26 quotes
A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality.
A system is recognized as such by remaining recognizable as 'itself' in spite of changes in its detailed appearance.
The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.
The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality.
Anatol Rapoport (1974)
A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.
Crisis in its simplest terms is defined as an upset in a steady state... the habitual problem-solving activities are not adequate and do not rapidly lead to the previously achieved balance state.
Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965)
To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.
The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow".
Anatol Rapoport (1969)
Conflict... is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love.
Fights, games, and debates (1960)
A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions
It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy.
Anatol Rapoport (1956)
It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.
The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.
Anatol Rapoport (1956)
One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.
The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results.
Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965)
We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves.
Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy.
In a game, the potentialities and evaluations of alternative outcomes must be taken into account, if the reactions of the opponents to each other's moves are to moves are to be understood or described systematically.
Fights, games, and debates (1960)
Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.
It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.
Fights, games, and debates (1960)