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Why We Still Need the Logic of Decision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

James M. Joyce
James M. Joyce*
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, The University of Michigan, 435 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1003.
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Abstract

In The Logic of Decision Richard Jeffrey defends a version of expected utility theory that advises agents to choose acts with an eye to securing evidence for thinking that desirable results will ensue. Proponents of “causal” decision theory have argued that Jeffrey's account is inadequate because it fails to properly discriminate the causal features of acts from their merely evidential properties. Jeffrey's approach has also been criticized on the grounds that it makes it impossible to extract a unique probability/utility representation from a sufficiently rich system of preferences (given a zero and unit for measuring utility). The existence of these problems should not blind us to the fact that Jeffrey's system has advantages that no other decision theory can match: it can be underwritten by a particularly compelling representation theorem proved by Ethan Bolker; and it has a property called partition invariance that every reasonable theory of rational choice must possess. I shall argue that the non-uniqueness problem can be finessed, and that it is impossible to adequately formulate causal decision theory, or any other, without using Jeffrey's theory as one's basic analysis of rational desire.

Type
A Symposium in Honor of Richard Jeffrey
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Sep., 2000 , 2000 , pp. S1 - S13
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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