Book Description
Now in Paperback
"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination in general education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and the social and multicultural context.... The author argues for schools to be restructured as places where students reach out for meanings and where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. She invites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate their own visions through the application of imagination and the arts. Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for all educators, particularly those in teacher education, and for general and academic readers."
--Choice
"Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essays presented here."
--American Journal of Education
Customer Reviews:
Pedagogically provoking but also repetitive.......2007-08-23
This was a required text for a literacy studies graduate class. The context was pedagogically provoking along the threads of progressive modern education standards that are taught to budding teachers. Some repetition was present as it is a lengthy text with a primary focus and one author. My classmates and I were a bit disappointed with the lack of example and proposals for the curriculum/pedagogy changes being presented. This is a text to be read for establishing perspective not for quick tips or golden ticket ideas.
One of the most important books I've ever read.......2004-01-08
Maxine Greene defends the role of the arts as social medicine and advancement. She brilliantly argues for maintaining art in curriculum. Art often requires of us to imagine things which do not exist in reality. This excercise is vital in creating social change. In order to create a new and better world, we must first imagine it. We must encourage our children (and adults for that matter) to imagine. That's the first step and I feel society becoming less imaginative and more homogenized. PLEASE READ THIS BOOK!!! AND BUY A COPY FOR A TEACHER.
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Uncertainty, Information and Communication: Essays in Honor of Kenneth J. Arrow, Volume III
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Book Description
Professor Kenneth J. Arrow is one of the most distinguished economic theorists. He has played a major role in shaping the present state of the subject and now is to be honored by the publication of three volumes of essays on economic theory. Each volume deals with a different area of economic theory. The books include contributions by some of the best economic theorists from the United Stated, Japan, Israel and Europe. This third volume is entitled Uncertainty, information, and communication.
Book Description
Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose.
Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life.
While there are many books on standard game theory that address the way ideally rational actors operate, Behavioral Game Theory stands alone in blending experimental evidence and psychology in a mathematical theory of normal strategic behavior. It is must reading for anyone who seeks a more complete understanding of strategic thinking, from professional economists to scholars and students of economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, and biology.
Book Description
In this provocative book, Paul Glimcher argues that economic theory may provide an alternative to the classical Cartesian model of the brain and behavior. Glimcher argues that Cartesian dualism operates from the false premise that the reflex is able to describe behavior in the real world that animals inhabit. A mathematically rich cognitive theory, he claims, could solve the most difficult problems that any environment could present, eliminating the need for dualism by eliminating the need for a reflex theory. Such a mathematically rigorous description of the neural processes that connect sensation and action, he explains, will have its roots in microeconomic theory. Economic theory allows physiologists to define both the optimal course of action that an animal might select and a mathematical route by which that optimal solution can be derived. Glimcher outlines what an economics-based cognitive model might look like and how one would begin to test it empirically. Along the way, he presents a fascinating history of neuroscience. He also discusses related questions about determinism, free will, and the stochastic nature of complex behavior.
Customer Reviews:
book on history of neurscoence from a neuroscientist.......2007-06-04
Great book about history of neuroscience from Descartes to the present and where it moves next. Ideas are clearly expressed and convincing evidence is presented. Somewhat populist, though, but interesting to read. Good for beginners in neuroscience like myself.
Groundbreaking thesis.......2007-02-03
This book is much more than its title. It provides a fascinating history of neurobiology and probability/game theory, leading up to the thesis that the brain is a Bayesian probability calculator and game-theoretic randomizer.
The Bayesian part refers to the ability of the brain to combine current incoming sensory data with current priors to estimate probabilities relevant to current decision-making. The game-theoretic randomizer part refers to the fact that to succeed in the evolutionary game, an animal, say a caveman, needs to act somewhat unpredictably so as not to be eaten by a predator. If the caveman were totally predicable in his/her actions, then an evolutionary adversary could predict what he/she was going to do, and use that information to defeat him or her. This is consistent with optimal strategies which are derived through game theory a la von Neumann.
The science is not certain how the brain accomplishes this (yet); however, it appears to be through parts of the brain continually estimating likelihoods, with thresholds that, when exceeded, result in actions on the part of the individual.
