Aggregation of value judgments differs from aggregation of preferences

Summary, in English

My focus is on aggregation of individual value rankings of alternatives to a collective value ranking. This is compared with aggregation o individual prefrences to a collective preference. While in an individual preference ranking the alternatives are ordered in accordance with one’s preferences, the order in a value ranking expresses one’s comparative evaluation of the alternatives, from the best to the worst. I suggest that, despite their formal similarity as rankings, this difference in the nature of individual inputs in two aggregation scenarios has important implications: The kind of procedure that looks fine for aggregation of judgments is inappropriate for aggregation of preferences. The procedure I have in mind consists in similarity maximization, or – more precisely – in minimization of the average distance from individual inputs. When applied to judgment aggregation, this procedure can also be approached from the epistemic perspective: the questions are posed concerning its advantages as a truth-tracker. From that perspective, what matters is not only the probability of the outcome of the procedure being true, but also the expected verisimilitude of the outcome: its expected distance from truth.

• Author: Wlodek Rabinowicz
• Department/s: Practical Philosophy
• Publishing year: 2016
• Language: English
• Pages: 9-40
• Publication/Series: Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004312654_003
• Document type: Book chapter
• Topic: Philosophy
• Keywords: value; preference; ranking; similarity; distance-based methods; aggregation; truth-tracking
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0303-8157; ISBN: 978-90-04-31265-4; ISBN: 978-900431910-3