Historical Social Research (HSR) 43 (2018) 1 Special Issue: Agent-Based Modeling in Social Science, History, and Philosophy (ed. Dominik Klein, Johannes Marx & Kai Fischbach)
Agent-based modeling has become a common and well-established tool in the social sciences and certain of the humanities. Simply put, it affords a way to study a social, economic, historic, or political phenomenon by examining the iterated interactions of individuals that give rise to the phenomenon. These interactions are encoded and simulated within a computer program, allowing the modeler to analyze the influence of various parameters, test the coherence of proclaimed explanations and also discover new mechanisms. Encoding a simulation requires the modeler to specify all assumptions and mechanisms explicitly. Hence, the resulting scientific arguments tend to be precise about their underlying assumptions and their exact scope.
With the present HSR Special Issue, we aim to present a cross-section of current approaches to agent-based simulations, including contributions to social sciences, history, philosophy up to literature studies. For the social sciences, this issue contains contributions on the dynamics of social trust or the polarization of party systems. That agent-based modeling can also be applied in the historic sciences is demonstrated by a simulation of medieval maritime trade in the Baltic. As to philosophy, various contributions address topics in the philosophy of science and epistemology, related, for instance, to the performance of epistemic groups and the quality of decision making procedures. Finally, agent-based simulations can be used to assess the theoretical coherence of an argument or compare the implica-tions of competing approaches. In this issue, this method is applied to the works of Thomas S. Kuhn and Adam Smith.
Abstracts of all contributions are available at http//:www.gesis.org/hsr/. For orders, please contact hsr-order@gesis.org.
CONTENTS
SPECIAL ISSUE – Agent-Based Modeling
Dominik Klein, Johannes Marx & Kai Fischbach Agent-Based Modeling in Social Science, History, and Philosophy. An Introduction. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.7-27
Rogier De Langhe An Agent-Based Model of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.28-47
Manuela Fernández Pinto & Daniel Fernández Pinto Epistemic Landscapes Reloaded: An Examination of Agent-Based Models in Social Epistemology. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.48-71
Csilla Rudas & János Török Modeling the Wikipedia to Understand the Dynamics of Long Disputes and Biased Articles. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.72-88
Simon Scheller When Do Groups Get It Right? – On the Epistemic Performance of Voting and Deliberation. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.89-109
Ulf Christian Ewert & Marco Sunder Modelling Maritime Trade Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Medieval History. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.110-143
Daniel M. Mayerhoffer Raising Children to Be (In-)Tolerant. Influence of Church, Education, and Society on Adolescents’ Stance towards Queer People in Germany. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.144-167
Johannes Schmitt & Simon T. Franzmann A Polarizing Dynamic by Center Cabinets? The Mechanism of Limited Contestation. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.168-209
Bert Baumgaertner Models of Opinion Dynamics and Mill-Style Arguments for Opinion Diversity. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.210-233
Dominik Klein & Johannes Marx Generalized Trust in the Mirror. An Agent-Based Model on the Dynamics of Trust. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.234-258
Bennett Holman, William J. Berger, Daniel J. Singer, Patrick Grim & Aaron Bramson Diversity and Democracy: Agent-Based Modeling in Political Philosophy. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.259-284
Anne Marie Borg, Daniel Frey, Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer Epistemic Effects of Scientific Interaction: Approaching the Question with an Argumentative Agent-Based Model. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.285-307
Michael Gavin An Agent-Based Computational Approach to “The Adam Smith Problem”. doi: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.1.308-336