Isaac Levi

(1930 - 2018)

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 rational agent restricts choice to one of the optimal options. Such an option is an available option judged at least as good as any other.Herzberger explored the prospects of weakening this ordinalist view of maximizing ..

In a pair of controversy provoking papers1, Kadane and Larkey argued that the normative or prescriptive understanding of expected utility theory recommended that participants in a game maximize expected utility given their assessments of the probabilities of the moves that other players would make. They observed that no prescription, norm or standard of Bayesian rationality recommends how they should come to make probability judgments about the choices of other players. For any given player, it is an empirical question as to whether other players are Bayes rational, judge him to be Bayes rational, etc., just as it is an empirical question as to what the other players’ goals and beliefs are. Participants in the game should, of course, use all empirical information available to them about how other players have behaved and how they are likely to behave in the given context of choice. Kadane and Larkey pointed out that rational players could participate in a game meeting these requirements without the game’s terminating with a Nash equilibrium or a result satisfying any other particular solution concept

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, only what Levi terms 'admissible'. This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict. Professor Levi discusses conflicts of value in several domains - those arising in moral dilemmas, the drawing of scientific inferences, decisions taken under uncertainty, and in social choice. In each of these he adapts his theoretical framework, showing how conflict may often be reduced though not always altogether eliminated.

This is a collection of Isaac Levi's philosophical papers. Over the period represented by the work here, Professor Levi has developed an interrelated set of views, in the tradition of Peirce and Dewey, on epistemology and the philosophy of science and social science. This focus has been on the problem of induction and the growth of knowledge, the foundations of probability and the theory of rational decision-making. His most important essays in these areas are assembled here, with an introduction setting out their main themes and connections. As a whole the volume presents a coherent, elaborated position which will be of great interest to a range of philosophers, decision theorists, welfare and social choice theorists and cognitive scientists.