Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
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What is game theory and how did it develop as a tool for studying strategic scenarios?
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Kaylin O'Connor, Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her new book, Games in the Philosophy of Biology, is just out from Cambridge University Press. The branch of mathematics called game theory, of which Prisoner's Dilemma is probably the most well-known example,
has been used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore many types of social relations between humans and also between non-human creatures. In her new book, O'Connor introduces the basics of game theory and its particular branch, evolutionary game theory, and discusses some of the central ways in which game theoretic models have helped explain the genesis of meanings of linguistic and non-linguistic signals, altruistic behavior, the spread of misinformation, and the origins of fair and unfair distributions of benefits in society. She also considers some of the drawbacks of game theoretic models. Her short introduction makes a major area of social scientific investigation accessible to readers without mathematical background.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Kaylin O'Connor. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Well, hello, Carrie. Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really looking forward to talking about games and the philosophy of biology. And I hope we'll also get a chance to talk a little bit about your book, which came out just late last year on the origins of unfairness. But we'll sort of focus on this one for the most part. Before we get into the actual chapters of the book, Maybe you could tell us a bit about yourself and your interests in philosophy and then, you know, how this book came about.
Yeah, sure. So I'm a philosopher of biology and the social sciences. And a lot of what I do is use modeling methods, especially game theory and evolutionary modeling to try to understand things about either animal behavior or more recently, especially human behavior. So that's the kind of broad picture on my work. And then within that, I've worked on a lot of topics. As I was saying to you before we started, recently I've been doing a lot of work modeling misinformation and the spread of false beliefs. And then as you mentioned, I have this other book on the cultural evolution of unfair norms and conventions having to do with gender and race. So apply this to a lot of topics. Now, this particular book is part of the Cambridge Elements series in philosophy of biology.
So that Michael Roos and Grant Ramsey are the editors of that. And they wrote to me to ask whether I could write something in this vein. And. I thought this is a great opportunity to try to bring together this literature that I've been dealing with throughout my career and a kind of coherent, easily readable, short book that would be good for teaching or people who are interested in a new subfield of philosophy.
Yeah, I agree. I think it certainly does that. I mean, I'm to some extent familiar with the games and the philosophy of biology, but this really does a really good job of, you know, I thought of laying it out for somebody who might not have any sort of background whatsoever. So maybe we should start with that. I mean, what is game theory? I mean, there's a number of different... you know, concepts there, you know, players and strategies, Nash equilibria and so forth and replicator dynamics. So could you, could you just give a bit of a description of what game theory is and how it was developed to explore what you, what is called, what are called strategic scenarios?
Yeah. So game theory is this branch of math first really developed through economics and
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is game theory and how did it develop as a tool for studying strategic scenarios?
0:02–7:50
2
How does evolutionary game theory differ from classic game theory and why is it important for biology?
7:50–15:31
3
What are signaling games and how can they explain the emergence of meaning and language?
15:31–25:12
4
How do models of deception and costly signaling illuminate biological and human communication?
25:12–33:26
5
Why do altruism and cooperation evolve despite the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s incentives to defect?
33:26–40:08
6
What mechanisms (e.g., kin selection, green beards, secret handshakes) support the evolution of cooperation?
40:08–48:42
7
How do bargaining games reveal the origins of fairness and the persistence of unfair social norms?
48:42–57:44
8
What are the main limitations of game‑theoretic models and why might they mislead philosophical analysis?
57:44–1:05:18
Speakers
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