This paper argues that, with certain provisos, predicting one's future actions is incompatible with rationally deliberating about whether to perform those actions. It follows that fully rational omniscient agents are impossible, since an omniscient being could never rationally deliberate about what to do . Consequently, theories that explain practical reasons in terms of the choices of a perfectly rational omniscient agent must fail. The paper considers several ways of defending the possibility of an omniscient agent, and concludes that while some (...) of these may work, they are inconsistent with the aim of explaining practical normativity by appeal to such an agent. (shrink)

An organizing theme of the dissertation is the issue of how to make philosophical theories useful for scientific purposes. An argument for the contention is presented that it doesn’t suffice merely to theoretically motivate one’s theories, and make them compatible with existing data, but that philosophers having this aim should ideally contribute to identifying unique and hard to vary predictions of their theories. This methodological recommendation is applied to the ranking-theoretic approach to conditionals, which emphasizes the epistemic relevance and the (...) expression of reason relations as part of the semantics of the natural language conditional. As a first step, this approach is theoretically motivated in a comparative discussion of other alternatives in psychology of reasoning, like the suppositional theory of conditionals, and novel approaches to the problems of compositionality and accounting for the objective purport of indicative conditionals are presented. In a second step, a formal model is formulated, which allows us to derive quantitative predictions from the ranking-theoretic approach, and it is investigated which novel avenues of empirical research that this model opens up for. Finally, a treatment is given of the problem of logical omniscience as it concerns the issue of whether ranking theory (and other similar approaches) makes too idealized assumptions about rationality to allow for interesting applications in psychology of reasoning. Building on the work of Robert Brandom, a novel solution to this problem is presented, which both opens up for new perspectives in psychology of reasoning and appears to be capable of satisfying a range of constraints on bridge principles between logic and norms of reasoning, which would otherwise stand in a tension. (shrink)

Epistemic transparency tells us that, if an agent S knows a given proposition p , then S knows that she knows that p . This idea is usually encoded in the so-called KK principle of epistemic logic. The paper develops an argument in favor of a moderate version of KK , which I dub quasi-transparency , as a normative rather than a descriptive principle. In the second Section I put forward the suggestion that epistemic transparency is not a demand of (...) ideal rationality, but of ideal epistemic responsibility, and hence that ideally responsible agents verify transparency principles of some sort; I also contend that their satisfaction should not be tied to an internalist epistemology. The central argument in favor of transparency is then addressed in Sections 3 to 8, through the development of a formal system. I show that, in a well-behaved formal setting, a moderate version of transparency is imposed upon us as a result of a number of independent decisions on the structure of higher-order probabilities, as long as we request that our probability and knowledge attributions cohere with each other. Thus I give a rationale to build a model for a hierarchy of languages with different levels of knowledge and probability operators; we obtain an analogous to KK for successive knowledge operators without actually demanding transitivity. The formal argument reinforces the philosophical intuition that epistemic transparency is an important desideratum we should not be too ready to dismiss. (shrink)

Formally-inclined epistemologists often theorize about ideally rational agents--agents who exemplify rational ideals, such as probabilistic coherence, that human beings could never fully realize. This approach can be defended against the well-know worry that abstracting from human cognitive imperfections deprives the approach of interest. But a different worry arises when we ask what an ideal agent should believe about her own cognitive perfection (even an agent who is in fact cognitively perfect might, it would seem, be uncertain of this fact). Consideration (...) of this question reveals an interesting feature of the structure of our epistemic ideals: for agents with limited information, our epistemic ideals turn out to conflict with one another. (shrink)

Representation theorems are often taken to provide the foundations for decision theory. First, they are taken to characterize degrees of belief and utilities. Second, they are taken to justify two fundamental rules of rationality: that we should have probabilistic degrees of belief and that we should act as expected utility maximizers. We argue that representation theorems cannot serve either of these foundational purposes, and that recent attempts to defend the foundational importance of representation theorems are unsuccessful. As a result, we (...) should reject these claims, and lay the foundations of decision theory on firmer ground. (shrink)

The idea that rational agents should have acyclic preferences and should obey conditionalization has been defended on the grounds that otherwise an agent is threatened with becoming a “money pump.” This essay argues that such arguments fail to prove their claims.

