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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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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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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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RepliesIn Erik J. Olsson (ed.), Knowledge and Inquiry: Essays on the Pragmatism of Isaac Levi, Cambridge University Press. 2006.
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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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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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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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30Newcomb's many problemsIn A. Hooker, J. J. Leach & E. F. McClennen (eds.), Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory: Vol.II: Epistemic and Social Applications, D. Reidel. pp. 369--383. 1978.
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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.
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Review of Sören Halldén: The strategy of ignorance: From decision logic to evolutionary epistemology (review)Theoria 54 (2): 129. 1988.
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162Gambling with Truth: An Essay on Induction and the Aims of ScienceMIT Press. 1967.This comprehensive discussion of the problem of rational belief develops the subject on the pattern of Bayesian decision theory. The analogy with decision theory introduces philosophical issues not usually encountered in logical studies and suggests some promising new approaches to old problems."We owe Professor Levi a debt of gratitude for producing a book of such excellence. His own approach to inductive inference is not only original and profound, it also clarifies and transforms the work of …Read more
Isaac Levi
(1930 - 2018)
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |