Why Arbitrate? Substantive versus Procedural Theories of Private Judging

Rules of thumb for judging ecological theories.

An impressive fit to historical data suggests to biologists that a given ecological model is highly valid. Models often achieve this fit at the expense of exaggerated complexity that is not justified by empirical evidence. Because overfitted theories complement the traditional assumption that ecology is 'messy', they generally remain unquestioned. Using predation theory as an example, we sugges...

Substantive and Procedural Rationality in Decisions under Uncertainty∗

We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to study systematically the substantive and procedural rationality of decision making under uncertainty. By using novel graphical representations of budget sets over bundles of state-contingent commodities, we generate a very rich data set well-suited to studying behavior at the level of the individual subject. We test the data for consistency w...

Substantive and procedural norms in normative multiagent systems

Procedural norms are instrumental norms addressed to agents playing a role in the normative system, for example to motivate these role playing agents to recognize violations or to apply sanctions. Procedural norms have first been discussed in law, where they address legal practitioners such as legislators, lawyers and policemen, but they are discussed now too in normative multiagent systems to ...

Why Theories of Change Matter

Theories of Structure versus Theories of Change

The dynamics/computation debate recalls a similar debate in the evolutionary biology community concerning the relative primacy of theories of structure versus theories of change. A full account of cognition will require a rapprochement between such theories and will include both computational and dynamical notions. The key to making computation relevant to cognition is not making it analog, but...