This paper argues that Isaac Levi's account of preference reversals is only a limited success. Levi succeeds in showing that an agent acting in accord with his theory may exhibit reversals. Nevertheless, the specific account that Levi presents in order to accommodate the behavior of experimental subjects appears to be disconfirmed by available evidence.

This paper examines the idea of an extended unit of action, which is the idea that the reasons for or against an individual action can depend on the qualities of a larger pattern of action of which it is a part. One concept of joint action is that the unit of action can be extended in this sense. But the idea of an extended unit of action is surprisingly minimal in its commitments. The paper argues for this conclusion by examining (...) uses of the idea of an extended unit of action in four theoretical contexts. It also explains why the idea of an extended unit of action need not involve magical thinking, and discusses possible replies to an objection based on a worry about recklessness. (shrink)

A fully adequate solution to Newcomb’s Problem (Nozick 1969) should reveal the source of its extraordinary elusiveness and persistent intractability. Recently, a few accounts have independently sought to meet this criterion of adequacy by exposing the underlying source of the problem’s profound puzzlement. Thus, Sorensen (1987), Slezak (1998), Priest (2002) and Maitzen and Wilson (2003) share the ‘no box’ view according to which the very idea that there is a right choice is misconceived since the problem is ill-formed or incoherent (...) in some way. Among proponents of this view, Richard Jeffrey (2004) recently declared that he renounces his earlier position that accepted Newcomb problems as genuine decision problems. Significantly, Jeffrey suggests that “Newcomb problems are like Escher’s famous staircase on which an unbroken ascent takes you back where you started” (Jeffrey (2004; 113)). Jeffrey’s analogy is apt for a puzzle whose specific logical features can be precisely articulated. Along the lines of these related approaches, I propose to improve and clarify them by providing such a deeper analysis that elucidates their essential, related insights. (shrink)

The focus in this paper is on deliberate human action. The central questions addressed are: whether purely rational choice is possible; whether choices may be induced by chance alone; or whether there is always a mixture of rationality and chance, as well as other factors such as habit, emotion, imitation and irrationality. The approach is a factualist one, upholding the view that, although human action can be explained by its antecedents, this is not incompatible with the notion of "free choice". (...) It is the actual choosing process that determines the final choice of action. Whatever the sources of the elements involved in the choosing process, the choice of action is a specific outcome created by the acting agent. It is in this choosing process and decision making that both rationality and chance enter. The conclusion is that rationality is the element which links intentionality with goal seeking and attainment, but that the actual choice is determined by a complex interactive process in which both logic and chance play a part. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these individuals are. On this view, there are two standard ways of handling risky prospects: Ex-Post Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off in final outcomes and then values prospects by the expectation of the sum total of those adjusted values, whereas Ex-Ante Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off on each individual's expectation and then values prospects by the sum total (...) of those adjusted expectations. A standard objection to Ex-Post Prioritarianism is that it violates Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes choices that worsen the expectations for everyone. In this article, I argue that Ex-Ante Prioritarianism suffers from much the same problem: it violates a sequential version of Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes sequences of choices that worsen the expectations for everyone. (shrink)

How does evidence figure into the reasoning of an agent? This is an intricate philosophical problem but also one we all encounter in our daily lives. In this chapter, we identify the problem and outline a possible solution to it. The problem arises, because the fact that it is up to us whether we do something makes a difference to how we should think of the evidence concerning whether we will actually do it. Otherwise we regard something that is up (...) to us as if it were not: We regard something that is up to us as if it were the outcome of a lottery. Nonetheless, we would be wrong to ignore the evidence. Otherwise we could not make a rational decision. In this chapter, we first show that a decision-theoretic approach to this problem cannot succeed. This approach does not explain how we can take evidence into account in practical reasoning without making predictions concerning matters that are up to us. It also gives rise to incoherence between our practical and our theoretical conclusions. We then argue that what is required to solve the problem is recognizing that beliefs about matters that are up to us can be grounded in practical reasoning. We argue that such beliefs are not subject to an evidential norm, because they are not meant to reflect a reality that is independent of them but instead are meant to bring about the reality they represent. Finally, we argue that, even if we are fully rational agents, we will sometimes lack practical knowledge of what we will do. That is because when it is practically rational to do something that will require resolve, we may be in a position to rationally conclude that we will do it, even though we have evidence that there is a non-negligible chance that we won’t. In such cases, our evidence serves as a defeater for our practical knowledge. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate what explanatory resources Robert Brandom’s distinction between acknowledged and consequential commitments affords in relation to the problem of logical omniscience. With this distinction the importance of the doxastic perspective under consideration for the relationship between logic and norms of reasoning is emphasized, and it becomes possible to handle a number of problematic cases discussed in the literature without thereby incurring a commitment to revisionism about logic. One such case in particular is (...) the preface paradox, which will receive an extensive treatment. As we shall see, the problem of logical omniscience not only arises within theories based on deductive logic; but also within the recent paradigm shift in psychology of reasoning. So dealing with this problem is important not only for philosophical purposes but also from a psychological perspective. (shrink)

