Standard principles of rational decision assume that an option's utility is both comprehensive and accessible. These features constrain interpretations of an option's utility. This essay presents a way of understanding utility and laws of utility. It explains the relation between an option's utility and its outcome's utility and argues that an option's utility is relative to a specification of the option. Utility's relativity explains how a decision problem's framing affects an option's utility and its rationality even for an agent who (...) is cognitively perfect and lacks only empirical information. The essay rewrites standard laws of utility to accommodate relativization to propositions' specifications. The new laws are generalizations of the standard laws and yield them as special cases. (shrink)

How do rational agents coordinate in a single-stage, noncooperative game? Common knowledge of the payoff matrix and of each player's utility maximization among his strategies does not suffice. This paper argues that utility maximization among intentions and then acts generates coordination yielding a payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium. ‡I thank the audience at my paper's presentation at the 2006 PSA meeting for many insightful points. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211; e-mail: [email protected].

I connect commodification arguments to an empirical literature, present a mechanism by which commodification may occur, and show how this may restrict the range of goods and services that are subject to commodification, therefore having implications for the use of commodification arguments in political theory. Commodification arguments assert that some people’s trading a good or service can debase it for third parties. They consist of a normative premise, a theory of value, and an empirical premise, a mechanism whereby some people’s (...) market exchange affects how goods can be valued by others. Hence, their soundness depends on the existence of a suitable candidate mechanism for the empirical premise. The ‘motivation crowding effect’ has been cited as the empirical base of commodification. I show why the main explanations of motivation crowding – signaling and over-justification – do not provide mechanisms that could underpin the empirical premise. In doing this, I reveal some requirements on any candidate me... (shrink)

It is a mistake to think that instrumental rationality fixes a single standard for judging or describing actions. While there is a core conception of instrumental rationality, we appeal to different elaborations of that conception for different purposes. An action can be instrumentally rational in some sense(s) but not in others. As we learn more about behavior, it is possible to add useful elaborations of the core conception of instrumental rationality. In this paper, I propose a new elaboration based on (...) Frederic Schick's work on understandings. (shrink)

The options that people face are rarely ideal: they are good in some ways and poor in others. People have problems choosing among such options because they don’t know which ends to favor. Multiple objectives pose a problem not only for decision makers, but also for our account of decision making. People act to achieve their ends given their beliefs. In order to handle decisions with multiple objectives, however, this story must be supplemented by an account of which ends are (...) implicated in which decisions (e.g., do individual goals guide particular choices? do different ends jointly pick out courses of action?). Unfortunately, such an account is lacking. As a result, there is a gap (at least) in our most basic account of human behavior. In this paper I explore that gap and examine some proposals for closing it. (shrink)

Bayesianism is a collection of positions in several related fields, centered on the interpretation of probability as something like degree of belief, as contrasted with relative frequency, or objective chance. However, Bayesianism is far from a unified movement. Bayesians are divided about the nature of the probability functions they discuss; about the normative force of this probability function for ordinary and scientific reasoning and decision making; and about what relation (if any) holds between Bayesian and non-Bayesian concepts.

Decision theory is a theory of rationality, but the concept of rationality has several different dimensions. Making decision theory more realistic with respect to one dimension may well have the result of making it less realistic in another dimension. This paper illustrates this tension in the context of sequential choice. Trying to make decision theory more realistic by accommodating resoluteness and commitment brings the normative assessment dimension of rationality into conflict with the action-guiding dimension. In the case of resolute choice (...) the conflict comes because of a clash of perspectives. The perspective from which resolute choice seems normatively compelling is not the perspective from which it can serve the purpose of guiding action. (shrink)

The paper is an addition to the intensionalist approach to decision theory, with emphasis on game theoretic modelling. Extensionality in games is an a priori requirement that players exhibit the same behavior in all algebraically equivalent games on pain of irrationality. Intensionalism denies that it is always irrational to play differently in differently represented but algebraically equivalent versions of a game. I offer a framework to integrate game non-extensionality with the more familiar idea of linguistic non-extensionality from philosophy of language, (...) followed by applications of it based on toy examples of well-known game models. I argue that the notion of what I call “Intensional Nash Equilibrium” is, in effect, very useful in understanding human decision-making. (shrink)

To clarify and illuminate the place of probability in science Ellery Eells and James H. Fetzer have brought together some of the most distinguished philosophers ...

The stakes-shifting cases suggest that pragmatic factors such as stakes play an important role in determining our intuitive judgments of whether or not S knows that p. This seems to be in conflict with intellectualism, according to which pragmatic factors in general should not be taken into account, when considering whether or not S knows that p. This paper develops a theory of judgments of knowledge status that reconciles intellectualism with our intuitive judgments regarding the stakes-shifting cases. I argue that (...) pragmatic factors affect only our epistemic perspectives, i.e., the ways in which we evaluate S’s epistemic position. Therefore, pragmatic factors only have an indirect impact on our judgments of knowledge status. (shrink)