Social Software

The term Social Software has acquired two meanings. In one of its meanings, social software means a range of web-based software programs. The programs allow users to interact and share data with other users. However, there is also another meaning which studies the procedures of society whether elections, conferences etc. as analogous to computer programs to be analyzed by similar logical and mathematical tools. As Searle points out, a ten dollar bill is physically just a piece of paper. What makes it money is the role it plays in our social procedures. It is the second meaning, where social software means the software by which society runs, which will be the focus of this article. Work in social software has been going on for about twelve years, and four conferences, in Copenhagen, London, Utrecht and New York, have been partly or wholly devoted to it. Wittgenstein's language games can be seen as a precursor of Social Software, but he only uses these language games to explicate issues in the philosophy of language and is not interested so much in the pragmatic issues.

Goals and Tools of Social Software

The goals of social software are to analyze social procedures and to examine them for correctness and efficiency. Thus for instance an election procedure, whether it is majority vote, Borda count, Single Transferable vote (STV), or Approval voting, can be examined for various properties like monotonicity (voting for a candidate should not harm that candidate, something which can happen in STV) or the ability to elect a Condorcet winner in case there is one. A procedure for fair division should be Pareto optimal, equitable and envy free. A procedure for auctions should be one which would encourage bidders to bid their actual valuation – a property which holds with the Vickrey auction. What is new in social software compared to these older fields is the recognition that these fields fall under a common umbrella, and that tools from computer science like logic of programs, analysis of algorithms and epistemic logic should also be used. Just like programs, social procedures dovetail into each other. For instance an airport provides runways for planes to land, but it also provides security checks, and it must provide for ways in which buses and taxis can take arriving passengers to their local destinations. The entire mechanism can be analyzed in just the way in which a complex computer program can be analyzed. The Banach-Knaster procedure for dividing a cake fairly, or the Brams and Taylor procedure for fair division have been analyzed in this way. To point to the need for epistemic logic, a building not only needs restrooms, for obvious reasons, it also needs signs indicating where they are. Thus epistemic considerations enter in addition to structural ones. For a more urgent example, in addition to medicines, physicians also need tests to indicate what a patient’s problem is.

See also

* Epistemic Logic
* Game Theory
* Mechanism Design
* Fair Division
* No-trade Theorem
* Dynamic Logic

Primary References

* John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) New York : Free Press, c1995.
* Rohit Parikh, “Social Software,” Synthese, 132, Sep 2002, 187-211.
* Eric Pacuit and Rohit Parikh, Social Interaction, Knowledge, and Social Software, in Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm}, ed. Dina Goldin, Sott Smolka, Peter Wegner, Springer 2007, 441-461.

Other References

* Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Philosophical Investigations," Macmillan, 1953.
* Jaakko Hintikka, "Knowledge and Belief: an introduction to the logic of the two notions", Cornell University press, 1962.
* D. Lewis, "Convention, a Philosophical Study", Harvard U. Press, 1969.
* R. Aumann, Agreeing to disagree, "Annals of Statistics", 4 (1976) 1236-1239.
* Paul Milgrom and Nancy Stokey, Information, trade and common knowledge, "Journal of Economic Theory", Volume 26:1, pp. 17-27, 1982.
* J. Geanakoplos and H. Polemarchakis, We Can't Disagree Forever, "J. Economic Theory", 28 (1982), 192-200.
* R. Parikh and P. Krasucki, Communication, Consensus and Knowledge, "J. Economic Theory" 52 (1990) pp. 178-189.
* W.B. Arthur. Inductive reasoning and bounded rationality. "Complexity in Economic Theory", 84(2):406-411, 1994.
* Ronald Fagin, Joseph Halpern, Yoram Moses and Moshe Vardi, "Reasoning about Knowledge", MIT Press 1995.
* Steven Brams and Alan Taylor, "The Win-Win Solution: guaranteeing fair shares to everybody," Norton 1999.
* David Harel, Dexter Kozen and Jureck Tiuryn, "Dynamic Logic", MIT Press, 2000.
* Michael Chwe, "Rational ritual : culture, coordination, and common knowledge", Princeton University Press, 2001.
* Marc Pauly, "Logic for Social Software", Ph.D. Thesis, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series 2001-10, ISBN 90-6196-510-1.
* Rohit Parikh, Language as social software, in "Future Pasts: the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy", Ed. J. Floyd and S. Shieh, Oxford U. Press, 2001, 339-350.
* Parikh, R. and Ramanujam, R., A knowledge based semantics of messages, in "J. Logic, Language, and Information", 12, pp. 453 - 467, 2003.
* Eric Pacuit, "Topics in Social Software: Information in Strategic Situations", Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York (2005).
* Eric Pacuit, Rohit Parikh and Eva Cogan, The Logic of Knowledge Based Obligation, "Knowledge, Rationality and Action", a subjournal of "Synthese", 149(2), 311 – 341, 2006.
* Eric Pacuit and Rohit Parikh, Reasoning about Communication Graphs, in Interactive Logic, Edited by Johan van Benthem, Dov Gabbay and Benedikt Lowe (2007).
* Mike Wooldridge, Thomas Ågotnes, Paul E. Dunne, and Wiebe van der Hoek. Logic for Automated Mechanism Design - A Progress Report. In "Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07"), Vancouver, Canada, July 2007.

External links

* Rohit Parikh's wikipedia page
* [http://web.cs.gc.cuny.edu/~kgb/ Knowledge, Games and Beliefs Group (City University of New York, Graduate Center)]
* [http://www.philog.ruc.dk/phiconf4.html http://www.philog.ruc.dk/phiconf4.html]
* [http://www.illc.uva.nl/ADMW05/ http://www.illc.uva.nl/ADMW05/]
* [http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2006/235/info.php3?wsid=235 http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2006/235/info.php3?wsid=235]
* [http://web.cs.gc.cuny.edu/~kgb/socsoft/ http://web.cs.gc.cuny.edu/~kgb/socsoft/]