Abstract
The approach to decision theory floated in my 1965 book is reviewed (I), challenged in various related ways (II–V) and defended, firstad hoc (II–IV) and then by a general argument of Ellery Ells's (VI). Finally, causal decision theory (in a version sketched in VII) is exhibited as a special case of my 1965 theory, according to the Eellsian argument.
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This is an outcome of several years' varying reactions to challenges by Robert Nozick, Alan Gibbard, William Harper, Brian Skyrms, David Lewis, Howard Sobel,et al., to the version of Bayesian decision theory floated in Chapter 1 of my book,The Logic of Decision (New York, 1965) and further developed in Chapters 5–9 there. My pręsent view of the matter turns pivotally on Ellery Eells's work,Newcomb's Paradox and the Principle of Maximizing Conditional Expected Utility (Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980), from which I derive the “ratificationist” reading of my 1965 theory in VI below. See also his paper ‘Causality Utility, and Decision’,Synthese 48, 295–329. Here I renege on the revisionist line suggested in two earlier papers: ‘How is it reasonable to base preferences on estimates of chance?’ (inScience, Belief, and Behaviour, D. H. Mellor, ed., Cambridge, 1980) and ‘Choice, chance, and credence’ (inPhilosophy of Logic, G. H. von Wright and G. Fløistad (eds.), Nijhoff, 1981. For support of this work, thanks are due to the National Science Foundation for a research grant, to Princeton University for sabbatical leave, and to MIT (Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy) for providing facilities to me as a Visiting Scientist.
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Jeffrey, R. The logic of decision defended. Synthese 48, 473–492 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01063989
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01063989