Article

Cheyne's paradox - And how to solve it

June 2012
Ratio 25(2)

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2012.00534.x

Authors:

Colin Cheyne's ‘paradox of reasonable believing’ poses a problem for both internalist and externalist theories of rationality. Cheyne suggests that externalists will more easily solve it. I argue the opposite.

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A paradox of justified believing

Article

Jul 2009
Ratio

Colin Cheyne

The following principles may plausibly be included in a wide range of theories of epistemic justification: There are circumstances in which an agent is justified in believing a falsehood, There are circumstances in which an agent is justified in believing a principle of epistemic justification, Beliefs acquired in compliance with a justifiably‐believed epistemic principle are justified. I argue that it follows from these three individually plausible claims that an agent's belief may be both justified and unjustified. I consider how theories may avoid this paradox, and conclude that deontological theories of epistemic justification face considerable, perhaps insurmountable, difficulties.

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Meghdad Ghari

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Positional Voting and the BC

January 1995

Donald G. Saari

As we learned in Chap. 3, problems and paradoxes must be anticipated with procedures based on pairwise rankings. The subtle reason is that these methods manage to drop the central assumption of transitivity. This suggests using methods, such as the plurality vote and the BC, which admit only rational voters. Do they have problems? Rest assured; there are plenty of them! But, with a further ... [Show full abstract] decomposition of profiles, it becomes easy to analyze the problems and create profile examples.

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Richard Dowell

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October 2005

The game-theoretic assumption of ‘common knowledge of rationality’ leads to paradoxes when rationality is represented in a Bayesian framework as cautious expected utility maximization with independent beliefs (ICEU). We diagnose and resolve these paradoxes by presenting a new class of formal models of players’ reasoning in which the analogue of common knowledge is provability in common reason. We ... [Show full abstract] show that a range of standards of decision-theoretic practical rationality can be assumed without inconsistency to be provable in common reason in models of this class. We investigate the implications arising when the standard of decision-theoretic rationality so assumed is ICEU.

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Legal Rationality among Different Types of Rationality

January 1984

Marek Aureliusz Zirk-Sadowski

The question about rationality of axiological decisions is very often felt to be a paradoxical problem. Rationality and the choice of values have nothing in common for those advocates of axiological relativism who claim that there is no possibility to justify a commitment to any moral, religious, scientific etc., practice. Such forms of human life create their own standards by which we may judge ... [Show full abstract] them. Only as the advocates of a given system of values may we, committing ourselves to its notions, make this system understandable for us. The commitment determines the correctness of a system but there is no justification for the commitment itself. Only deterministic explanations, e. g. our psychic features, the surroundings we were brought up in may eventually give reasons for the commitment but they do not justify it.

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Nida Vasiliauskaitė

The article deals with the problem of a rational consensus in contemporary political philosophy, arosed by postmodern critique of modern Reason. In this context two important ideas - an "Overlapping consensus" of John Rawls and "the Differend" of Jean-Francois Lyotard - are discussed, compared and criticized. Paradoxical implications produced by a common antifundamentist approach are pointed out. ... [Show full abstract] An attempt is made to show that in both cases consensus or disensus are allready presupposed in advance: the kind of the thesis depends upon suppositions about the nature of epistemic pluralism and its link with the political.

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January 2013 · Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Philosophie

Gianfranco Soldati

Following a certain transparency claim, evidence concerning the external world can be used in order to ground the attribution of a belief to oneself. This epistemic privilege arguably depends on the applicability of norms of rationality that are manifest in paradoxes of the Moorean kind ('It is raining but I don't believe it'). In this paper I clarify how these norms of rationality apply to the ... [Show full abstract] self-attribut ion of belief and I determine the features by virtue of which they deliver genuine epistemic warrants. A central issue in this debate depends on the way experiences provide the subject with reasons to form a belief. It is useful in this respect to compare the self-attribution of judgements, of acts of judging, to the self-attribution of other kinds of experiences, such as perceptions and desires.

Chapter

Pragmatic Intuitions and Rational Choice

January 1986

Russell Hardin

The literature of rational choice is pervaded with apparent paradoxes. Often the paradoxes are contrived in the following sense. We consider a problem as though it were a realistic or typical choice problem similar to the kinds of problems we normally face in everyday life. Yet the conditions of the problem as specified defy normal experience. Reasoning through the problem under the specified ... [Show full abstract] conditions yields one result while baldly attacking the problem from the intuitions developed from our normal experience yields a contrary result. Hence we think there is a paradox.

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The Game Take-or-Play: A Paradox of Rationality in Simultaneous Move Games

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Ferdinando Colombo

We show that paradoxical conclusions similar to those emerging from reasonings of backward induction can arise also in simultaneous move games with incomplete information. In a static setting, these paradoxes are particularly puzzling, because the usual attempts to avoid the backward induction solution do not work. In a dynamic setting, there is a way out of the paradoxes, which hinges on a ... [Show full abstract] (possibly endogenous) uncertainty over the past behaviour of the players and does not call for a long time–horizon.

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The Creative Construction of Rationality

January 1989

Is the development of rationality a creative process? Is there something paradoxical about the idea that creativity can result in increasing rationality? We will argue in this chapter that rationality is indeed creatively constructed by the developing individual. If one thinks of creativity as consisting of unconstrained flights of the imagination and of rationality as strict adherence to ... [Show full abstract] mechanical rules of reasoning, there is indeed something paradoxical about this conclusion. The paradox dissolves, however, upon reconsideration of the definitions of both rationality and creativity.

Article

Full-text available

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Louis Levy-Garboua

One may reason before making a decision on perceiving potential objections to expected utility-preference. Cognitive consistency is attained by making full use of available information, i.e. consistent preference and reasons. I show that coincidence between the rational choice and the normative preference requires perfect consciousness, and I provide maximizing rules of decision conditional on ... [Show full abstract] preference which are valid with imperfect consciousness. A necessary and sufficient condition for expected utility to be descriptively valid is given. Under risk, the rational choice converges towards expected utility through unconscious learning. Many well-known paradoxes and anomalies of choice, evaluation and information are solved for well-behaved preferences.

Chapter

Moral Responsibility and Individual Choice

January 2015

In this paper we analyze within the framework of individual choice theory assignments of moral responsibility. For this purpose we introduce a so-called responsibility function that describes for any choice situation the alternatives for which the agent would be deemed responsible if she were to choose one of them in that situation. We show under which conditions a responsibility function can be ... [Show full abstract] rationalized by information about which courses of action constitute reasonable alternatives to other courses of action. After thus having characterized one way of assigning responsibility, we show that it leads to what we call the agency paradox: a rational person will in many cases not be responsible for her actions. It is argued that a decision rule that is formally the same as the ‘never choose the uniquely largest’-rule characterized by Baigent and Gaertner (1996) circumvents the paradox. Turning to a possible counterargument to the analysis presented, we conclude by suggesting that moral responsibility should be seen as a criterion for the assessment of the quality of our choice sets rather than as a consideration that is relevant when making our choices.