Counterfactual Desirability
Orri Stefansson (London School of Economics)

March 25, 2014, 1:15pm - 2:45pm
Institute of Philosophy, University of London

London
United Kingdom

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Tues 25 Mar, 5.15pm Room 243, second floor, Senate House, WC1
Orri Stefansson (LSE)
Counterfactual Desirability
Abstract: What could have been often impacts the desirability of what actually occurs. Such dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes create well-known problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais paradox. This paper deals with these problems by extending the domain of Richard Jeffrey's desirability measure to counterfactual prospects. The extension is based on Richard Bradley's recent multidimensional possible world semantics for conditionals, and the resulting framework allows us to represent as maximising desirability certain preferences that have troubled decision theorists for decades. We then show what axioms need to be added to the framework to obtain a standard expected utility representation. Due to the logical richness of the multidimensional framework, we can obtain such a representation without some of the more controversial assumptions of Leonard Savage's theory. (Based on joint work with Richard Bradley).

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