Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. (...) We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states. (shrink)

Decision theorists have attempted to accommodate several violations of decision theory’s axiomatic requirements by modifying how agents’ choice options are individuated and formally represented. In recent years, prominent authors have worried that these modifications threaten to trivialize decision theory, make the theory unfalsifiable, impose overdemanding requirements on decision theorists, and hamper decision theory’s internal coherence. In this paper, I draw on leading descriptive and normative works in contemporary decision theory to address these prominent concerns. In doing so, I articulate and (...) assess several different criteria for individuating and formally representing agents’ choice options. (shrink)

This paper presents Sen's theory of agency, focusing on the role of commitment in this theory as both problematic and potentially illuminating. His account of some commitments as goal-displacing gives rise to a dilemma given the standard philosophical theory of agency.Eithercommitment-motivated actions are externally motivated, in which case they are not expressions of agency,orsuch actions are internally motivated, in which case the commitment is not goal-displacing. I resolve this dilemma and accommodate his view of commitment as motivation by developing a (...) broader descriptive theory of agency, which recognizes both agent goal-directed and goal-displacing commitments. I propose a type of goal-displacing commitment, which I call ‘tacit commitment’, that can be seen to fit between the horns. Tacit commitments regulate behaviour without being made conscious and explicit. This resolution suggests a means of bridging the normative/descriptive gap in social-scientific explanation. (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

The classical theory of rational choice is built on several important internal consistency conditions. In recent years, the reasonableness of those internal consistency conditions has been questioned and criticized, and several responses to accommodate such criticisms have been proposed in the literature. This paper develops a general framework to accommodate the issues raised by the criticisms of classical rational choice theory, and examines the broad impact of these criticisms from both normative and positive points of view.

The idea of confining the idea of ‘rationality’ with that of the ‘choice of best elements’ unnecessarily limits the sense and scope of ‘rationality’. The existing internal consistency conditions that are popularly used in the social choice theory to assess a choice function are insufficient to analyse several choice patterns. The paper tries to address that problem by accepting a broader definition of rationality and characterizes choice behaviours where an individual chooses a k-th best element from set of alternatives, where (...) k is an integer. (shrink)

The basic axioms or formal conditions of decision theory, especially the ordering condition put on preferences and the axioms underlying the expected utility formula, are subject to a number of counter-examples, some of which can be endowed with normative value and thus fall within the ambit of a philosophical reflection on practical rationality. Against such counter-examples, a defensive strategy has been developed which consists in redescribing the outcomes of the available options in such a way that the threatened axioms or (...) conditions continue to hold. We examine how this strategy performs in three major cases: Sen's counterexamples to the binariness property of preferences, the Allais paradox of EU theory under risk, and the Ellsberg paradox of EU theory under uncertainty. We find that the strategy typically proves to be lacking in several major respects, suffering from logical triviality, incompleteness, and theoretical insularity. To give the strategy more structure, philosophers have developed “principles of individuation”; but we observe that these do not address the aforementioned defects. Instead, we propose the method of checking whether the strategy can overcome its typical defects once it is given a proper theoretical expansion. We find that the strategy passes the test imperfectly in Sen's case and not at all in Allais's. In Ellsberg's case, however, it comes close to meeting our requirement. But even the analysis of this more promising application suggests that the strategy ought to address the decision problem as a whole, rather than just the outcomes, and that it should extend its revision process to the very statements it is meant to protect. Thus, by and large, the same cautionary tale against redescription practices runs through the analysis of all three cases. A more general lesson, simply put, is that there is no easy way out from the paradoxes of decision theory. (shrink)

In the face of an impossibility result, some assumption must be relaxed. The Mere Addition Paradox is an impossibility result in population ethics. Here, I explore substantially weakening the decision-theoretic assumptions involved. The central finding is that the Mere Addition Paradox persists even in the general framework of choice functions when we assume Path Independence as a minimal decision-theoretic constraint. Choice functions can be thought of either as generalizing the standard axiological assumption of a binary “betterness” relation, or as providing (...) a general framework for a normative (rather than axiological) theory of population ethics. Path Independence, a weaker assumption than typically (implicitly) made in population ethics, expresses the idea that, in making a choice from a set of alternatives, the order in which options are assessed or considered is ethically arbitrary and should not affect the final choice. Since the result establishes a conflict between the relevant ethical principles and even very weak decision-theoretic principles, we have more reason to doubt the ethical principles. (shrink)

[This version of the paper has been superseded by "Reason-based choice and context-dependence: An explanatory framework", forthcoming in Economics & Philosophy.] -/- We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent’s choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the “fundamental preference relation”). Reason-based rationalizations can explain non-classical choice behaviour, including boundedly rational and sophisticated rational behaviour, (...) and predict choices in unobserved contexts, an issue neglected in standard choice theory. We characterize the behavioural implications of different reason-based models and distinguish two kinds of context-dependent motivation: “context-variant” motivation, where the agent cares about different properties in different contexts, and “context-regarding” motivation, where the agent cares not only about properties of the options, but also about properties relating to the context. (shrink)