Million dollar questions

Why deliberation is more than information pooling

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21470597
AutoresDaniel Hoek (0000-0002-5331-2409, Virginia Tech), R Bradley (0000-0003-2184-7844, London School of Economics and Political Science, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume63
Fascículo3-4
Páginas581-600
Data de publicação2024-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSocial Choice and Welfare (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0176-1714 • E-ISSN: 1432-217X
EditoraSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s00355-022-01392-9
OpenAlexW4221026869
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas30

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents' informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved

Conversation · Deliberation · Deliberative democracy · Economics · Epistemology · Management science · Political science · Pooling · Sociology · Computer Science · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Law · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence