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EPISTEMIC TRANSFORMATION AND RATIONAL CHOICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

Krister Bykvist  and
H. Orri Stefánsson
Krister Bykvist
Affiliation:
Email: krister.bykvist@philosophy.su.se
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Extract

Most people at some point in their lives face transformative decisions that could result in experiences that are radically different from any that they have had, and that could radically change their personalities and preferences. For instance, most people make the conscious decision to either become or not become parents. In a recent but already influential book, L. A. Paul (2014) argues that transformative choices cannot be rational – or, more precisely, that they cannot be rational if one assumes what Paul sees as a cultural paradigm for rational decision-making. Paul arrives at this surprising conclusion due to her understanding of transformative experience as being both epistemically and personally transformative. An experience is epistemically transformative if it ‘teaches [a person] something she could not have learned without having that kind of experience’ (11), but it is personally transformative if it changes the person's point of view and her fundamental preferences (16).

Type
Critical Notice
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 125 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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