Kevin Zollman - Teaching

Teaching

At the University of California, Irvine, I taught a class on the philosophy of law that was cross listed with Philosophy, Criminology, and Political Science. At Carnegie Mellon, I taught a graduate/undergraduate course on evolutionary game theory and animal signaling.

Game Theory and the Evolution of Signaling (CMU)

(Spring 2008)

The evolution of simple languages, known as signaling systems, has received a lot of recent attention from game theorists in philosophy, biology, and economics; this will be the focus of our course. In the first half, we will look at several evolutionary and learning models of “costless” signaling. In addition to analyzing the plausibility of these as models for the evolution of proto-languages, we will consider the ways this model has been applied to some old philosophical problems (convention, meaning, natural kinds, and the descriptive/normative distinction). One handy feature of signaling games is that many different modeling strategies have been applied to them. This will give us an opportunity to see the variety of strategies used in this fast expanding literature.

In the second half of the course we will turn to different models of the evolution of language which relax the pure common interest assumption. Here we will look at the problem of “signal cost” (e.g. “handicaps”) and attempt to determine the extent to which this feature expands the set of explanations available for the evolution of simple languages. Costly signaling has been used primarily by both biologists and economists and we will have a look at the similarities between these two approaches.

Philosophy of Law

(Spring 2007)

This course has two primary parts. In the first part we discuss a few influential accounts of what law is. In particular we will focus on how law is different from other social institution, and also how these accounts bear on the process of “interpretation” that is required of judges. Our last book of the first section, Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire, discusses the process of interpretation in some detail. While reading this we will have the opportunity to discuss the oft-used distinction between “activist” judges and “judicially restrained” judges.

In the second part of the course, we will read a series of influential U.S. Supreme Court decisions. We will attempt to square the reasoning in these decisions with the framework for interpretation set out in the first half of the course. In this section half, we will look at court cases in three major areas, Equal Protection, Privacy, and War Powers. This last topic will allow us to look at one recent supreme court decision, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.