Models of Identity Signaling

Identity signals inform receivers of a signaler’s membership in a subset of individuals, and in doing so shape cooperation, conflict, and social learning. Understanding the use and consequences of identity signaling is therefore critical for a complete science of collective human behavior. And, as with all complex social systems, this understanding is aided by the use of formal mathematical and computational models. Here I review some formal models of identity signaling. I divide these models into two categories. The first concerns models that assert how identity functions as a signal and test the consequences of those assertions, with a focus on public health behavior and disease transmission. The second concerns models used to understand how identity signals operate strategically in different social environments, with a focus on covert or encrypted communication.

Formal Models of International Political Economy

This chapter examines how scholars use formal models to study International Political Economy (IPE). This small, but important, body of research revolves around three substantive research questions. First, scholars have asked: how do states promote international trade by reducing tariffs and non-tariff barriers? Second, they ask: how do states encourage foreign investment by making binding pledges to protect foreign investors? Finally, scholars have studied: how do states stabilize and grow their economies? For each of these topics, the chapter looks back at past findings from formal models. It then discusses how IPE scholars can profitably move forward in their future research on these important topics.

Twentieth Century Linguistics at Closing Time

This chapter appraises the state of linguistics at the end of the twentieth century in the wake of the Generative/Interpretive Semantics episode. The period saw a huge upswing in Noam Chomsky’s influence with the dominance of his Government and Binding/Principles and Parameters model, but also the development of multiple other competing and intersecting formal models, all of which did away with Chomsky’s totemic concept, the transformation: Relational Grammar (RG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and so many more that Frederick Newmeyer tagged the lot of them Alphabet Grammars (AGs). Alongside these frameworks came George Lakoff’s most far-reaching and influential development, with philosopher, Mark Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (a label the author rejects).

The Open Society and Its Complexities

Two decades ago it was widely assumed that liberal democracy and the Open Society had won their century-long struggle against authoritarianism. Although subsequent events have shocked many, F. A. Hayek would not have been surprised that people are in many ways disoriented by the society they have created. For him, the Open Society was a precarious achievement, in many ways at odds with the deepest moral sentiments. He argued that the Open Society runs against humans’ evolved attraction to “tribalism”; that the Open Society is too complex for moral justification; and that its self-organized complexity defies attempts at democratic governance. In this wide-ranging work, Gerald Gaus re-examines Hayek’s analyses. Drawing on work in social and moral science, Gaus argues that Hayek’s program was prescient and sophisticated, always identifying real and pressing problems, though he underestimated the resources of human morality and the Open Society to cope with the challenges he perceived. Gaus marshals formal models and empirical evidence to show that the Open Society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in the distant evolutionary past, but has built upon them a complex and diverse society that requires rethinking both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance. In these fearful, angry, and inward-looking times, when political philosophy has itself become a hostile exchange between ideological camps, The Open Society and Its Complexities shows how moral and ideological diversity, far from being the enemy of a free and open society, can be its foundation.

Interactive Computation and Artificial Epistemologies

What is algorithmic thought? It is not possible to address this question without first reflecting on how the Universal Turing Machine transformed symbolic logic and brought to a halt the universality of mathematical formalism and the biocentric speciation of thought. The article draws on Sylvia Wynter’s discussion of the sociogenic principle to argue that both neurocognitive and formal models of automated cognition constitute the epistemological explanations of the origin of the human and of human sapience. Wynter’s argument will be related to Gilbert Simondon’s reflections on ‘technical mentality’ to consider how socio-techno-genic assemblages can challenge the biocentricism and the formalism of modern epistemology. This article turns to ludic logic as one possible example of techno-semiotic languages as a speculative overturning of sociogenic programming. Algorithmic rules become technique-signs coinciding not with classic formalism but with interactive localities without re-originating the universality of colonial and patriarchal cosmogony.