Descriptive and Normative Approaches to Human Behavior

Some written by mathematical psychologists and others by mathematical philosophers, 12 essays demonstrate the little known overlap of methods in the two fields. They were presented as the 2010 Purdue Winer Memorial Lectures. Among the topics are the impossibility of a satisfactory population ethics, defining goodness and badness in terms of betterness without negation, the reverse problem of Fechnerian scaling, presumption of equality as a requirement of fairness, knowledge spaces regarded as set representations of skill structures, and model selection with informative normalized maximum likelihood. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)