I am very happy that I saw this book in the MIT Press display at the ASSA conferences this January, and that it had a cool-looking illustration on the cover, or I probably wouldn't have bought it. I highly recommend it.
In the interest of completness, I should mention some of the things I didn't like so much. First of all, I wish that Glimcher had mentioned the research of DaMasio, who wrote a fascinating book named "DeCarte's Error". In that book DeMasio presents a thesis that emotions pay a key role in decision-making. As pointed out by other reviewers, Glimcher doesn't even mention this line of research. Secondly, the book was a bit dry and academic in tone from time to time, but that is a small complaint given how interesting the content was.
A good start.......2006-12-26
Neuroeconomics is a relatively new field but one that shows great promise in providing insight into how the human brain makes financial decisions and to what degree human behavior is determined by the environment. It could give answers as to what motivates people to acquire wealth in spite of not having enough time to enjoy this wealth and shed light on why some people are risk adverse while others are not. If neuroeconomics is to be a successful theory it must of course deal with what is real and observable, and not engage in fanciful, philosophical speculation. This is another way of saying that it must be scientific in its methodologies, however difficult this might become. To perform real-time experiments in economics is extremely difficult, and this difficulty is exacerbated by the need to integrate what is observed in the everyday life with what is observed in laboratory experiments on the brain that are performed with the assistance of fMRI and other brain-scanning techniques. This book is an effort to introduce the field of neuroeconomics as a counter to what the author calls the `classical Cartesian paradigm' and its arbitrary classification of behaviors into `simple' and `complex'. The simple behaviors are essentially deterministic and are now called `reflexes.' Complex behaviors, on the other hand, are the result of processes that occur in the `soul', and have no discernable relation between cause and effect. These processes are called `cognitive mechanisms" by some and their scientific viability has been cast in doubt.
The book should not be considered one that attempts to establish the field of neuroeconomics as a scientific one. Instead, the author wants to define cognitive mechanisms in the same way as that done in the field of economics. Only then can they be referred to as scientific, argues the author, and he further asserts that the use of reflexes itself is not scientifically viable. It is therefore the Cartesian paradigm of dualism that the author argues against, and neuroeconomics plays on a minor role in his case. Readers may therefore be disappointed if they are expecting a more thorough discussion of neuroeconomics. Indeed, it is only in the last two chapters of the book that the author gets down to analyzing the neural correlates of economic decision-making.
In these chapters the author discusses experiments that he and a collaborator performed that point to the parietal cortex as being the part of the brain that is responsible for decision-making. It is interesting that for animals at least, game theory is thought to be the best computational model for indeterminate decision-making. Bayesian probability theory plays a role in these computational models, and work from ecological biologists is quoted as supporting the notion that models based on economics are needed to describe the decision-making processes of animals as they encounter situations where fitness must be maximized. The author gives examples of how neuroeconomic strategies can be employed in practice, but he is also aware of the enormity of the problem of building a complete neuroeconomic theory of the brain, a task requiring large amounts of empirical data and an understanding of how individual behaviors have their origins in computational processes that occur in various neural modules in the brain.
Mind-altering book about the mind.......2005-12-05
This is undoubtedly one of the most important conceptual books on the brain I have read in the past decade. Irrespective of how one feels about the author's ideas, familiarity with them is already a prerequisite for any serious philosophical debate about the structure of the mind and free will. This small book with a somewhat awkward title could have been easily called "New Ideas on the Brain and the Mind". It is not another popular book on the brain. It introduces a radically new approach to the brain, but does it so smoothly that stylistically the book reads like Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species". After you close the last page and look up, you know something has changed.
As with all great insights, the idea the author proposes is deceptively simple. Here is how I'd state it (my apologies for possible distortions):
The anatomy and physiology of the brain have been designed by evolution to look for optimal solutions. The brain appears sloppy, but it is a remarkably precise machine specifically designed to deal with an environment whose true state can never be known precisely. Some optimal solutions will be deterministic, but many optimal solutions will require a truly random behavior. That's it.
