List, Christian (2008) Group Communication and the Transformation of Judgments: An Impossibility Result. [Preprint]

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Abstract

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be "holistic": It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine "holism thesis" on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID List, Christian
Keywords:	communication, group deliberation, judgment aggregation, impossibility theorem, belief revision, opinion change
Subjects:	General Issues > Decision Theory General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Theory Change Specific Sciences > Economics
Depositing User:	Christian List
Date Deposited:	11 Nov 2008
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:17
Item ID:	4320
Subjects:	General Issues > Decision Theory General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Theory Change Specific Sciences > Economics
Date:	November 2008
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/4320

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