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Paper delivered during the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences annual congress, The Legacy of A.M. Turing, Urbino September 25-27, 2012. Authors: Lella Mazzoli, Fabio Giglietto Abstract The cognition-computing short circuit, one of the most important legacies of Alan Turing’s work, is still affecting today both neuroscience and computer science. Starting from the proposals formulated by the British logician and mathematician, this paper underlines the rarely studied impact his ideas have had on the study of society. Social systems theories on the one hand and agent-based simulations on the other hand, have pinpointed once more the traditional sociological dualism between macro and micro-sociology. However, the advent of ‘’Big Data’ has paved the way to new techniques of investigation based on the study of new types of data, such as conversations taking place on popular web sites like Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to these techniques, we can go beyond simulation and observe the operation within the social “black box” in the same way as neuronal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) does as regards to the brain. This paper discusses the potential and limitations of these new methods of sociological investigation and their spillover effects on the theoretical development of the discipline.
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Lella Mazzoli [[email protected]]Fabio [.] Giglietto [@uniurb.it] Deparment of Communication Studies and Human Sciences | Università di Urbino Carlo Bo
SOCIAL SYSTEMS: FROM SIMULATION TO OBSERVATION
Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences annual congress, The Legacy of A.M. Turing, Urbino 25-27 Settembre 2012
Summary
The legacy of Alan Turing in social sciences; Cognition, AI and simulation of social systems
Top-down approaches Bottom-up approaches
Form simulation to observation Conclusions
The cognition-computing short circuit
Inside the “biological black box”
Can machines think?
PERMANENT LINK TO THIS COMIC: HTTP://XKCD.COM/329/
Top down Bottom up
Social system theories and simulation
From simulation to observation (1/x)
source: http://vincos.it/osservatorio-facebook/
Focus groups, interviews, surveys Unspontaneous data
Social media data Spontaneously
generated Tradition of content
analysis but: 1. Contents not
anymore generated by an elite;
2. No filter before publishing.
From simulation to observation (2/x)
Simulation Models
Observation Real data
From simulation to observation (3/x)
Conclusions (1/3)
The theoretical effects of computational social science (CSS) on sociology and theory of social systems are not fully explored;
CSS is criticized by some sociologists with the same arguments used against theories of social systems;
Conclusions (2/3)
Can the display or the analysis of a conversations network, always detached from single individuals
taking part to that conversation, help us fully understand the phenomenon under study?
What is the relationship between the displays of networks of communications and the relationship
between individuals and society?
Conclusions (3/3)
Most of the studies in CSS are developed by computer scientists (recall strong AI);
Most of the concept developed in sociology is not enough well defined (recall weak AI);
A stronger and more in depth collaboration is needed to fully express CSS potential.