This can be shown mathematically (in probability theory and game theory), by observing actual animal behavior (in behavioral ecology), and by studying the brain (in experiments done by Dr. Glimcher and others). Now the mind-body dualism can survive only if it no longer hinges on nondeterministic vs. deterministic behavior. My decision to work or shirk has no longer anything to do with free will - I'm unconsciously randomizing my actions based on the optimal probabilistic strategy that a mathematician can compute. The soul and free will may well continue to exist (I recommend W. James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience" as a relevant reading), but they certainly have to explain themselves better. Simple unpredictability will no longer do.
The book has a remarkable, perhaps even unique, review of how our ideas about the brain have come to be what they are and how they have been influenced by the development of mathematics. These chapters can be used in many courses virtually independently of the rest of the book.
1. I suspect that the author's explanation of Bayes's theorem (p. 194-197) will be obscure to people who are not already familiar with it. I'd write it in the symmetric form, P(A|B)P(B) = P(B|A)P(A), and would use a simple, more natural example.
2. The book should have mentioned "Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code" (ed. F. Rieke and others), another very important book, after which sensory perception can no longer be viewed the same. While Dr. Glimcher's approach is based on Bayes's theorem and game theory, "Spikes" approaches perception by using Bayes's theorem and information theory. It will be every interesting to watch probability theory, game theory, and information theory mutate and merge into one mathematical theory of the brain (which so far does not exist; see my review of "The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks").
3. I was left wondering how stochastic differential equations (SDEs), widely used in economics, might be used to understand the brain. It is a little odd that the author has not even mentioned them, especially because they may help us model how a Nash equilibrium is reached by the brain. Without understanding the dynamics of this process and its implementation in the brain, this new approach will fail (as the author is acutely aware).
4. Frankly, I don't find the described experiments to be particularly convincing, but these experiments are very, very difficult to do, and very few people are doing them.
5. The author could have mentioned an interesting biography of Rene Descartes by R.A. Watson ("Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes"). This biography is a bit strange, but still useful.
All in all, Paul Glimcher has written a superb book. This truly new conceptual approach will change our views on why we sometimes sit down and feel compelled to write such long reviews.
Uncertainty is the Law of Probabilities in Perception.......2005-04-19
Glimcher looks carefully at a paper by Shadlen & Newsome on MT neurons in behavioral paradigms. The concept of Neuroeconomics as developed in the book Behavioral Game Theory by Colin Camerer is developed somewhat by Glimcher, but I think he realizes we are at the beginning of the role of uncertainty and probability in brain function. Certainly digital EEGs and brain waves show randomness, even though Llinas and others claim that 40 Hz. is the frequency of binding. I think there are going to be other binding frequencies as well. Multielectrode arrays will allow us to look not only at frequency maps, but spatial, color, and other probability maps through redundancy and repetition of brain symbols in adjacent microanatomical regions of the brain, like in V1 in the primate. Glimcher begins his glorious ride and tour through Neuroscience by describing its History: DesCartes, John Stuart Mill, Sherrington, and so on. This book is written for the specialist and the novice; the writing style is simple and lucid. Paul models probabilistically LIP neurons by looking at receptive field paradigms. Near the end of the book, Glimcher ties everything together in a cohesive theory of Neuroeconomics. This will prove to be a valid and interesting approach to neurophysiological function. Another book to look at exploring similar issues is Probabilistic Models of the Brain by Rao.
Book Description
What should be done about airplane safety and terrorism, global warming, polluted water, nuclear power, and genetically engineered food? Decision-makers often respond to temporary fears, and the result is a situation of hysteria and neglect--and unnecessary illness and death. Risk and Reason explains the sources of these problems and explores what can be done about them. It shows how individual thinking and social interactions lead us in foolish directions. Offering sound proposals for social reform, it explains how a more sensible system of risk regulation, embodied in the idea of a "cost-benefit state," could save many thousands of lives and many billions of dollars too--and protect the environment in the process. Cass R. Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Appointed by President Clinton to serve on the Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Television Broadcasters. His many books include Republic.com (Princeton, 2001) and Designing Democracy (Oxford, 2001). He has worked in the United States Department of Justice and advised on law reform and constitution-making in many nations.
