Isaac Levi

(1930 - 2018)

Isaac Levi is one of the preeminent philosophers in the areas of pragmatic rationality and epistemology. This collection of essays constitutes an important presentation of his original and influential ideas about rational choice and belief. A wide range of topics is covered, including consequentialism and sequential choice, consensus, voluntarism of belief, and the tolerance of the opinions of others. The essays elaborate on the idea that principles of rationality are norms that regulate the coherence of our beliefs and values with our rational choices. The norms impose minimal constraints on deliberation and inquiry, but they also impose demands well beyond the capacities of deliberating agents. This major collection will be eagerly sought out by a wide range of philosophers in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science, as well as economists, decision theorists, and statisticians.

An argument is advanced to show why E-admissibility should be preferred over maximality as a principle of rational choice where rationality is understood as minimal rationality. Consideration is given to the distinction between second best and second worst options in three way choice that is ignored according to maximality. It is shown why the behavior exhibited in addressing the problems posed by Allais (Econometrica 21:503–546, 1952) and by Ellsberg (Q Econ 75:643–669, 1961) do not violate the independence postulate according to minimal rationality

This volume presents a series of essays which investigate the nature of intellectual inquiry: what its aims are and how it operates. The startingpoint is the work of the American pragmatists C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. Inquiry according to Peirce is a struggle to replace doubt by true belief. Dewey insisted that the transformation was from an indeterminate situation to a determinate or non-problematic one. So Isaac Levi's subject is changes in doxastic commitments, which may involve changes in attitudes or changes in situations in which attitudes are entangled. The question of what justifies modification of doxastic commitments is a normative one, and so may not be understandable in purely naturalistic terms."--Dust jacket.

  We present a decision-theoretically motivated notion of contraction which, we claim, encodes the principles of minimal change and entrenchment. Contraction is seen as an operation whose goal is to minimize loses of informational value. The operation is also compatible with the principle that in contracting A one should preserve the sentences better entrenched than A (when the belief set contains A). Even when the principle of minimal change and the latter motivation for entrenchment figure prominently among the basic intuitions in the works of, among others, Quine and Ullian (1978), Levi (1980, 1991), Harman (1988) and Gärdenfors (1988), formal accounts of belief change (AGM, KM – see Gärdenfors (1988); Katsuno and Mendelzon (1991)) have abandoned both principles (see Rott (2000)). We argue for the principles and we show how to construct a contraction operation, which obeys both. An axiom system is proposed. We also prove that the decision-theoretic notion of contraction can be completely characterized in terms of the given axioms. Proving this type of completeness result is a well-known open problem in the field, whose solution requires employing both decision-theoretical techniques and logical methods recently used in belief change

A comparison is made between the criterion of choice of E-admissibility I proposed in Levi, 1974 and elaborated in Levi, 1980 and 1986, and the ideas about norms elaborated by Alchourrón and Bulygin with an emphasis on the fact that choice cannot always be evaluated in terms of binary comparisons as the distinction between second worst and not second worst illustrates. Se establece una comparación entre el criterio de E-admisibilidad propuesto en Levi,1974 y elaborado en Levi,1980 y 1986 y las ideas sobre normas elaboradas por Alchourrón y Bulygin enfatizando el hecho de que una elección no puede siempre ser evaluada en términos de comparaciones binarias como lo ilustra la distinción entre "second worst" y "not second worst"

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a linguistic entity or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists.