Abstract
Any decision is made in some way or another. Which way? (Have I worked out enough alternatives to choose from? Which decision rule to apply?) That is a higher-order decision problem, to be dealt with in some way or other. Which way? That is an even higher-order decision problem. There seems to be a regress of decision problems toward higher and higher orders. But in daily life we stop moving to higher-order decision problems—stop the regress—at some finite point. The regress problem of deciding how to decide is the problem of explaining what would make it rational to stop the regress. I will give a new solution in the present paper. The result suggests a new way of looking at standard Bayesian theory and the more recent theory of adaptive rationality.
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Notes
If beliefs and desires are reducible to preferences, Bayesian rationality merely requires coherence among preferences.
There are at least three possible positions: (Infinitism) We can legitimately have an infinite chain of justifications, in which each belief is justified by a belief that has not been used for justification, such that the justification relation holds independently of whether the agent actually adduces the justifying belief. Namely, we can legitimately have an infinite regress of justification relations, although it is impossible to have an infinite regress in which one actually adduce beliefs for justification for infinitely many times. (Foundationalism) The regress of justification relations stops at a certain finite point, reaching beliefs whose justifications do not require further any beliefs. (Coherentism) The linear, chain-like picture of justification is wrong; instead, justification of a belief consists in the belief’s being a member of a coherent set of beliefs.
Note that the point I make in this paragraph is not specific to any particular heuristic. The point applies to, for example, the satisficing heuristic proposed by Simon (1955), one of the earliest pioneers of adaptive rationality.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to participants of the final Workshop on the Frontiers of Rationality and Decision conference (2012 August, University of Groningen), especially Jeanne Peijnenburg and Jan-Willem Romeijn for stimulating questions. I am also indebted to Alan Hájek and Nathan Pensler for discussions, and to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to clarify some of the points I made.
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Lin, H. On the regress problem of deciding how to decide. Synthese 191, 661–670 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0398-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0398-1