Customer Reviews:
A short review of 'Risk and Reason'.......2004-08-08
It is sometimes referred to as "emotional decision making", when after accidents which cause loss of life, government authorities decide to spend irrational huge budgets to try to prevent these accidental risks from happening again. This 2002-book of Prof. Sunstein from the U of Chicago explains the sources of such irrational behaviour and comes up with novel ideas what can be done about it. This book contains a great deal of new material, but it also draws on Sunstein's publications in the J of Risk and Uncertainty, Stan L Rev., and his 2001-book 'The cost-benefit state', amongst others.
The book gives the reader a lot of recent case studies, such as the sniper murders in the Washington DC area in fall 2002, the SARS epidemic, the Love Canal controversy in the 80s, as illustrations of people's unjustified fear, which in the same time neglects the real hazards, such as obesity, indoor air pollution, sun exposure, etc.
Risk and Reason advocates the government to produce cost benefit analyses (CBA) before choosing an emotional course of action. Sunstein argues in his book to see CBA as a pragmatic tool, designed to promote a better appreciation of the consequences of a certain regulation, rather than a form of unethical, barely human calculation, treating health and life as variables for some kind of huge maximising objective function. The author succeeds in delivering this message to the reader very well.
Sunstein urges toward four alternative strategies in optimal cost-saving risk regulation: disclosure of information to the public, economic incentives, risk reduction contracts and free market environmentalism. With the economic incentives he means financial penalties for harm producing behaviour, and tradable emission rights (similar as the Kyoto protocol is designed to reduce global warming. The alleged fact that risk creators might be given a right to create harm is shown to be false.
Political.......2003-08-14
Sunstein is a lawyer. He is neither a scientist nor an economist. His advocacy of (what he calls) "rational" and "scientific" models of risk evaluation appears to be motivated by politics, not good science or economics. Be wary of his methodology and his rigor.
Insights Into Rational Risk Management for IT Professionals.......2003-01-18
While this book focuses on government regulation of health and environmental risks (regulation is government-speak for risk management), IT risk managers can learn a lot about IT risk management from the book. For example, Chapter Three is entitled "Are Experts Wrong?", which will tell you why you need to be cautious about adopting "Best Practices." Chapter Five is entitled "Reducing Risks Rationally," just what every risk manager should be striving to do. Sunstein makes a very convincing case for the value of cost benefit analysis in managing risks. If you are responsible for risk management, get this book and read it.
Huge Helping of Reason, Needs Salt.......2002-12-02
The bottom line on this book is clear: our governance of risk to the public tends to be managed by political gut reaction rather than informed investigation; there is no clear doctrine for studying and articulating risk (for example, distinguishing between high risks to a few and low but sustained risks to the many, or between three levels of cost-benefit analysis so that choices can be made); and the best form of risk management may be through the effective communication of risk information to the public rather than imposed costs on private sector enterprises.
As reasoned as the book is, it also constitutes a direct attack on all those who expouse the "precautionary principle." While I do not agree completely with the author, who seems to feel that rational study allows for the discounting of any risk to the point where it can be economically and politically managed at an affordable cost, he certainly take the debate to an entirely new level and his book is--quite literally--worth tens of billions of dollars in potential regulatory risk savings.
Most compelling is his methodical aggregation of data from several sources to show that the cost of saving one life (he notes that we fail to distinguish adequately between a life saved for a few years and a life saved for many years, or between young lives saved for a lifetime and old lives saved for a brief span of time). Table 2.1 on page 30 is quite astonishing--of 45 major regulated risks, one (drinking water) costs over $92 billion per premature death averted; eight including asbestos cost between $50 million and $4 billion; seven including arsenic and copper cost between $13 million and $45 million; 14 including various electrical standards cost between $1 million and $10 million per death averted; and 15 cost less than $1 million per death averted.
