Bücher der Reihe Theory and Decision Library A:

Current environmental problems and technological risks are a challenge for a new institutional arrangement of the value spheres of Science, Politics and Morality.

This book offers a radical new theoretical approach for the understanding of communication. The theory is operationalized by the application of certain computer programs, namely Soft Computing programs like cellular automata and artificial neural nets.

These considerations, as developed by Quine, introduce us to a conceptual perspective like the "internal realist" perspective advocated by Putnam whose principal aim is, for cer tain aspects, to link the philosophical approaches developed respectively by Quine and Wittgenstein.

He also shows that certain moral theories cannot be reformulated as consequentialist theories. The relevant alternatives for an agent in a situation are taken to comprise all actions that they can perform in the situation. The problem of whether agents should adapt their actions to their own future actions is also addressed.

Develops and defends a version of utilitarianism, including expected-utility theory, as a normative model of decision-making. The work considers the endorsement of a norm as a decision and asks what reasons there are for endorsing norms for decision-making.

We have witnessed the often unhappy course of societal and political decision making concerning projects such as hazardous chemical installations, novel types of electric power plant or storage sites for solid wastes.

These problems are usually solved by resorting to some opinion aggre gating procedure, like voting. Most official decision making bodies have formally instituted procedures of voting but in informal groups such procedures are typically chosen in casu.

A new approach to explaining the existence of firms and markets, focusing on variability and coordination. This approach, called the variability approach, allows us to: show why both the need for communication and the coordination costs increase when the division of labor increases;

may be related to another basic assumption in economic psychology: that the human capacity to process information from the environment is limited, and that the kind of optimal use of that information postulated in many economic theories is therefore not possible.

To give an answer to these onerous questions we should immediately point out that cognition (as well as natural language) has to be considered first of all as a peculiar fu- tion of active biosystems and that it results from complex interactions between the - ganism and its surroundings.

To give an answer to these onerous questions we should immediately point out that cognition (as well as natural language) has to be considered first of all as a peculiar fu- tion of active biosystems and that it results from complex interactions between the - ganism and its surroundings.

This volume demonstrates that recognizing the many forms of uncertainty that enter into the development of any particular subject matter is a precondition for more responsible choice and deeper knowledge.

In that book, Den Hartogh extends Lewis' analysis of semantic norms to moral norms. The third book is a book on economics, largely ignored by economists, which only lately has started to receive some recognition among philosophers: Robert Sugden's The Economics of Rights, Co operation and Welfare.

Agent-based modelling on a computer appears to have a special role to play in the development of social science. What are the sociological concepts of norms and norm processing that could either be used for planned implementation or for identifying equivalents of social norms among co-operative agents?

Nonlinear `evolution equations' and serial stochastic matrices of evolutionary game theory allow us to optimally compute possible serial evolutionary solutions of societal conflicts.