When we deliberate about what to do, we appear to be free to decide on different options. Three accounts use ordinary beliefs to explain this apparent freedom—appealing to different types of ‘epistemic freedom’. When an agent has epistemic freedom, her evidence while deliberating does not determine what decision she makes. This ‘epistemic gap’ between her evidence and decision explains why her decision appears free. The varieties of epistemic freedom appealed to might look similar. But there is an important difference. Two (...) rely on an agent's ability to justifiably form beliefs unconstrained by evidence, and identify decisions as beliefs—either beliefs about acts or about decisions. But, when used to explain apparent freedom, these accounts face serious problems: they imply that agents have epistemic freedom over evidence-based beliefs, and rely on a faulty notion of justification. Underlying these troubles, it turns out that these accounts presuppose an unexplained apparent ability to form different beliefs. A third variety of epistemic freedom uses ignorance conditions instead (Levi and Kapitan). We appear free partly because we’re ignorant of what we’ll decide. Ignorance-based accounts avoid the above problems, and remain a promising alternative. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

I develop a strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of our epistemic life, as well as to the role of pragmatic factors in epistemology. The model relies on a particular understanding of the distinction between full belief and acceptance , which makes room for the idea that our reasoning on both practical and theoretical matters typically proceeds in a contextual way. Within this framework, I discuss (...) how agents can rationally shift their credal probability functions so as to consciously modify some of their contextual acceptances; the present account also allows us to represent how the very set of contexts evolves. Voluntary credal shifts, in turn, might provoke changes in the agent’s beliefs, but I show that this is actually a side effect of performing multiple adjustments in the total lot of the agent’s acceptance sets. In this way we obtain a model that preserves many pre-theoretical intuitions about what counts as adequate rationality constraints on our actual practices—and hence about what counts as an adequate, normative epistemological perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I shall consider the phenomenon of believing ourselves to have at least one false belief: a phenomenon I call believed fallibility I shall first present a paradoxical argument which appears to show that believed fallibility is incoherent; second, note that this argument assumes that we are committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs; third, sketch a more intuitive notion of commitment in which we are not committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs and argue that the original (...) paradoxical argument is now defused; fourth, construct a new paradoxical argument showing that if we believe that we have at least one false belief we are committed to a contradiction, employing the preferable notion of commitment; and, fifth, suggest that perhaps we might avoid the new paradox by denying that closing our beliefs under conjunction is required by rationalityRÉSUMÉ: Je me pencherai ici sur le phénomène qui consiste à penser que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse: je nomme ce phénoméne «la croyance d’etre faillible». Je présente en premier lieu un argument paradoxal qui semble démontrer que la croyance d’être faillible est incohérente. Deuxièmement, je remarque que cet argument suppose que nous nous obligions à réaliser la conjonction de toutes nosopinions. Troisièmement, je propose une version plus intuitive de cette obligation selon laquelle nous ne sommes pas obligés de réaliser la conjonction de toutes nos opinions, et je soutiens que le paradoxe initial est alors désamorcé. Quatrièmement, je construis un nouvel argument paradoxal démontrant que, si nous croyons que nous avons au moins une opinion fausse, nous sommes obligés de nous contredire, selon la notion d’obligation que je préconise d’adopter. Cinquièmement, je suggère que nous pourrions peut-être éviter ce nouveau paradoxe en niant que la rationalité exige de soumettre nos opinions à la conjonction. (shrink)

Kolmogorov''s axiomatization of probability includes the familiarratio formula for conditional probability: 0).$$ " align="middle" border="0">.