What cost human life? Even on this there is no standard, and even within a single regulatory agency (e.g. the Environmental Protection Agency) there are different calculations used in relation to different risks being regulated. The author does a really fine job of comparing the public perception of the value of a life saved ($1.3 million for automobile-related risks, $103 million for aviation-related risks) with the values used by the government and the courts, which vary widely (into the billions) but seem to hover between $10 million and $30 million per life saved and without regard the the number of life-years actually involved.
The heart of the book is in its conclusion, where the author proposes a four-part strategy for dramatically reducing the cost of regulatory risk management, suggesting that we focus on 1) disclosure of information to the public; 2) economic incentives; 3) risk reduction contracts; and 4) free market environmentalism. With respect to the latter, he is strongly supportive of allowing the "sale" of pollution privileges between nations and industries and companies.
For additional observations on reducing risk to the future of life see my reviews of Joe Thorton on "Pandora's Poison," Raffensperger and Tickner on "Protecting Public Health & The Environment," Novacek on "The Biodiversity Crisis," Czech on "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train," Lomberg on "The Skeptical Environmentalist," Helvarg on "Blue Frontier," and Wilson's "The Future of Life."
Cass Sunstein and Lawrence Lessig join Jerry Berman and Marc Rotenberg and Mike Godwin as America's "top guns" in responsible law-making. This book makes a great deal of sense, is worth a great deal of money, and should guide the future evolution of regulatory and information-driven risk management.
Book Description
In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning.
This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for decision making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more order and coherence on the idea of bounded rationality. The contributors view bounded rationality neither as optimization under constraints nor as the study of people?s reasoning fallacies. The strategies in the adaptive toolbox dispense with optimization and, for the most part, with calculations of probabilities and utilities. The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions; it analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools as rational strategies; and it shows how smart heuristics can exploit the structure of environments.
Customer Reviews:
Human Rationality and Evolution.......2006-08-13
This edited volume is an important addition to the work on human decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, in which people use "rules of thumb" to produce cost-effective decisions that are not strictly "rational." From the psychological literature, the work of Kahneman and Tversky is well know (and has been rewarded with international recognition). However, they do not explicitly link such behavior (often referred to as "heuristics") to evolution and biology. And they tend to define these "rules of thumb" as rather poor guides to decision making.
The essays in this edited volume provide a different--and more optimistic picture--of such heuristics. The contributors provide evidence and logic to suggest that evolution has led to the development of decision making shortcuts that "work" reasonably well.
One can disagree with certain aspects of this work (they may be a bit harsh on Kahneman and Tversky and their peers; they may be overly optimistic about some of the heuristics that they mention). Nonetheless, this work is a wonderful introduction to a literature on how humans actually think and decide--rather than relying on abstract conceptualizations often prevalent in the social sciences, including the simplistic "rational choice" theory ascendant in several social science disciplines. This book represents a welcome corrective to such perspectives.
State of the Art on Behavioral Choice Theory.......2001-09-20
Suppose we wanted to predict how an expert billiards player would hit a certain shot. We would measure the angles and distances, get the coefficients of elasticity of the balls and the bumpers, and we would solve a set of differential equations. But is that how the billiards player figures out what to do? Of course not! We don't know exactly what he would do, but if the authors of this book had their way, we'd give up on the differential equations (optimization theory) and find the "fast and frugal heuristic" actually used by the billiards player.
This book is the product of a conference of experts in the field. It includes wonderful contributions by the editors and their coworkers on how decisions are actually made, and argues persuasively that fast and frugal is almost as good as full optimization, and at much lower cost.
But the volume is a lot broader than that. It includes contributions on the role of emotions in decision-making (Dan Fessler), learning in animal societies (Keven Laland) and social insects (Thomas Seeley), and a lot of material on the role of culture in human societies (Boyd, Richerson, McCabe, Smith, Henrich, and others). This is important new material, very up to date.
Gigerenzter and Selten go to great lengths to cast aspersions on the old-fashioned "optimization subject to constraints" perspective, but their arguments are not persuasive. They make a category error: they maintain that models that use optimization assume that the agents the models describe use optimization. This is just silly. Just as the billiards player does not solve differential equations, decision-makers do not do complete optimization, even though we may use such models to describe their behavior.
