We are a Working Group devoted to the discussion of historical and philosophical issues in symbolic logic, mathematics, and science. We meet on occasional Wednesday evenings for a talk and a lively discussion. The group is funded by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy.
All members of the academic community are welcome to attend. We have regular participants in many different fields, including philosophy, mathematics, history of science, and psychology.
The group organizers are Wesley Holliday, John MacFarlane, Paolo Mancosu, Seth Yalcin, and Xueyin (Snow) Zhang.
Our next event
April 02, 2025, 4-6 PM (note special time) in 234 Philosophy
Harvey Lederman (University of Texas, Austin)
Maximal Social Welfare Relations on Infinite Populations Satisfying Permutation Invariance
We study social welfare relations (SWRs) on an infinite population. Our main result is a characterization of the common core shared by prominent utilitarian SWRs over distributions which realize finitely many welfare levels on this population. We characterize them as the largest SWR (in terms of subset when the weak relation is viewed as a set of pairs) which satisfies Strong Pareto, Permutation Invariance (elsewhere called “Relative Anonymity” and “Isomorphism Invariance”), and a further “Pointwise Independence” axiom. Based on joint work with Jeremy Goodman (Johns Hopkins).