In the debate between simple inference heuristics and complex decision mechanisms, we take a position squarely in the middle. A decision making process that extends to both naturalistic and novel settings should extend beyond the confines of this debate; both simple heuristics and complex mechanisms are cognitive skills adapted to and appropriate for some circumstances but not for others. Rather than ask `Which skill is better?'' it is often more important to ask `When is a skill justified?'' The selection and (...) application of an appropriate cognitive skill for a particular problem has both costs and benefits, and therefore requires the resolution of a tradeoff. In revisiting satisficing, we observe that the essence of satisficing is tradeoff. Unlike heuristics, which derive their justification from empirical phenomena, and unlike optimal solutions, which derive their justification by an evaluation of alternatives, satisficing decision-making derives its justification by an evaluation of consequences. We formulate and present a satisficing decision paradigm that has its motivation in Herbert Simon''s work on bounded rationality. We characterize satisficing using a cost–benefit tradeoff, and generate a decision rule applicable to both designing intelligent machines as well as describing human behavior. (shrink)

Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”. These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evidential decision theory, and be causal decision (...) theorists instead. Unfortunately, causal decision theory has its own family of problematic examples for which it endorses irrational courses of action, and its own irrational policy that it is committed to endorsing. These are, I think, fatal problems for causal decision theory. I wish that I had another theory to offer in its place. (shrink)

This volume concerns Rational Agents - humans, players in a game, software or institutions - which must decide the proper next action in an atmosphere of partial information and uncertainty. The book collects formal accounts of Uncertainty, Rationality and Agency, and also of their interaction. It will benefit researchers in artificial systems which must gather information, reason about it and then make a rational decision on which action to take.

There is an ongoing debate in the philosophical literature whether the conditionals that are central to deliberation are subjunctive or indicative conditionals and, if the latter, what semantics of the indicative conditional is compatible with the role that conditionals play in deliberation. We propose a possible-world semantics where conditionals of the form “if I take action _a_ the outcome will be _x_” are interpreted as material conditionals. The proposed framework is illustrated with familiar examples and both qualitative and probabilistic beliefs (...) are considered. Issues such as common-cause cases and ‘Egan-style’ cases are discussed. (shrink)

Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal (...) and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable. (shrink)

When acting in social contexts, we are often able to voluntarily coordinate our choices with one another. It has been suggested that this ability relies on the adoption of preferences that transcend those of the individuals involved in the social interaction. Conditional game theory provides a formal framework that facilitates the study of coordinated rational choice in a way that disentangles the concepts of individual preference and group agency. We argue that these concepts are complementary: individual preferences are formed in (...) a social context and groups coordinate as socially influenced preferences interact. In particular, we show that if agents can engage in conditional reasoning and can define their preferences in the form of hypothetical propositions, group-level coordination can be grounded only on the preference of individuals. (shrink)

There is a long-standing disagreement in the philosophy of probability and Bayesian decision theory about whether an agent can hold a meaningful credence about an upcoming action, while she deliberates about what to do. Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? No, say some philosophers, for Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction (DCOP), but others disagree. In this paper, we propose a valid core for DCOP, and identify terminological (...) causes for some of the apparent disputes. (shrink)

This essay develops the epistemic challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. While evolutionary considerations do not support the strongest claims made by ‘debunkers’, they do provide the basis for an inductive argument that our moral dispositions and starting beliefs are at best partially reliable. So, we need some method for separating truth from falsity. Many non-naturalists think that rational reflection can play this role. But rational reflection cannot be expected to bring us to truth even from reasonably accurate starting points. Reflection (...) selects views that are coherent and conflict-free, yet there is no reason to think that the non-natural moral truth must be like this. Inasmuch as we seek coherent, conflict-free, ethical viewpoints, that suggests that our goal is not non-natural truth at all. (shrink)

