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Distinctive human social motivations in a game-theoretic framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2005

Don Ross*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy and Economics and Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL35294 School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africahttp://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/Economics/staff/dross/default.asp

Abstract

I discuss implications of Tomasello et al's hypothesis that humans exhibit distinctive collective intentionality for game-theoretic approaches to modeling human evolution. Representing the hypothesis game-theoretically forces a question about whether it implies only distinctively human motivations or both distinctive motivations and distinctive cognitive capacities for representation of intentions. I also note that the hypothesis explains uniquely human ideological conflict and invites game-theoretic modeling of this.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

1. Clark (2002), Dennett (2003), and Sterelny (2004) all provide supporting philosophical arguments for this view.