1st World Congress on Logic, Chance, and Money

Speaker: Rohit Parikh, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College, CUNY

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith wrote two influential books in the 18th century. One was the famous Wealth of Nations and the other one was the Theory of Moral Sentiments. One could say, loosely speaking, that he regarded society as run by a mixture of self interest and sympathy for other people. What Smith did not have were some developments that would take more than 200 years after his passing, namely computers, probability, the theory of algorithms and logic. These tools need to be used to understand structures in society.

Here is an example. Academic journals charge a lot for a subscription, so much so that even the rich universities cannot afford all of them and they are certainly hard to get in the developing world. And yet the work of doing the research, and these days even the work of typesetting is done by academics. So how is it that publishers acquire the clout to charge these enormous amounts of money for subscriptions? They do not have an army, do they? There are structures here which are not easily explained in terms of a simple version of Adam Smith’s ideas, but we do now have new tools: algorithms, logic and theory of knowledge to be able to arrive at a better understanding of society. We can then offer an explanation of a question raised by John Searle, namely how does a piece of paper with some printing on it become money and wield power?

This talk will be a survey with one or two new results but relying mostly on the contributions of various people in economics, philosophy, and logic.