Richard Jeffrey said that Newcomb’s Problem may be seen “as a rock on which... Bayesianism... must founder” and the problem has been almost universally conceived as reconciling the science-fictional features of the decision problem with a plausible causal analysis. Later, Jeffrey renounced his earlier position that accepted Newcomb problems as genuine decision problems, suggesting “Newcomb problems are like Escher’s famous staircase”. We may interpret this to mean that we know there can be no such thing, though we see no local (...) flaw in the puzzle. In this paper, I develop the critique of Slezak to show that Jeffrey’s analogy is apt for a puzzle whose logical features can be precisely articulated and I propose an easily realizable experiment that convincingly supports this analysis. I suggest that these real-life analogs of Newcomb’s Problem have diverted attention from the essential function of the science-fiction of a predicting demon. Following Eells, similarities with realistic problems such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and common cause cases have suggested that Newcomb’s Problem may be given a coherent description and realized in some way consistent with classical causation. However, the peculiarity of the apparent link between one’s choice and the previously determined contents of the second box is the central, defining feature of Newcomb’s Problem. I argue that the predictor may not be merely a fiction providing insufficient “extra information” as both McKay and Levi suggest. Rather, I suggest that the decision problem permits a precise specification revealing the source of the notorious perplexity. Notwithstanding efforts to rescue the coherence of Newcomb’s Problem and a classical causal account, a simulation of the decision problem establishes the correctness of my analysis and, thereby, hopefully ending the debate. (shrink)

In “Truth and Probability” Ramsey claimed that the logic of consistency for probability is not a logic of truth. After supporting this claim, he proceeded to explore the possibilities for a logic of truth for probability. An examination of Ramsey's intent reveals that Ramsey was far from being an orthodox Bayesian when it comes to statistical reasoning. The relations between Ramsey's thought and the ideas of Keynes and Peirce are discussed.

The present paper revisits the issue of rational decision making in John Rawls' original position. Drawing on Isaac Levi's theory of decision, I discuss how we can defend Rawls against John C. Harsanyi's charge that maximin reasoning in the original position is irrational. The discussion suggests that systematic application of Levi's theory is likely to have important consequences for ethics and political theory as well as for public policy.

I focus my discussion on the well-known Ellsberg paradox. I find good normative reasons for incorporating non-precise belief, as represented by sets of probabilities, in an Ellsberg decision model. This amounts to forgoing the completeness axiom of expected utility theory. Provided that probability sets are interpreted as genuinely indeterminate belief, such a model can moreover make the “Ellsberg choices” rationally permissible. Without some further element to the story, however, the model does not explain how an agent may come to have (...) unique preferences for each of the Ellsberg options. Levi holds that the extra element amounts to innocuous secondary “risk” or security considerations that are used to break ties when more than one option is rationally permissible. While I think a lexical choice rule of this kind is very plausible, I argue that it involves a greater break with xpected utility theory than mere violation of the ordering axiom. (shrink)

The thesis aims at developing new, alternative approaches and methods based on suggestions and ideas originating from moral philosophy and philosophical decision theory. More precisely, the thesis aims at investigating the rationality of transport policy decisions, including goal-setting and performance evaluation. Paper I discusses rationality in road safety policy. Problematic features are identified and discussed. The paper argues that the Swedish road safety goal is rational, since it is action-guiding and achievement-inducing. This follows by observing that the goal satisfies the (...) criteria of precision, evaluability, approachability, and motivity. The paper states that previous accusations of irrationality have been unnecessarily imprecise, since no reference is made to independently developed criteria of rational goal-setting. Paper II discusses the Swedish transport policy goals, and the role of social welfare in rational policy decisions. Goals often come into conflict and trade-offs must be rationally and consistently managed. Policy decisions are outcomes of political processes. In the case of policy goals and decisions, the agent is society. This introduces the problematic concept of social welfare, which itself is an ambiguous goal with many meanings. Whether a decision is rational or not depends on whose perspective one takes on – that of society as a whole or that of the actual decision makers. Paper III aims at investigating six different procedures for resolving goal conflicts: weighted average, lexicographic preference, conditional lexicographic preference, absolute restriction, generalised prioritarianism, and partial comparability. Criteria for selection, according to the respective procedures, are formulated and summarised in a table. The six procedures are contrasted with respect to their tendency to rule out possible sets of alternatives as being not choiceworthy. (shrink)

