Rousseau’s Social Contract

Over the weekend I began reading Rousseau’s On the Social Contract so as to get a better idea of what it was from the horse’s mouth. Though I have only gotten through Book 1 so far, it is clear not only how important the work must have been at the time and how it influenced American democracy, but also why such interesting connections have been made between it at evolutionary game theory. Skyrms has two books (that are very fun and easy reads) that draw out the beginnings of these quite interesting connections.

In general the connections are thus (as I see it so far). The social contract is a cooperation of people to give up some rights for the greater good. However, this cooperation prima facie seems to be irrational, since any one person could do better by pretending to follow the rules of society, but really pursuing their own ends exclusively. Skyrms does an excellent job of illuminating how this, and other problems may be resolved by understanding the development of necessary features of the social contract such as stable cooperation in game-theoretic terms. The use of evolutionary game theory instead of more economics-y one-shot interaction game theory lends weight to the emergence of a social contract and its stability instead of just its possibility as well.

Philosophy of Biology

For something (almost) completely different, I will now turn to some philosophy of biology and mind stuff. Over the weekend, I had something of a small epiphany about what might get me to a paper for the evolution of cognition seminar I am taking. This started a week ago when, towards the end of a presentation about the last chapter and overall plan of Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition I got hit with an unexpected¹ “So what?” question that I deflected.

Doing the reading for this week, I realised that the content was interesting, but it didn’t seem to have much obvious philosophical punch. Most of the readings were concerned with evidence for/against or standards for determining whether human cognition evolved. This seemed very strange when I tried to consider the alternatives. It seems that the answer is clearly yes, or alternatively a rejection of evolutionary theory generally². So I started asking myself why exactly we were reading it. The response I came up with — which is actually a bigger, but more correct question — was related to the fall seminar with the same professor and the colloquium talk last Friday: If evolution did evolve, then so what?

I don’t have a good answer to that question yet, but at least focusing on it seems to be a good place to look for paper topics. I only wish something like this had occurred to me in the fall so I could have attempted to write a paper for the evolution of morality class and gotten my ethics requirement out of the way then.

Non-Philosophy

On some things even more completely different, this weekend my bicycle was stolen, and I survived my first sensible earthquake last night. C’est la vie.

¹ The lack of expectation was probably poor planning on my part.

² That statement is probably wrong, but it doesn’t appear to be wrong in an interesting enough way to fix it.