Normative systems in a multiagent system must be able to evolve over time, for example due to actions creating or removing norms in the system. The only formal framework to evaluate and classify normative system change methods is the so-called AGM framework of theory change, which has originally been developed as a framework to describe and classify both belief and normative system change. Howe...

This paper gives an overview of Pierre Bayle’s theory of toleration and derives a normative principle of toleration from it that is meant to compete with other normative principles of toleration such as the Harm principle. INDEX WORDS: Political philosophy, Social philosophy, toleration, religion, Christianity, justice, legitimacy, stability, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, Baruch Spinoza, Harm princ...

John Searle’s theory of social ontology posits that there are indispensable normative components in the linguistic apparatuses termed status functions, collective intentionality, and collective recognition, all of which, he argues, make the social world. In this paper, I argue that these building blocks of Searle’s social ontology are caught in a petitio of constitutive circularity. Mo...

Social norms have been shown to impact behaviors, but with mixed results. The theory of normative social behavior delineates factors that moderate the relationship between descriptive norms and behaviors, and it addresses the attributes of behaviors that make them susceptible to normative influence. This study tests whether group orientation moderates the impact of descriptive norms on water co...

This article gives an overview of a normative computational theory of visual receptive fields, by which idealized shapes of early spatial, spatio-chromatic and spatiotemporal receptive fields can be derived in an axiomatic way based on structural properties of the environment in combination with assumptions about the internal structure of a vision system to guarantee consistent handling of imag...

Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory of structuring with limits in its analysis of the market economy. These limits undermine its ability t...

Racism is a problem with many facets, and a strategy of divide and conquer is useful in making the problem more tractable. One facet, which is also a core question of contemporary social morality, concerns how we ought to handle racial categorization, by which we mean, for instance, thinking of a person as black, Korean, Latino, white, etc. While it is widely agreed that racial categorization p...