We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (...) (a paradigm of rationality) apparently gives rise to a situation closely analogous to having intransitive preferences (a paradigm of irrationality). Indeed, the agents in these examples are vulnerable to a money pump set-up despite having preferences that exhibit no obvious defect of rationality. We explore several putative solutions to such problems, particularly those that appeal to binding and to deliberative dynamics. We consider the prospects for these solutions, concluding that if they fail, the examples show that money pump arguments are invalid. (shrink)

According to the usual way of understanding how true knowledge attribution works, it is not right to attribute knowledge of p to S unless p is true and S is justified in believing p. This assumption seems to hold even if we shun away from the idea that we can give an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I want to raise some suspicions on the correctness of this traditional picture. I suggest that justification is not (...) always perceived as a necessary condition for true knowledge attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard epistemic terms. This is not to say that justification is never seen as an important requirement; sometimes it certainly is. Still, the full-fledged, traditional position on epistemic justification needs to be seriously qualified. Ultimately, I will contend that this result lends support to a rival epistemological standpoint — what we might dub a Moderate Peircean stance on epistemic matters. (shrink)

One can interpret the No Probabilities for Acts-Principle, namely that any adequate quantitative decision model must in no way contain subjective probabilities for actions in two ways: it can either refer to actions that are performable now and extend into the future or it can refer to actions that are not performable now, but will be in the future. In this paper, I will show that the former is the better interpretation of the principle.

In this article I respond to comments and objections raised in the special issue on my book The Dimensions of Consequentialism. I defend my multi-dimensional consequentialist theory against a range of challenges articulated by Thomas Schmidt, Campbell Brown, Frances Howard-Snyder, Roger Crisp, Vuko Andric and Attila Tanyi, and Jan Gertken. My aim is to show that multi-dimensional consequentialism is, at least, a coherent and intuitively plausible alternative to one-dimensional theories such as utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and mainstream accounts of egalitarianism. I am (...) very grateful to all contributors for reading my book so closely and for devoting time and intellectual energy to thinking about the pros and cons of multi-dimensional consequentialism. (shrink)

The papers focuses on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on her beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind typically targets constraint violations. It purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be confronted with a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent herself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of (...) this kind are synchronic Dutch Books, for the standard probability axioms, diachronic Dutch Books, for the more controversial principles of reflection and conditionalization, and Money Pumps, for the acyclicity requirement on preferences. The paper suggests that the proposed exploitation set-ups share a common feature. If the violator of a given constraint is logically and mathematically competent, and if she prefers to be better off rather than worse off, she can be exploited only if she is disunified in her decision-making, i.e. only if she makes decisions on various issues she faces separately rather than jointly. Unification in decision making is relatively unproblematic in synchronic contexts, but it may be costly and inconvenient diachronically. On this view, therefore, pragmatic arguments should be seen as delivering conditional recommendations: If you want to afford disunification, then you’d better satisfy these constraints. They identify safeguards of a disunified mind. Isaac Levi’s position on these matters is diametrically different. According to Levi, only synchronic pragmatic arguments are valid. The diachronic ones, he argues, lack any validity at all. This line of reasoning is questioned in the paper. (shrink)

We propose a model for belief which is free of presuppositions. Current models for belief suffer from two difficulties. One is the well known problem of logical omniscience which tends to follow from most models. But a more important one is the fact that most models do not even attempt to answer the question what it means for someone to believe something, and just what it is that is believed. We provide a flexible model which allows us to give meaning (...) to beliefs in general contexts, including the context of animal belief , and of human belief which is expressed in language. (shrink)

