Challenging Deliberation

Sequential Deliberation

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to continue deliberation, generating costly information, or stop and take a binding vote yielding a decision. For homogeneous committees, the model is a reinterpretation of the classic Wald (1947) sequential testing of statistical hypotheses. In heterogeneous committ...

“Talking It Out”: Deliberation With Others versus Deliberation Within

Modeling Deliberation in Teamwork

Cooperation in multi-agent systems essentially hinges on appropriate communication. This paper shows how to model communication in teamwork within TEAMLOG, the first multi-modal framework wholly capturing a methodology for working together. Taking off from the dialogue theory ofWalton and Krabbe, the paper focuses on deliberation, the main type of dialogue during team planning. We provide a fou...

Deliberation as Interactive Reasoning

Most formal models of deliberative democracy posit actors who want to guide a collective choice. This assumption stands in stark contrast to deliberative democratic theory as it was originally developed. The baseline non-formal model of this theory is the ideal speech situation, in which actors aim to understand and be understood, rather than to manipulate the outcome (Cohen 1989, Habermas 1990...

Deliberation and Metaphysical Freedom

Proponents of the “Belief in Ability Thesis” (BAT) maintain that one deliberates about whether to perform a given action only if one believes that one can perform the action in question. In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen endorsed BAT and deployed it in an argument for the incompatibility of deliberation and consistent belief in the nonexistence of free will. Van Inwagen’s argument att...