Adam Smith’s foundational idea of sympathetic persuasion1

Adam Smith’s “sympathetic Impartiality” and Universality*

I reconstruct here the implicit rationale of Smith’s ethical system, which unites in a single and consistent theory the most valuable features of both ancient virtue ethics and modern deontology. I propose that Smith could do this because of his approach to what I call “sympathetic impartiality”, and the pretension of universality that arises from it. In Smith’s theory, sentiments are moralized...

The Same Face of the Two Smiths: Adam Smith and Vernon Smith

Contested Political Persuasion1

We show how contest and rent-seeking functions can be thought of as persuasion functions that can be derived in a Bayesian setting. Two contestants (such as lobbyists or politicians) produce evidence for a decision-maker (such as an agency head or a voter) who has prior beliefs and possibly other biases and engages in Bayesian updating. The probability of each contestant winning depends on the ...

Foundational Belief Change* Foundational Belief Change

anonymous referee for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank Prasanta Bandy-opadhyay, Jim Cain, Francis Jeery Pelletier and Ted Sider for their sugges tions and encouragement, and acknowledge the help of my friend Ramkrish-nan Nambimadom in the construction of a crucial proof. Abstract: This paper is concerned with the co...

ADAM 10 ( ADAM metallopeptidase domain 10 )