En este trabajo argumento a favor de la idea de que una explicación científica es una respuesta a una pregunta, aunque no necesariamente a una pregunta-por-qué. Esto no quiere decir que las preguntas-por-qué no sean elementos fundamentales de toda investigación científica: su importancia radica en que son capaces de organizar y sistematizar un conjunto dado de creencias. Para justificar esta afirmación, comienzo por identificar tres estadios básicos en los cuales pueden surgir preguntas-por-qué, y luego procedo a caracterizar su estructura. Muestro (...) finalmente cómo usar este análisis para elucidar la noción de poder de unificación de hipótesis rivales. Entiendo que esta última noción, a su vez, constituye uno de los criterios que debemos considerar a la hora de evaluar cuál de dichas hipótesis rivales es la mejor explicación disponible, comparativamente hablando. In this paper I take scientific explanations to be answers to questions, though not necessarily to why-questions. This, however, is not meant to imply that why-questions are not fundamental in their own peculiar way. As I understand it, why-questions are crucial elements in any research process because they are able to organize and systematize an agent's belief set. In order to justify my claim I start by identifying three basic stages in which whyquestions can arise, and then I proceed to characterize their structure. I also show how to use this analysis to elucidate the notion of comparative unification power of rival hypotheses. The notion of comparative unification power, in turn, can be thought of as one of the criteria that we should take into account at the time of assessing which of such rival hypotheses is the best explanation available, comparatively speaking. (shrink)

Consider a group of people whose preferences satisfy the axioms of one of the current versions of utility theory, such as von Neumann-Morgenstern (1944), Savage (1954), or Bolker-Jeffrey (1965). There are political and economic contexts in which it is of interest to find ways of aggregating these individual preferences into a group preference ranking. The question then arises of whether methods of aggregation exist in which the group’s preferences also satisfy the axioms of the chosen utility theory, and in which (...) at the same time the aggregation process satisfies certain plausible conditions (e.g., the Pareto conditions below). (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of disagreement with oneself, in both its diachronic and synchronic forms. A puzzling case of synchronic intrapersonal disagreement is presented and the paper considers its implications. One is that belief is a genus that comes in two species: as disposition and as commitment. Another is that self-deception consists in a conflict between one's beliefs as dispositions and one's beliefs as commitments. Synchronic intrapersonal disagreement also has implications for the condition that needs to be fulfilled in (...) order to have genuine disagreement tout court, and for the different ways in which it can be satisfied. (shrink)

Normative ethics usually presupposes background accounts of human agency, and although different ethical theorists might have different pictures of human agency in mind, there is still something like a standard account that most of mainstream normative ethics can be understood to rest on. Ethical theorists tend to have Rational Man, or at least some close relative to him, in mind when constructing normative theories. It will be argued here that empirical findings raise doubts about the accuracy of this kind of (...) account; human beings fall too far short of ideals of rationality for it to be meaningful to devise normative ideals within such a framework. Instead, it is suggested, normative ethics could be conducted more profitably if the idea of unifying all ethical concerns into one theoretical account is abandoned. This disunity of ethical theorizing would then match the disunited and heuristic-oriented nature of our agency. (shrink)

It is a popular view thatpractical deliberation excludes foreknowledge of one's choice. Wolfgang Spohn and Isaac Levi have argued that not even a purely probabilistic self-predictionis available to thedeliberator, if one takes subjective probabilities to be conceptually linked to betting rates. It makes no sense to have a betting rate for an option, for one's willingness to bet on the option depends on the net gain from the bet, in combination with the option's antecedent utility, rather than on the offered (...) odds. And even apart from this consideration, assigning probabilities to the options among which one is choosing is futile since such probabilities could be of no possible use in choice. The paper subjects these arguments to critical examination and suggests that, appearances notwithstanding, practical deliberation need not crowd outself-prediction. (shrink)

Are predictions about how one will freely and intentionally behave in the future ever relevant to how one ought to behave? There is good reason to think they are. As imperfect agents, we have responsibilities of self-management, which seem to require that we take account of the predictable ways we're liable to go wrong. I defend this conclusion against certain objections to the effect that incorporating predictions concerning one's voluntary conduct into one's practical reasoning amounts to evading responsibility for that (...) conduct. There is, however, some truth to this sort of objection. To understand the legitimate role of self-prediction in practical reasoning, we need to distinguish instances of coping responsibly with an anticipated failure to behave as one ought, on the one hand, from mere acquiescence in one's flaws, on the other. I argue that, to draw this distinction, we must recognize certain limits on the use of self-prediction as a ground of choice. (shrink)