Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Jan-Paul Sandmann (Harvard University), on his recent paper " Irrationality and Indecision " ( Synthese,  2023). Jan-Paul Sandmann What is wrong with preferring some option a to option b , b to c , but c again to a ? Why shouldn’t one cling on to such cyclical preferences? The standard response is that one ought not hold on to cyclical preferences because one could be money pumped as a result. By focusing on the binary comparisons alone, it would seem reasonable to pay some amount of money for b rather than c , a rather than b , as well as c rather than a .  If the agent however takes these actions, she ends up with the option she started with, c , while having paid some money. And that clearly does not seem sensible: acting upon a preference cycle would not be in the agent’s interest. The money pump argument thus draws one to conclude that the agent should get rid of her cyclical preferences.  The argument is powerful, but it also makes som...

Christian List  organised a two-day workshop on Reasons, Rationality, and Intentional Agency in the Lakatos Building (picture above) at the LSE on 29th and 30th September 2017. I was lucky enough to attend three talks on the 29th, and here is a brief report. The event was funded by the Leverhulme via a  Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship  awarded to List. Kate Vredenburgh from Harvard (picture above) opened the workshop with a paper entitled “Rational Choice Explanation”. She started with the observation that choice-frameworks have been criticised a lot recently. Especially, the revealed preferences approach, according to which statements about preferences are summaries of choice behaviour, has been criticised on the basis that it cannot provide causal explanations and action explanations. Vredenburgh's main thesis was that, if revealed preferences theorists adopt a unificationist theory of explanation, then they can avoid some of the problems. Reveale...

Robert Davies This post is by Robert Davies , a PhD student at the University of York.  Robert is interested in self-knowledge and memory, and particularly how the study of memory can shed light on philosophical problems in self-knowledge.  Here is one variety of introspective failure: I make a choice but, when providing reasons, I offer reasons that could not be my reasons for that choice. Choice Blindness research by Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and their colleagues ( 2005 –) suggests it is surprisingly prevalent (see e.g. Johansson et al. 2008 ), showing a low rate of manipulation detection and a high degree of willingness, in non-clinical participants, to offer confabulatory explanations for manipulated choices across a range of modalities and environments (see e.g. Hall et al. 2006 ; Hall et al. 2010 ). We see ourselves as introspectively competent, rational decision-makers—capable of knowing our reasons, weighing them as reasons , and self-regulating when requir...