Bøger i Theory and Decision Library serien

The first article, by John Marshall and Roger Wales (Great Britain) concerns the pragmatic values of communication, starting by considering bird-song and passing to the infinitely more complex 'meaningful' values of human language and pictures.

Decision theory as a new interdiscipline of social sciences is actually an assemblage of a variety of subtheories such as value-utility theory, game theory, collective decision theory, etc.

And in modern times, there is in some societies a struggle between those who are exploited and oppressed at the same time and those who at the same time exploit and oppress.

Behavior settings are the natural units of social activity into which people sort themselves to get on with the busi ness of daily life--grocery stores, school classes, reI i gious services, meetings, athletic events, and so on.

It followed the major breakthrough of decision theory that came with von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944. Psychologists became interested in studying how people's decision behavior agreed with what was prescribed by the theory.

The depth, intensity, and long-standing nature of the disagreements between differing schools of social thought renders more critical than ever the treatment of dialectical reasoning and its relationship to the social sciences.

For instance Amartya Sen - comparing the two current notions of rationality, internal consistency and self-interest pursuit introduces the concept of reasoning and considers the irrationality which may result from the failure of a positive correspondence between reasoning and choice or from a limited capacity of reasoning.

noting in this connection that KotarbiIiski's assumptions were proved true many years later, and that increasingly representatives of various scientific disciplines have come to observe paradigms of efficiency which had often tended to be ignored; empirical studies involving a large concentration of personnel, financial resources and equipment are now guided by the principles of efficiency and economy. In his second paper Kotarbiriski referred to Alfred Espinas, the French philosopher and sociologist, and to other authors who repre­ sented the praxiological viewpoint, together with that of the general systems approach. KotarbiIiski was the first to accept a theory more general than praxiology, which he termed the theory of complexes. He considered one of its representatives to be A. Bogdanov (1873-1928), the Marxist theorist and author of Tectology. A General Theory of Organization (first written in Russian, published in the German­ language version as Allgemeine Organizationslehre in the 1920's, and recently translated into English in Canada). KotarbiIiski also realized that he was not the only praxiologist, that even the name of the dis­ cipline had been used earlier by various authors not aware of the work of others.

Philosophy of Science deals with the problem, 'What is science?' It seems that the answer to this question can only be found if we have an answer to the question, 'How does science function?' Thus, the study of the methodology of social sciences is a prominent factor in any analysis of these sciences.

The first article, by John Marshall and Roger Wales (Great Britain) concerns the pragmatic values of communication, starting by considering bird-song and passing to the infinitely more complex 'meaningful' values of human language and pictures.

This book offers a unified treatment of my research in the foundations of expected utility theory from around 1965 to 1980. The numbers for theorems cited within a chapter have no prefix if they appear in that chapter, but otherwise carry a chapter prefix (Theorem 3.2 is Theorem 2 in Chapter 3).

In the last decade, geographers significantly -augmented their methodologi cal base by developing quantitative techniques which are specifically directed towards analysis of explicitly spatial problems.

In the last decade, geographers significantly -augmented their methodologi cal base by developing quantitative techniques which are specifically directed towards analysis of explicitly spatial problems.

Under the title 'Information, Inference and Decision' this volume in the Theory and Decision Library presents some papers on issues from the borderland of statistical inference philosophy and epistemology, written by statisticians and decision theorists who belonged or are allied to the former Saarbriicken school of statistical decision theory.

The papers in this volume consist of the invited lectures delivered at the Conference, Section 7: Non-Classical Logics and Modelling, as well as some selected papers which offer an introduction to the philosophy, methodology and to the lite rature of the broad and fascinating field of vagueness, imprecision and uncertainty.

Philosophy of Science deals with the problem, 'What is science?' It seems that the answer to this question can only be found if we have an answer to the question, 'How does science function?' Thus, the study of the methodology of social sciences is a prominent factor in any analysis of these sciences.

The theory of games, properly understood, is a very broad approach to social interaction based on individually rational behavior, and it connects closely with fundamental methodological and substantive issues in social science and in ethics.

Decision theory as a new interdiscipline of social sciences is actually an assemblage of a variety of subtheories such as value-utility theory, game theory, collective decision theory, etc.

Proceedings of a Conference Organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria, July 3-5, 1974

In spite of the seeming heterogeneity of topics in its title - Revolutions, Systems, and Theories - this volume purports to be something more than a random collection of Essays in Political Philosophy. The Colloquium of the Philosophy Department of the University of Western Ontario (29-31 Octo­ ber, 1971) at which initial versions of the first eight papers were delivered was entitled 'Political Theory'; and while the organizers anticipated and indeed welcomed topicality in the issues accorded priority arid in the empirical evidence invoked, they were also hoping for a reasonably comprehensive explorat ion of some of the central issues of political philosophy. For this reason it was quickly decided that in such a field a philosophical focus on clarification of ordering concepts required the suppIement - and test - of researches into more particular subject maUers by social scientists. Thus, to speak in general terms (where the specializatlons and their taxonomies multi­ ply fissiparously!), contributors include political scientists, economists and sociologists (Barnard, Baston, Tullock, Rapoport) as well as philosophers (Scriven, Morgenbesser, Braybrooke, TayIor), and juxtaposed as proponents and commentators ·to generate exchanges across disciplinary frontiers. While the five additional invited papers are alI by professional philosophers, they extend the original Colloquium either by continuing controversy on its funda­ mental issues (e. g. , Rubinoff, Nielsen, Roy) or by their continued explorations in what are acknowledged to be boundary areas (e. g. , Schick, Wartofsky). The greatest topical emphasis is that on revolution.

This book is devoted to the problems of stochastic (or probabilistic) programming. In the conclusion of the chapter consideration is given to: the transport problem with random data, the problem of the determination of production volume, and the problem of planning the flights of aircraft as two-stage stochastic programming problems.

Our interest in problems of aggregation originates from about seven years ago when we became involved in research in the field of applied microeconomics. one abstains from aggregation to avoid loss of information, to avoid aggregation biases and one aggregates such and to such degree as to bypass or reduce the drawbacks mentioned above.

Proceedings of the Fifth Research Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making, Darmstadt 1975

Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Research Conference, Rome, September 3-6, 1973

The present volume helps to understand how the collection of miscellaneous disciplines, called the science of science, came into being. To be sure, theory of knowledge is not to be identified with theory of science. What we call today the science of science is not concerned with, say, the Kantian question how synthetic a priori truths are possible.

The reality around us constantly demonstrates physical and social processes in which the interests of the participants are not diametrically opposed, though they by no means always coincide.

This book reports our research on detection of change processes that underlie psychophysical, learning, medical diagnosis, military, and pro duction control situations, and share three major features.