The editors believe that optimization subject to constraints is dead in behavioral theory, but they're dead wrong. That's in fact what they are doing, but they prefer to call it "bounded rationality."
Finally, I should note that the work of Eduardo Zambrano (look up his home page) shows that the SEU (Subjective Expected Utility model---the enemy of all bounded rationalers) actually is behaviorally universal, in the sense that one can always find a set of Bayesian priors for which an observed set of behaviors is optimal.
But don't let these petty methodological issues get you down. The book is a great collection by the authors of major work in behavioral theory.
Book Description
This exciting volume marks the birth of a new field--a field that studies law with reference to an accurate, rather than a crude, understanding of human behavior. Behavioral Law and Economics presents new findings in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, which show that people are frequently both unselfish and over-optimistic; that people have limited willpower and limited self-control; and that people are "boundedly" rational, in the sense that they have limited information-processing powers, and frequently rely on mental short-cuts and rules of thumb. Understanding this kind of human behavior has large-scale implications for the analysis of law, in areas including environmental protection, taxation and tax compliance, constitutional law, voting behavior, punitive damages for civil rights violations, labor negotiations and strikes, and corporate finance. Behavioral Law and Economics offers many new insights into these fields and suggestions for legal reform. With a better knowledge of human behavior, it is possible to predict the actual effects of law, to see how law might actually promote society's goals, and to reassess the questions of what law should be doing.
Customer Reviews:
Behavioral Economics Comes of Age.......2001-08-24
There are several prominent legal scholars who work in the interface of social theory and law, but Cass Sunstein is, to my mind, one of the very few really innovative thinkers with full control of social theory. This edited collection shows that the approach he has been working on for the past several years, has finally come of age.
The first synthesis of law and economics took place several decades ago, based on the seminal work of Nobel prize winning Chicago economist Ronald Coase. The synthesis was based on the so-called "rational actor model" (often called homo Economicus) that can be derived from certain axiomatic, mathematics-like principles, based on the notion of self-interest and utility maximization. This was a major breakthrough in social theory and policy.
But the "rational actor model" has been shown to be systematically violated by real human beings, and behavioral economics arose to ammend the "rational actor model" to fit the reality. It's not that people are irrational, but rather the concept of rationality used in the traditional theory is seriously wanting. If you're interested in this larger backdrop to the present book, there is a marvelous new book on the subject edited by its creators, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, called "Choices, Values, and Frames."
The introductory chapters of Behavioral Law and Economics are refreshingly clear and free of jargon. These are followed by some of the most important articles that have been written on the topic over the past several years.
Behavioral law and economics is not just some academic field. It is absolutely, front and center, critical to political philosophy and the policy sciences in general. This book is for both expert and layperson alike---a real tour de force.
Book Description
In this clearly reasoned defense of Bayes's Theorem — that probability can be used to reasonably justify scientific theories — Colin Howson and Peter Urbach examine the way in which scientists appeal to probability arguments, and demonstrate that the classical approach to statistical inference is full of flaws. Arguing the case for the Bayesian method with little more than basic algebra, the authors show that it avoids the difficulties of the classical system. The book also refutes the major criticisms leveled against Bayesian logic, especially that it is too subjective. This newly updated edition of this classic textbook is also suitable for college courses.
Customer Reviews:
NOT for beginners.......2007-09-05
First off, there are way too many errors in this book, even for a first addition. There are numerous grammatical errors, missing punctuation and notation, etc.
DO NOT expect to learn probability theory from this book - the explanations are poorly written.
Perhaps this would be a good book for someone who is well-versed in probability theory and wanted to know more about Bayesian reasoning.
An absolute "must-read" for all scientists and students of science.......2006-07-09
Now in its third edition, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach, is a basic introduction to the philosophy that scientific reasoning is, and should be, conducted in accordance with the axioms of probability. Called the Bayesian view, after a theorem first proven by Thomas Bayes in the late eighteenth century, has recently gained increased standing as a valuable methodology for examining scientific evidence. Scientific Reasoning explains the elements of probability calculus that are relevant to Bayesian methods and argues that probability calculus should be understood as a form of logic. Accessibly written, even to readers who understand only the basics of probability or calculus, Scientific Reasoning is a solid explanation of how Bayesian theory offers a unified and highly satisfactory accounting of scientific procedure, and is an absolute "must-read" for all scientists and students of science.
just a philosophy book for beginners.......2005-09-22
[1] Both authors are philosophers, not mathematicians.
