Social Norms, Rational Choice and Belief Change

Abstract

This article elaborates on foundational issues in the social sciences and their impact on the contemporary theory of belief revision. Recent work in the foundations of economics has focused on the role external social norms play in choice. Amartya Sen has argued in [Sen93] that the traditional rationalizability approach used in the theory of rational choice has serious problems accommodating the role of social norms. Sen's more recent work [Sen96, Sen97] proposes how one might represent social norms in the theory of choice, and in a very recent article [BS07] Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura develop Sen's proposal, offering an extension of the classical theory of choice that is capable of dealing with social norms. The first part of this article offers an alternative functional characterization of the extended notion of rationality employed by Bossert and Suzumura in [BS07]. This characterization, unlike the one offered in [BS07], represents a norm-sensitive notion of rationality in terms of a pure functional constraint unmediated by a notion of revealed preference (something that is crucial for the application developed in the second part of this article). This functional characterization is formulated for general domains (as is Bossert and Suzumura's characterization) and is therefore empirically more applicable than usual characterizations of rationality. Interestingly, the functional constraint we propose is a variant of a condition first entertained in [AGM85] by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson in the area of belief change. The second part of this article applies the theory developed in the first part to the realm of belief change. We first point out that social norms can be invoked to concoct counterexamples against some postulates of belief change (like postulate (*7)) that are necessary for belief change to be relational. These examples constitute the epistemological counterpart of Sen's counterexamples against condition α in rational choice (as a matter of fact, Rott has showed in [Rot01] that condition and postulate (*7) are mutually mappable). These examples are variants of examples Rott has recently presented in [Rot04]. One of our main goals in this article consists in applying the theory developed in the first part to develop a theory of norm-inclusive belief change that circumvents the counterexamples. We offer a new axiomatization for belief change and we furnish correspondence results relating constraints of rational choice to postulates of belief change

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

How not to change the theory of theory change: A reply to Tennant.Sven Ove Hansson & Hans Rott - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3):361-380.
Rational choice theory's mysterious rivals.Dennis Chong - 1995 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 9 (1-2):37-57.
Infinitary belief revision.Dongmo Zhang & Norman Foo - 2001 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 30 (6):525-570.
Rational choice and agm belief revision.Giacomo Bonanno - 2009 - Artificial Intelligence 173 (12-13):1194-1203.
Introduction: Aspects of Rationality.Alfred R. Mele & Piers Rawling - 2004 - In Alfred R. Mele & Piers Rawling (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality. Oxford University Press.
Rational Choice Virtues.Bruno Verbeek - 2010 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (5):541-559.
External norms and rationality of choice.Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (2):139-152.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-10-29

Downloads
215 (#85,107)

6 months
11 (#127,761)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Arthur Paul Pedersen
Carnegie Mellon University (PhD)

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references