passed, is an assumption that can be tested empirically with the usual methods of empirical social research.
See, for example, Eric W. Weisstein, ‘von Neumann Neighborhood’, from MathWorld—A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/vonNeumannNeighborhood.html.
For instance, if an individual has, at most, three neighbours and a minimum tolerance level of a third of colour-like neighbours, s/he accepts only situations in which two or more of her/his neighbours are of like colour, which corresponds to two-thirds of minimum tolerance level. If, as in Schelling’s model, there are at most eight neighbours and a minimum tolerance of one-third, the individual accepts 1 like neighbour out of 1 neighbour in all, 1 like neighbour at least out of 2 (1/2), 2/3, 2/4, 2/5, 3/6, 3/7 and 3/8. After many runs it amounts to approximately one-half of effective tolerance on a weighted average. Under this interpretation, the authors claim the model shows a linear relation between tolerance and segregation levels.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their useful comments and suggestions. This work was partially developed while the author was visiting the Department of Values, Technology and Innovation, Sections Ethics/Philosophy of Technology, at TU Delft, Netherlands. The author was partially supported by the Portuguese FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BSAB/114462/2016).
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David, N. Implementations, interpretative malleability, value-laden-ness and the moral significance of agent-based social simulations. AI & Soc 38, 1565–1577 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01304-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01304-y