Minds, machines and economic agents: Cambridge receptions of Boole and Babbage

Equilibrium and Evolution

“…Venn, J.R. Mozely, Sidgwick and, later, Clifford. As Cook's (2005bCook's ( , 2005c investigations highlight, the approach to the moral sciences developed by Grote and his followers significantly influenced Marshall's early thinking on philosophy and the mental sciences. Grote, clergyman and professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge between 1855 and 1866, developed a dualistic treatment of the moral sciences in which the materialist logic of Mill, and the associationist psychology of Bain, provided credible instances of what he regarded as 'phenomenological logic' and psychology (Cook 2005c: 333).…”

A transdisciplinary perspective on economic complexity. Marshall's problem revisited

“…As Cook (2005b) has argued, Marshall's two-circuit model is modeled upon the characteristics of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Both Babbage's mechanical model and Marshall's psychological model are endowed with the property of "foresight" and in both cases foresight occurs through the implementation of feedback processes.…”

Charles Babbage and the Emergence of Automated Reason

“…Simon Cook (2005) describes how Venn, in his ''On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings'' of 1880, clearly recognized considerable potential for the automation of his logical formalisms but went on to identify a strictly limited role for such machinery. The nature of the labor involved in logical work, Venn stated (p. 340), involves four ''tolerably distinct steps'': the statement of the data in accurate logical language, the putting of these statements into a form fit for an ''engine to work with,'' thirdly the combination or further treatment of our premises after such a reduction, and finally interpretation of the results.…”

“…Recent historical papers have revealed how the promise of Babbage's simulation model, coupled with the new logics of Boole and Venn, inspired two of the fathers of economic science to design and build automated reasoning machines (Maas 1999;Cook 2005). Unlike Babbage and Lovelace, the names Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924 are not well known to students of computing or artificial intelligence.…”

“…Jevons's piano, then, would not have inclined Venn to alter his opinion on the limitations of machine logic. Cook (2005) has recently revealed that Marshall (who, upon Jevons's early death by drowning in 1882, would eventually come to head the marginalist revolution within economics) also considered the question of machine intelligence. In ''Ye Machine,'' the third of four manuscripts thought to have been written in the late 1860s to be presented to Cambridge Grote Club, he described his own version of a machine capable of automatically following the rules of logic.…”