[2] If you are interested in the philosophy of Bayesianism, Probability Theory : The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes is definitely better.
[3] The knowledge required for reading this book is almost nothing, so it is useful to complete beginners of probability theory.
[4] Good Bayesian guys are always good philosophers and skilled at traditional theories. So what? Read the books written by good Bayesian mathematicians.
[5] The title is awesome, but the content is not commensurate.
Just shy of being great...........2004-10-21
This book contains lots of useful information for the budding Baysian. Excellent discussions on many topics. However, I have to give this only 3 stars, because on a cardinal point, the authors give very bad advice: they give the impression that Komogorov complexity-based methods are ill motivated. In fact, Kolmogorov complexity is one of the most fruitful new developments in Baysianism, and I have personally used it many times in industrial settings to solve otherwise intractible problems.
However, on most points the book is very useful. I recommend buying the first edition over the second, because the second edition doesn't really add that much useful info over the first. I also recommend buying in addition to this book Ming Li and Paul Vianyi's book on Kolmogorov complexity, for a comprehensive intro to a whole wonderland of Baysianism which Howson & Urbach have overlooked.
An unexpected and unusual gem.......2002-08-01
This book is a little-known treasure in the philosophy of science that deserves a spot alongside the better known works of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend, and is more practical than most of those. Herein lies the clearest, simplest, and most persuasive discussion I've ever seen on the limits of Karl Popper's view of science, along with a sound introduction to the Bayesian probability theory requiring no more than high school algebra and a little persistence.
Much of this book will strike students of classical probability theory and philosophy of science as very counter-intuitive at first, but it is so well argued and so clear that I think most readers will begin to warm up to the Bayesian view at least to some degree by the time they finish the book.
The book starts out introducing one version of the traditional "problem of induction": 'how can we be certain of a rule inferred from finite individual observations ?' We then quickly discover why the usual solutions offered don't quite work in actual theory construction in practice. Mainly, the usual solutions (generally based on the disconfirmation of hypotheses) don't address the way _auxilliary_ hypotheses help theories escape refutation, and how webs of evidence of different kinds often converge to help confirm theories.
It has been generally accepted by modern philosophers of science that useful scientific theories go well beyond the experimental data. Hence they can technically not be "proven" in a logical sense, only considered increasingly more likely as their testable predictions are validated.
The Bayesian view is not based so much on a negative attitude toward objective confirmation of theories, as on the observation that classical methods which are the guardians of total objectivity, in fact violate that ideal constantly and in arbitrary ways. The most objective methods, such as those of Fisher and Neyman and Pearson are credibly claimed to rely on personal judgement of likelihood at key points, rather than being the objective logical consequences generally assumed of them.
The Bayesian view starts off acknowledging that subjective assessment of likelihood is an important part of theory selection and construction, and makes it part of the philosophy of science. The central point is that we have degrees of belief in theories, and that these degrees of belief adhere to probability calculus.
The power of scientific reasoning then results not from some elusive objective logic of discovery but because our innate inference abilities lead observation of evidence to beliefs that follow probability calculus, and hence our sense of increasing credibility tends to reflect greater likelihood of a theory making accurate predictions. Although our inferences are not consistently Bayesian by any means, our own intuitions about what represents *correct* inductive reasoning _are_ Bayesian in nature. So when we take pains to correct our inferences based on our own standards of tenability, our subjective assessments lead us to increasingly better theories.
