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Rational Choice and Rational Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2009

Jules L. Coleman
Jules L. Coleman
Affiliation:
Yale Law School
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Extract

There is a close but largely unexplored connection between law and economics and cognitive psychology. Law and economics applies economic models, modes of analysis, and argument to legal problems. Economic theory can be applied to legal problems for predictive, explanatory, or evaluative purposes. In explaining or assessing human action, economic theory presupposes a largely unarticulated account of rational, intentional action. Philosophers typically analyze intentional action in terms of desires and beliefs. I intend to perform some action because I believe that it will (is likely to) produce an outcome that I desire. This standard “belief-desire” model of action invokes what philosophers of psychology and action theorists aptly refer to as a “folk psychology.”

Type
Articles
Information
Legal Theory , Volume 3 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Rationality , June 1997 , pp. 183 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

1. This paper makes no claim to originality. It draws heavily on the work of Stephen Stich, Jaegwon Kim, and Donald Davidson. My goal is the modest one of introducing rational-choice scholars to research in epistemology and philosophy of mind that bears on the methodology of the social sciences and rational-choice theory in particular.

2. There is an obvious but important distinction between drawing warranted or justified inferences and asserting true propositions (whether or not one's assertion constitutes knowledge of the truth asserted). One can draw appropriate inferences, whether by deduction or induction, from a set of false premises. In that case, one's inferences are warranted though the beliefs one asserts may be false. Rational cognition requires the former, not the latter—that is, it requires that one draw warranted inferences from the information available or given; it does not require that one assert true propositions.

3. The experimental literature is nicely summarized in Stephen Stich, 's essay, Could Man Be an Irrational Animal? inGoogle Scholar Naturalizing Epistemology (Kornblith, H. ed., 1985).Google Scholar

4. Davidson, D., On the Very Idea of a Cancefrtual Scheme, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation 183 (1989).Google Scholar

5. These are not sufficient conditions. See Gettier, Edmund, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis 23 (1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. I say traditional epistemology, because naturalist epistemology (which I discuss below) has no interest whatever in answering the skeptic.

7. I owe these distinctions to Leiter, Brian, Rethinking Legal Realism: Toward a Naturalized JurisprudenceGoogle Scholar (manuscript on file with author).

8. This is a point that Schiffer, Stephen notes in Remnants of Meaning (1987).Google Scholar

9. Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (1990).Google Scholar

10. The ethical reductionist neither abandons moral discourse nor denies morality's regulative role. Rather, the reductionist explains moral discourse naturalistically. Goldman can be understood in precisely the same way.

11. Notice an interesting similarity between Stich's views about justified reasoning, and Ronald Dworkin's and the legal realist's views about justified legal reasoning (or adjudication). To the question What does proper adjudicative reasoning consist in?, the realist's answer is: It is what judges already do, only better. To the same question, Dworkin answers: It is what judges do, only done in its idealized form, that is, as done by Hercules. Recall that part of Dworkin's claim is that Hercules captures (in an aspirational form) how judges in fact reason about law. For a useful discussion of Dworkin on this point, see Mackie, John, The Third Theory of Law, inGoogle ScholarDworkin, Ronald and Contemporary Jurisprudence 161, 163Google Scholar (Cohen, Marshall ed., 1983).Google Scholar

12. Quine himself rejects any form of cognitive or cultural relativism. Some postmodernists in legal theory, like Dennis Patterson, have focused on Quine's antifoundationalism or his coherentism in an effort to claim Quine as a founding figure of postmodernism. But this reading of Quine is extremely confused. Patterson's argument appears in Law and Truth (1996); Brian Leiter shows the error of Patterson, 's reading of Quine in Why Quine Is not a PostmodernistGoogle Scholar (manuscript on file with author).

13. Let us begin with traditional normative epistemology. That different people and cultures may reason differently is interesting, but of no immediate consequence to the project of determining how people ought to reason. Traditional epistemology simply rejects the claims of normative relativism.

Things are slightly more complex for the methodological naturalist. The empirical or anthropological claims of cognitive diversity are, if true, relevant to formulating the constraints within which the norms governing warranted belief must be developed. On the other hand, the methodological naturalist has no reason to accept the claims of normative cognitive relativism.

For a naturalist like Stich, who believes that the norms of good reasoning are embedded in actual human cognitive practices, the empirical claims of cognitive relativism, if true, do nothing to undermine the normative project, though they affect the conclusions of that project. The evidence helps us isolate the better cognizers within a culture in much the same way that advanced logic courses enable us to isolate those with more advanced deductive logic skills.

14. Quine, W.V.O., cited in The Fragmentation of Reason 36–37Google Scholar (Stich, Steven ed., 1990).Google Scholar

15. Id. at 37.

16. Id. at 38.

17. Id.

18. Id.

19. Kim, Jaegwon, What Is Naturalized Epistemology? in Supervenience and Mund 216 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Davidson, Donald, Psychology as Philosophy, in Essays on Actions and Events 237 (1980).Google Scholar

21. Davidson, Donald, Thought and Talk, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation 168–169 (1984).Google Scholar

22. See Wayne Davis's comment on my paper elsewhere in this issue of the journal.

23. Dennett, D., Brainstorms (1978).Google Scholar

24. Stich, , supra note 14, at 63.Google Scholar

25. Sober, E., The Nature of Selection (1984).Google Scholar

26. Stich, , supra note 14, at 66.Google Scholar

27. Sober, , supra note 25, at 104–5.Google ScholarKitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition (1985).Google Scholar

28. Stich, , supra note 14, at 66.Google Scholar

29. Id. at 69.