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6Illusions About Uncertainty (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (3): 331-340. 1985.
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7Assessing Accident Risks in U.S. Commercial Nuclear Power Plants: Scientific Method and the Rasmussen ReportSocial Research: An International Quarterly 48. 1981.
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73Possibility and probabilityErkenntnis 31 (2-3): 365--86. 1989.De Finetti was a strong proponent of allowing 0 credal probabilities to be assigned to serious possibilities. I have sought to show that (pace Shimony) strict coherence can be obeyed provided that its scope of applicability is restricted to partitions into states generated by finitely many ultimate payoffs. When countable additivity is obeyed, a restricted version of ISC can be applied to partitions generated by countably many ultimate payoffs. Once this is appreciated, perhaps the compelling ch…Read more
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Identity and ConflictSocial Research: An International Quarterly 74 25-50. 2007.A sketch of a way of characterizing multidimensional value commitments and the way they can come into conflict derived from my book Hard Choices is presented and applied to the question of how to characterize the relevance of identity to value commitments and conflict. The views of A.K. Sen and A. Bilgrami are examined in the light of these ideas.
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98Two notions of epistemic validitySynthese 109 (2). 1996.How to accept a conditional? F. P. Ramsey proposed the following test in (Ramsey 1990).(RT) If A, then B must be accepted with respect to the current epistemic state iff the minimal hypothetical change of it needed to accept A also requires accepting B.
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65Hard Choices: Decision Making Under Unresolved ConflictCambridge University Press. 1986.It is a commonplace that in making decisions agents often have to juggle competing values, and that no choice will maximise satisfaction of them all. However, the prevailing account of these cases assumes that there is always a single ranking of the agent's values, and therefore no unresolvable conflict between them. Isaac Levi denies this assumption, arguing that agents often must choose without having balanced their different values and that to be rational, an act does not have to be optimal, …Read more
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38Money Pumps and Diachronic BooksPhilosophy of Science 69 (S3). 2002.The idea that rational agents should have acyclic preferences and should obey conditionalization has been defended on the grounds that otherwise an agent is threatened with becoming a “money pump.” This essay argues that such arguments fail to prove their claims.
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RepliesIn Erik J. Olsson (ed.), Knowledge and Inquiry: Essays on the Pragmatism of Isaac Levi, Cambridge University Press. 2006.
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88Why Rational Agents Should Not Be Liberal MaximizersCanadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (S1): 1-17. 2008.Hans Herzberger's 1973 essay 'Ordinal Preference and Rational Choice' is a classic milestone in the erosion of the idea that rational agents are maximizers of utility. By the time Herzberger wrote, many authors had replaced this claim with the thesis that rational agents are maximizers of preference. That is to say, it was assumed that at the moment of choice a rational agent has a weak ordering representing his or her preferences among the options available to the agent for choice and that the …Read more
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50Belief and ActionThe Monist 48 (2): 306-315. 1964.“Ethics and science,” wrote Poincaré, “have their own domains, which touch but do not interpenetrate. The one shows us to what goal we should aspire, the other, given the goal, teaches us how to attain it.” Poincare’ may be mistaken in supposing that science has nothing to contribute to the selection of goals. He is surely right, however, in insisting on the relevance of the results of science to the choice of policies for realising goals already selected.
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67Deductive closureSynthese 186 (2): 493-499. 2012.This is a brief review of issues over which Henry Kyburg and I differed concerning the requirement that full beliefs should be closed under deductive consequence.
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Inference and Logic According to PeirceIn Paul Forster & Jacqueline Brunning (eds.), The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of C.S. Peirce, University of Toronto Press. pp. 34-56. 1997.
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12How to fix a priorIn Dag Prawitz & Dag Westerståhl (eds.), Logic and Philosophy of Science in Uppsala: Papers From the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 185--204. 1994.
Isaac Levi
(1930 - 2018)
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |