Desire, expectation, and invariance

Bradley, Richard ORCID: 0000-0003-2184-7844 and Stefansson, H. Orii (2016) Desire, expectation, and invariance. Mind, 125 (499). 691 - 725. ISSN 0026-4423

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Abstract

The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis’s argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of this paper is to explore what impact the rejection of Invariance has on the DAB thesis. Without assuming Invariance, we first refute all versions of DAB that entail that there are only two levels of goodness. We next consider two theses according to which rational desires are intimately connected to expectations of (multi-levelled) goodness, and show that these are consistent with Bayesian decision theory as long as we assume that the contents of ‘value propositions’ are not fixed. We explain why this conclusion is independently plausible, and show how to construct such propositions

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/
Additional Information:	© 2016 The Authors
Divisions:	Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Date Deposited:	07 Jan 2016 15:59
Last Modified:	03 Oct 2024 06:33
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/64866

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