1,720,964 research outputs found
Optimization and Beyond
No full textInternational audienceThis paper will be concerned with hard choices—that is, choice situations where an agent cannot make a rationally justified choice. Specifically, this paper asks: if an agent cannot optimize in a given situation, are they facing a hard choice? A pair of claims are defended in light of this question. First, situations where an agent cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation constitute a hard choice. Second, situations where agents cannot optimize because the binary preference or value relation violates acyclicity do not constitute a hard choice
Optimization and Beyond
Full text linkThis paper will be concerned with hard choices—that is, choice situations where an agent cannot make a rationally justified choice. Specifically, this paper asks: if an agent cannot optimize in a given situation, are they facing a hard choice? A pair of claims are defended in light of this question. First, situations where an agent cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation constitute a hard choice. Second, situations where agents cannot optimize because the binary preference or value relation violates acyclicity do not constitute a hard choice
What is a Hard Choice?
Full text linkThe title of this thesis is also its question: what is a hard choice? I start addressing this in chapter 1 by arguing that at the most general level, a hard choice is a situation that condemns an agent to failure. Specifically, hard choices condemn an agent to failure because rational agents must act in a way that can be justified, but they cannot do so when facing a hard choice. They cannot do so because, in a hard choice, an agent's given reasons for action will fail to determine what, all things considered, the agent ought to do. Subsequent chapters of this thesis develops this view in more detail. Chapter 1* presents the formal framework that will be used in this thesis. It argues that there is an important sense in which the standard theory of rational choice needs to be reformulated in order to present a sound theory of hard choices. Chapter 2 argues that leading positions on hard choices that can be found in the literature provide an inadequate understanding of them. The argument presented to defend my claims will refer directly or indirectly to the fairly intuitive idea that a situation where a best---or optimal---alternative exists does not constitute a hard choice. That is, optimization implies rationality. Chapter 3 asks the converse: does rationality imply optimization? The chapter defends two claims. First, if you cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation that you hold, then you are facing a hard choice. Second, if you cannot optimize because the binary preference or value relation that you hold is cyclic, then you are not facing a hard choice. Chapter 4 doubles down on this claim by characterizing this understanding of a hard choice. More specifically, chapter 4 presents a systematic analysis of the axiomatic structure of hard choices with the help of the theory of rational choice. This is the most formal chapter of the thesis, and it presents joint work undertaken with Prof. Martin van Hees and Dr. Roland Luttens. Chapter 5 also presents joint work with Prof. Martin van Hees and Dr. Roland Luttens. This chapter scrutinizes the most famous existence argument for hard choices, to wit: the small-improvement argument, and argues that it fails to establish the existence of hard choices. Chapter 6 will be concerned with extending the analysis of hard choices that has been presented in the preceding chapters. Specifically, observe that the claims in the preceding chapters have been articulated and defended by presupposing the existence of an all things considered binary relation that describes an agent's preferences or values. Chapter 6, however, will present an analysis of hard choices that does not require presupposing such a binary relation. A Coda motivates the possibility of another extension: collective hard choices
What Public Policy Can Be: An Interview with Matthew Adler
No full textThe Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics(EJPE) interviewed Adler about his formative years (section I); his work on the theoretical foundations of public policy, zooming in onwelfare-consequentialism and social welfare functions(section II), welfarism and interpersonal comparisons(section III), the ethical deliberator and the role of the philosopher (section IV); and, finally,his views and visions for interdisciplinary work in law, economics, and philosophy,as well as his advice for graduate students in the field (section V)
Small amendment arguments: how they work and what they do and do not show
No full textInternational audienceThe small improvement argument has been said to establish that the standard weak preference or value relation can be incomplete. We first show that the argument is one of three possible ‘small amendment arguments’, each of which would yield the same conclusion. Generalizing the analysis thus, we subsequently present a strong and a weak version of small amendment arguments and derive the exact rationality conditions under which they reveal incompleteness. The results show that the arguments (in any of their variants) need not reveal a problem for the possibility of rational choice. In fact, it can be argued that they only reveal such a problem if the underlying relation is complete rather than incomplete
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
What Public Policy Can Be: An Interview with Matthew Adler
Full text linkThe Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics(EJPE) interviewed Adler about his formative years (section I); his work on the theoretical foundations of public policy, zooming in onwelfare-consequentialism and social welfare functions(section II), welfarism and interpersonal comparisons(section III), the ethical deliberator and the role of the philosopher (section IV); and, finally,his views and visions for interdisciplinary work in law, economics, and philosophy,as well as his advice for graduate students in the field (section V)
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