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Choice and Decision Research

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The Geometry of Choice

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Abstract

This chapter addresses in more detail the issues preliminarily addressed in Chap. 1. The chapter begins by discussing the notion of choice in the context of the research in the decision sciences (DS). An attempt is then made to outline the essence of choice through recourse to aspects of Euclidian geometry as underlain by Plato’s Theory of Forms. The chapter concludes with a summary of various implications that the philosophical findings carry for the contemporary cognitive account of choice understood as cube.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Decision:

    • ‘a choice or judgment that you make after a period of discussion or thought’ (Longman DOCE, 2009)

    • ‘a choice that you make about something after thinking about several possibilities’ (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2013)

    • ‘When you make a decision, you choose what should be done or which is the best of various possible actions’ (Collins Cobuild, 2009).

  2. 2.

    For the latest comprehensive survey of the choice behaviour modelling that ranges from the traditional utility theories, through statistical methods and multidimensional signal detection theories to neuroscientific and quantum accounts, see Wang and Busemeyer (2021).

  3. 3.

    The references are cited after Turner (2001, p. 26). Cf. another relevant work quoted by Turner (2001, p. 31), such as McCubbins and Thies (1997), where he finds more arguments for incorporating the insights of the cognitive sciences into the rationalist theories of decision-making.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory, accessed 13 February 2018.

  5. 5.

    http://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/decidere, accessed 13 February 2018.

  6. 6.

    https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory, accessed 15 February 2018.

  7. 7.

    The data cited herein were extracted from the British National Corpus, which is distributed by the University of Oxford on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the cited texts are reserved. The emphasis in the examples is added by the author to better illustrate the discussed cases.

  8. 8.

    For the broad discussion of emotions as the key aspect of decision-making, see Wilson (2012), Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Wilson (2013a, 2013b, 2017, 2018).

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  1. Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

    Marek Kuźniak

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Kuźniak, M. (2021). Choice and Decision Research. In: The Geometry of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_2

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