Technological innovation is almost always investigated from an economic perspective; with few exceptions, the specific technological and social nature of innovation is often ignored. We argue that a novel way to characterise and make sense of different types of technological innovation is to start considering uncertainty. This seems plausible since technological development and innovation almost always occur under conditions of uncertainty. We rely on the distinction between, on the one hand, uncertainty that can be quantified (e.g. probabilistic risk) and, on (...) the other, deep forms of uncertainty that may resist the possibility of being quantified (e.g. severe or fundamental uncertainties). On the basis of these different ingredients of uncertainty in technological innovation, we propose a new taxonomy that reveals the technological nature of innovation. Unlike previous taxonomies employed to handle different types of technological innovations, our taxonomy does not consider the economic value of innovation alone; it is much more oriented towards societal preferences and forms of technological uncertainty. Finally, we investigate the coherence of our proposal with the dual nature of technological artefacts, showing that innovation can be grounded on structural and functional factors and not just on economic ones. (shrink)

Decision-making under uncertainty is sometimes investigated as a homogeneous problem, independently of the type of decision-maker and the level and nature of the decision itself. However, when the decision-maker is a public authority, there immediately arise problems additional to those that concern any other (private) decision-maker. This is not always clearly recognised in orthodox discussions on decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This article investigates the methodological, strategic and procedural challenges of taking public decisions in such conditions. It focuses mainly on (...) decisions involving urban contexts, such as planning decisions regarding land use and building transformations, by trying to develop some pioneering research studies in this field. (shrink)

Surprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive-neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains (...) when and why an unexpected fact is surprising. We distinguish between descriptive and normative notions of what is surprising; clarify the sense in which surprising facts are unexpected; and, finally, develop and defend the significance account of surprise, according to which a fact is surprising to an agent if and to the extent that it is both unexpected and significant to the agent. Since a surprising fact can be significant to an agent in various ways—personal, moral, epistemic, and aesthetic—surprise is not merely or primarily epistemic. Fitting surprise reflects more than a person’s view of what is; it reflects a person’s view of what is significant. (shrink)

A number of business ethics theorist have highlighted the potential for economics to contribute to the advancement of business ethics. In response, this article emphasizes the insights of a particular area of economics that could provide such expansion and development. Subjectivist economics may yet provide an effective analytical framework through which to investigate and evaluate business decision making, and hence the ethics of business. Integrating the concepts of uncertainty, time and imagination, subjectivist economic theory contributes to a greater appreciation of (...) economic choice and behaviour. While such notions are often effectively omitted from modern economic analysis to aid formal representation, business ethicists could utilize such concepts more effectively than their colleagues in economic theory. Significantly, the well-known economists who have championed the insights of subjectivist economics have themselves recommended its extension to an analysis of ethics. (shrink)

The paper first introduces a cube of opposition that associates the traditional square of opposition with the dual square obtained by Piaget’s reciprocation. It is then pointed out that Blanché’s extension of the square-of-opposition structure into an conceptual hexagonal structure always relies on an abstract tripartition. Considering quadripartitions leads to organize the 16 binary connectives into a regular tetrahedron. Lastly, the cube of opposition, once interpreted in modal terms, is shown to account for a recent generalization of formal concept analysis, (...) where noticeable hexagons are also laid bare. This generalization of formal concept analysis is motivated by a parallel with bipolar possibility theory. The latter, albeit graded, is indeed based on four graded set functions that can be organized in a similar structure. (shrink)

This Special Issue titled "Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine and Technology" aims to shed new light on the understanding of severe uncertainty and its multifaceted implications. The main idea of the papers of this collection is that, despite possible sophisticated statistical judgments towards future risks in science, medicine, and technology, severe forms of uncertainty still exist.While ignorance is usually assumed to be a total absence of knowledge, uncertainty often refers to the incompleteness of knowledge or information. In its extreme form, (...) this is called "severe uncertainty" but is also known as "fundamental," "radical," "deep," "great," or "genuine" uncertainty. A common characteristic of these... (shrink)

Possibilistic logic and modal logic are knowledge representation frameworks sharing some common features, such as the duality between possibility and necessity, and the decomposability of necessity for conjunctions, as well as some obvious differences since possibility theory is graded. At the semantic level, possibilistic logic relies on possibility distributions and modal logic on accessibility relations. In the last 30 years, there have been a series of attempts for bridging the two frameworks in one way or another. In this paper, we (...) compare the relational semantics of epistemic logics with simpler possibilistic semantics of a fragment of such logics that only uses modal formulas of depth 1. This minimal epistemic logic handles both all-or-nothing beliefs and explicitly ignored facts. We also contrast epistemic logic with the S5-based rough set logic. Finally, this paper presents extensions of generalized possibilistic logic with objective and non-nested multimodal formulas, in the style of modal logics KD45 and S5. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, this article argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. “Fictionality” in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations. Since these representations are (...) not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy. Fictionality opens up a way to an understanding of the microfoundations of the dynamics of the economy. The article develops the notion of fictional expectations. It discusses the role of fictional expectations for the dynamics of the economy and addresses the question of how fictional expectations motivate action. The last part relates the notion of fiction to calculation and social macrostructures, especially institutions and cultural frames. The conclusion hints at the research program developing from the concept of fictional expectations. (shrink)

This paper explores the intertwining of uncertainty and values. We consider an important but underexplored field of fundamental uncertainty and values in decision-making. Some proposed methodologies to deal with fundamental uncertainty have included potential surprise theory, scenario planning and hypothetical retrospection. We focus on the principle of uncertainty transduction in hypothetical retrospection as an illustrative case of how values interact with fundamental uncertainty. We show that while uncertainty transduction appears intuitive in decision contexts it nevertheless fails in important ranges of (...) strategic game-theoretic cases. The methodological reasons behind the failure are then examined. (shrink)

