I SEE THIS BOOK as the third in a trilogy on generative social science.
VOLUME I
The first volume of the trilogy was Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (MIT Press/Brookings Press), with coauthor Robert Axtell. Published in 1996, this introduced the Sugarscape agent-based model, and the notion of a generative explanation of social phenomena. Sugarscape was a single sweeping exploratory artificial society, with glimmerings of a mature generative epistemology.
VOLUME II
For the subsequent decade, with diverse colleagues, I applied agent-based modeling to a broad spectrum of fields—economics, archaeology, conflict, epidemiology, spatial games, and the dynamics of norms—and thought more deeply about the philosophy of agent-based social science. The results are collected in the second volume of the trilogy: Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling, published in 2006 by Princeton University Press. Relative to Growing Artificial Societies, Generative Social Science presented a collection of more tightly focused and specifically explanatory exercises, and a far more extended and mature generative epistemology.
VOLUME III
Generative Social Science ended with a challenge: Grow Raskolnikov! By this, I meant agents with more fully developed—and so conflicted—inner lives.1 In effect, it was a call for greater cognitive realism. The present book is my response. It introduces a new theoretical entity, Agent_Zero, whose observable behavior is itself generated by the interaction, indeed conflict, of affective, deliberative, and social components. Passion, reason, and social forces, in other words, are all at play in Agent_Zero’s observable behaviors, which span a wide array of fields, including economics, health, conflict, social psychology, and endogenous network dynamics. Needless to say, the relationship between passion and reason within the individual, and the relation of the individual to society, are among the more enduring questions in philosophy. And while I do not claim to resolve them, I do claim to treat them in a new way. A significant volume of contemporary cognitive neuroscience is employed in constructing Agent_Zero, whom I offer as a new, neurocognitively grounded, foundation for generative social science—hence the subtitle of this book. However, as is repeated numerous times, I use only selected neuroscience in developing this particular agent model. I do not purport to encompass—much less to advance—any area of neuroscience itself. Indeed, through the good offices of a number of very fine neuroscientists, I may have avoided insulting their fascinating and fast-moving discipline.
1Indeed, the name Raskolnikov is from the Russian, raskólʾnik, meaning, roughly, schismatic.