Our beliefs can be measured as probabilities, and probabilities can be used to confirm theories. Among other things, the Bayesian view uniquely predicts, in contrast to the classical view of Popper and statistician Fisher, that novel observations should have and do have special importance in theory construction. The authors not only introduce probability calculus in simple algebraic terms and discuss its application to philosophy of science, but they also devote considerable time to exploring specific weaknesses of alternate views, and considerable time persuasively addressing the strongest criticisms of the Bayesian approach, such as that it is "too subjective." But the Bayesian philosophy of science is actually built on a powerful theory of inference and is itself "unimpeachably objective" because of its strict rules of consistency, even though its subject matter is subjective degrees of belief.
If you've ever wondered exactly what the Bayesian approach to probability is, and what it is supposed to offer science, or you've ever been dissatisfied with the traditional answers to the problem of induction, this book will be your welcome friend for a number of evenings. It combines mathematical elegance and deftness with simple philosophical wisdom and deals convincingly with the controversial nature of its claims.
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- The most important impartial history of gambling
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Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of some Human Decisions
Reuven Brenner , and
Gabrielle A. Brenner
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0521381800 |
Book Description
Gambling and Speculation takes the long, historic perspective of its controversial subject. The book offers not only a better understanding of the recent "gambling craze," but also a fundamental inquiry into human nature and the structure of societies. The Brenners argue that the negative image of gamblers and of speculators stems from prejudice, whose roots are in the distant, forgotten past. Legal scholars have frequently confused gambling with speculation and the anti-gambling laws were, at times, erroneously interpreted as implying the prohibitions of contracts in futures and insurance markets. One consequence of all this confusion was that during this century both in the United States and England, the legislation and law on betting and gambling became ambiguous. The authors touch on this issue and make policy recommendations: to abolish restrictions on the industry, diminish the states' role in selling lotteries, and, at the same time, make legal distinctions capable of helping the tiny percentage of players who might be "addicted." The Brenners' recommendations on gambling are based on their conclusion that gamblers are neither "mentally ill" nor "criminals" and that gambling does not lead its practitioners to poverty. Rather, it is the other way around: some of the poor and the frustrated gamble. Looking at gambling in this way leads to questions about the nature of society: What do the fortunate do for those who are not? What is society's obligation to people who fall behind in the game of life? Answers to these questions require a discussion on the principles of equality, capitalism, the role of religious influence on society, topics that the Brenners have discussed in their previous studies, and they do so here too, putting gambling within its proper, historical context.
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The most important impartial history of gambling.......2006-07-27
It's hard to learn about gambling because different ideological camps define the subject differently and therefore talk past each other. People with moral objections to gambling usually ignore risk-taking in business and life, economists tend to focus on the probability and utility theory underlying a single bet rather than the broader social and economic context, and pro-gambling works often ignore basic mathematical and economic theory. This book is a rare exception in that it covers all kinds of risk taking without prejudice, and it is grounded in solid history and theory. This book defines the context in which gambling should be discussed, and presents a powerful opening statement.
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Functional Models of Cognition: Self-Organizing Dynamics and Semantic Structures in Cognitive Systems (THEORY AND DECISION LIBRARY: Series A}
Manufacturer: Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0792360729 |
Book Description
What function is played by concepts related to meaning and mereology in the cognitive sciences? How can one outline adequate simulation models for the continuous emergence of new categorization forms characterizing cognitive processes? To what extent is it possible to define new measures of meaningful complexity? How is it possible to describe synergetically the symbolic dynamics inherent in cognitive processes? What types of formal models should we use to describe the evolutionary aspects of cognition? These, the most difficult questions in cognitive science, are discussed here in 15 original essays written by distinguished scholars drawn from a variety of disciplines.
The first part presents an up-to-date account of some current trends in the functional modeling of cognitive activities, the synergetic models in particular are widely discussed. The second part focuses on recent advances in complexity theory, self-organizing networks, the theory of self- reference, and the theory of self organization. The third part focuses on some methods of formal analysis that can be used to delineate consistent simulation models of cognitive activities at the perceptual, linguistic and computational levels. The volume also highlights traditional philosophical concerns about realism, the cognitivism-connectionism debate, and the role of holistic assumptions.
Readership: psychologists, cognitive scientists, theorists working in complexity theory, self-organization theory, synergetics, semantics of natural language and mereology, philosophers, epistemologists.
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