Individual Research Initiatives – Permanent Members

Luc Bovens

Research activities

1. Moral Psychology: Forgiveness and Apologies
2. Philosophy and Public Policy: Libertarian Paternalism
3. Bayesian Epistemology: Sleeping Beauty, Judy Benjamin Problem, Strategic Voting, Analysis of 2-by-2 Contingency Tables, Doubly Symmetric Games

Individual Projects

My work on the Sleeping Beauty and the Judy Benjamin Problem was inspired by a joint conference of Groningen-LSE. 

Publications 2008-09

1. 'The Ethics of Nudge', Forthcoming in Till Grüne-Yanoff and S.O. Hansson (2008) Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology, Berlin and New York: Springer, Theory and Decision Library A
2. 'The Puzzle of the Hats', Forthcoming in Synthese (with Wlodek Rabinowicz)
3. 'Measuring Voting Power for Dependent Voters through Causal Models', Forthcoming in Texts in Logic and Games covering LOFT8 (with Claus Beisbart)
4. 'Must I Be Forgiven?', Analysis (forthcoming, 2008)
5. 'Apologies', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, (2008), 108 219-39.
6. 'A Power Measure Analysis of Amendment 36 in Colorado', Public Choice, 134 (3-4) (2008), pp. 231-46. (with Claus Beisbart)

Rom Harré

Presentations, Workshops etc.

1. 'Vygotsky's developmental psychology' Vygotsky Conference, Institute of Education, London University.
2. 'Critical Realism and the Discursive Turn' Annual Critical Realism Conference, King's College, London.
3. 'Discursive Psychology Workshop', KCC Leadership Progam, Royal Holloway College, London.
4. 'Why "Psychoneurology" is preferable to "Neuropsychology"', Philosophy of Psychiatry Conference, Royal College of Psychiatry, London.
5. Barriers and Constraints on the Spread of Knowledge: The paradox of the Lingua Franca'. Technology and Education Conference, Huntsville AL.
6. 'Thinking with Models', MS3 Models Conference, Charlottesville, VA.
7. 'Iconic Models' Workshop Session, Center for Complexity Analysis, Arlington VA.
8. 'Mice are little people too! Moral Problems of the Living Laboratory'. Reynolds Lecture, Elon University, Raleigh, NC. 

Publications 2008-09

1. Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. 'Recent advances in Positioning Theory' Theory and Psychology, 19/1 5-32. With F. M. Moghaddam et al.
3. 'The complexity of Wittgenstein's method' Philosophy 83 1 - 11.  
4. 'Grammatical therapy and the third Wittgenstein' Metaphilosophy 39/4 484-491.
5. 'Saving Critical Realism' Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 39/1 1-15.
6. 'The transcendental domain of physics'. In M. Bitbol (ed) Constituting Subjectivity: Transcendental Perspectives in Modern Physics. New York: Springer, pp. 149 – 158.
7. 'Reasons for choosing among equipollent theories' In L. Soler, H. Sankey and P. Hoyningen-Huene (eds) Rethinking Scientific Change and Theory Comparison: Stabilities, Ruptures, Incommensurabilities? Dordrecht: Springer, pp 225 – 238.
8. The second cognitive revolution' In, After Cognitivism: New York: Springer, Chapter 11.
9.  'Trope theory and the ontology of chemistry' Foundations of Chemistry, 11 93-103.
10. 'Emotions as physiological-discursive hybrids' Emotion Review.1/4 1-8.

Rajiv Prabhakar

I have continued my research into asset-based welfare this year, looking at policies such as the Child Trust Fund and theoretical developments such as behavioural economics and assets.

Publications 2008-09

1. Prabhakar, R. (2009), 'How can opposition to inheritance tax be weakened?', Public Policy and Administration, 24(3), 227-244

2. Prabhakar, R. (2009), 'The assets agenda and social policy', Social Policy and Administration, 43(1), 54-69

3. Prabhakar, R. (2009), 'The development of asset-based welfare: the case of the Child Trust Fund in the UK', Policy and Politics, 37(1), 129-143

4. Prabhakar, R. (forthcoming) 'The reform of public services: the views of the main parties', in Hickson, K. And Griffiths, S. (ed) Political Thought and Party Politics after New Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan)

5. Prabhakar, R. (2008) 'Assets and Citizenship', in White, S. and Leighton, D. (ed) Building a Citizen Society (London: Lawrence and Wishart), 67-74

6. Prabhakar, R. (2008), 'Wealth taxes: stories, metaphors and public attitudes', Political Quarterly, 79(2), 172-178

Presentations

1. Invited speaker at policy symposium on child development accounts at University of Washington at St Louis, November 2008

2. Invited speaker on wealth inequality, University of Antwerp, 2010

Peter Sozou

Research activities

1. Evolutionary Biology. This includes a kin-selection model of social discounting, and a continuous-time evolutionary game theory (with asymmetric information) model of courtship.
2. Strategic Problems in Reproductive Medicine, in association with the University of Warwick. This involves medical ethics and economics

Presentations, Workshops etc.

• "The evolution of social discounting". Presented at workshop on the Biological Basis of Economics, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, April 2008.
• "An evolutionary basis for social discounting". Presented to the Choice Group, LSE, June 2008.
• "Duration of courtship effort as a costly signal". Presented at London Evolutionary Research Network (LERN), February 2009.

Publications 2008-09

R M Seymour and P D Sozou "Duration of courtship effort as a costly signal". Journal of Theoretical Biology 256, 1-13, 2009. 

Max Steuer

I have been working on the alternative of market organisation as against public provision of goods and services.  A particular case study is the partial privatisation of Air Traffic Control in the United Kingdom in 2001.  I gave a paper on this at a Transport Infrastructure Conference in Paris last June, and the paper, having gone through a number of drafts, is now ready for submission.

Publications and Conference Presentations etc. by Project Leaders and Assistants are reported under each project.

Philip Thonemann

I have been continuing my weekly visits to the Centre, running our tea, assisting graduate students, and contributing to the Wittgenstein Reading Group. I have continued to muse on the best defence of scientific realism. Meanwhile I have been working on applications of Wittgenstein's ideas, developed in his Philosophical Investigations, Language Games, and Forms of Life. In particular, I am pursuing the consequences of the conjecture that the criteria that have to be satisfied for a Language Game to be acceptable are often indeterminate. If, therefore, extraordinary Language Games cannot easily be dismissed, I am beginning to suspect that various philosophical confusions, including, ironically, much of the Investigations and all of On Certainty, should be seen as the result of failure to recognise when two Language Games, one ordinary, one extraordinary, are being played simultaneously.