Evidence Theory is a branch of mathematics that concerns combination of empirical evidence in an individual’s mind in order to construct a coherent picture of reality. Designed to deal with unexpected empirical evidence suggesting new possibilities, evidence theory is compatible with Shackle’s idea of decision-making as a creative act. This essay investigates this connection in detail, pointing to the usefulness of evidence theory to formalise and extend Shackle’s decision theory. In order to ease a proper framing of the issues involved, (...) evidence theory is compared with sub-additive probability theory and Ewens’s infinite alleles model. Furthermore, the original version of evidence theory is presented along with its most recent developments. (shrink)

A global pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 upsets all standard decision protocols. Pressure from politicians to "open up" the economy presumes that individuals grant credible trust to politicians and merchants eager to recover customers. The asymmetric concern for safety compounds normal heuristics. The Peircean pragmatic maxim reminds us that it is the perceived effects of a post-pandemic society and economy that will drive human volition in the aftermath of Covid-19. Opening up does not equal showing up.

Les pères de l’école connue sous le nom d’ « École autrichienne d’économie », Carl Menger (1840-1921) et son premier disciple Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), ont analysé les pratiques d’affaires et la nature des activités de l’entrepreneur au-delà de ce qui se faisait en leur temps au sein de l’école historique allemande. Ont-ils pour autant déjà donné une « théorie de l’entrepreneur » en tant que telle, et le pouvaient-ils? Toujours est-il qu’émergent dans leurs œuvres les éléments d’analyse d’un intérêt (...) neuf pour des aspects de l’entreprise et la nature du système de production capitaliste dont l’impact allait se faire sentir de la société de leurs contemporains et chez leurs héritiers (comme Israel Kirzner) jusqu’à nos jours. (shrink)

Carol Gilligan's temporally embedded caring subjects reason in terms of relationships with and forward-looking responsibilities to others, and consider how their decisions will shape future ties. Subsequent work in philosophy and economics has had difficulty developing these aspects because of an underlying social ontology that excludes them. This paper draws on a heterodox tradition, post-Keynesianism, to develop an alternative social ontology and an analysis of material life that takes time fully into account.

Objective standards for justification or for being a reason would be desirable, but inductive skepticism tells us that they cannot be presupposed. Rather, we have to start from subjective-relative notions of justification and of being a reason. The paper lays out the strategic options we have given this dilemma. The paper explains the requirements for this subject-relative notion and how they may be satisfied. Then it discusses four quite heterogeneous ways of providing more objective standards, which combine without guaranteeing complete (...) success. (shrink)

This article documents the history of the Allais paradox, and shows that underneath the many discussions of the various protagonists lay different, irreconcilable epistemological positions. Savage, like his mentor von Neumann and similar to economist Friedman, worked from an epistemology of generalized characterizations. Allais, on the other hand, like economists Samuelson and Baumol, started from an epistemology of exact descriptions in which every axiom was an empirical claim that could be refuted directly by observations. As a result, the two sides (...) failed to find a common ground. Only a few decades later was the now so-called Allais paradox rediscovered as an important precursor when a new behavioural economic subdiscipline started to adopt the epistemology of exact descriptions and its accompanying falsifications of rational choice theory. (shrink)

This paper offers a modified version of the certainty equivalence (CE) theory of utility for uncertain prospects and a new set of axioms as its basis. It shows that the CE and the von Neumann-Morgenstern (NM) approaches to uncertainty are opposite in spirit: The CE approach represents a flight from the world of uncertainty to the rules of certainty while the NM approach represents a flight from the world of certainty to one of uncertainty. The two approaches differ even in (...) their treatment of compound prospects and their actuarially identical simple counterparts. (shrink)

AbstractDespite the evident importance of imagination in both ethical decision-making and entrepreneurship, significant gaps remain in our understanding of its actual role in these processes. As a result, scholars have called for a deeper understanding of how imagination impacts value creation in society and how this critical human faculty might more profoundly connect our theories of ethics and business decision-making. In this paper, we attempt to fill one of these gaps by scrutinizing the underlying philosophical foundations of imagination and applying (...) them to the challenges facing entrepreneurs attempting to create new value in an increasingly unpredictable and kaleidic world. Accordingly, we apply a view of imagination developed by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to the radically subjective economic philosophy of G.L.S Shackle. As a result, we develop a concept of imagination which we believe can be both significant and hopeful for research at the intersection of business ethics and new value creation. (shrink)

A commitment to receive input from stakeholders is often obligatory in the crafting of environmental policies. This requirement is presumed to satisfy certain conditions of democracy. The need for stakeholder input is quite intuitive; public decision makers want to know what their constituents—or at least a limited number of them—think about certain issues. At the same time, individuals, groups, communities, and various interest groups want to learn about the plans that authoritative agencies have concerning those things that affect their daily (...) lives. In light of this widespread commitment to stakeholder input, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to the necessary conditions under which .. (shrink)

G.L.S. Shackle stood at the historic crossroads where the economics of Hayek and Keynes met. Shackle fused these opposing lines of thought in a macroeconomic theory that draws Keynesian conclusions from Austrian premises. In Shackle 's scheme of thought, the power to imagine alternative courses of action releases decision makers from the web of predictable causation. But the spontaneous and unpredictable choices that originate in the subjective and disparate orientations of individual agents deny us the possibility of rational expectations, and (...) therewith the logical coherence of market equilibrium over time. (shrink)