Rolling Back Idealizations

Abstract

Abstract Common principles of rationality adopt idealizations that a normative model makes explicit. A standard method of generalizing the model is to relax an idealization and revise principles of rationality to accommodate the change. Three idealizations to relax are: (1) cost-free reflection (2) certainty of the contents of propositions entertained, and (3) utility assignments that are stable throughout a choice. This chapter sketches ways of relaxing these idealizations. It shows how deliberations using beliefs and desires may approximate results of deliberations using probabilities and utilities. It generalizes probability and utility assignments for uncertainty about the content of a proposition by relativizing the assignments to a way of understanding the proposition. Finally, it presents principles of choice for decision problems with unstable utility assignments to acts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.