Essays in decision theory

Goldschmidt, Zeev Avraham (2024) Essays in decision theory. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis is composed of five essays tackling a range of issues in different areas of decision theory: moral uncertainty, the theory of reasons, and the semantics of taste predicates. In the first two chapters concerning moral uncertainty, I demonstrate how various versions of this problem are instances of broader phenomena addressed by general theories of rationality. Situating the problem of moral uncertainty in these broader contexts enables novel and illuminating applications of the general theories to it. In particular, the first two chapters demonstrate how the theories of belief binarization, and choice under indeterminacy – both theories devised independently of moral uncertainty – may be fruitfully applied to various versions of the morally uncertain agent. The second two chapters explore two different aspects of the theory of reasons – their weight and the notion of acting for the right reasons. In chapter 3, I propose a method for measuring the weight of reasons that draws on the Theory of Measurement (Krantz et al. 1971). I derive a numerical representation of the weight of reasons from comparative judgments of outweighing relations, thus providing a rich structure rooted in intuitive judgments about the notion. In chapter 4, I apply the concept of acting for the right reasons to the case of assertion to argue that the norm of assertion is not epistemic. In doing so I demonstrate how concepts from the theory of reasons may have bearings on first-order issues like the contents of norms. Finally, chapter 5 is about the semantics of taste predicates. I apply the theory of “Clouds of Contexts” developed with other purposes in mind (von Fintel and Gillies 2011) to allow the contextualist to account for linguistic intuitions arising from dialogues about taste. Such dialogues, on the proposed theory, function as explorations of individual and group taste-related attitudes.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Zeev Avraham Goldschmidt
Library of Congress subject classification:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Sets:	Departments > Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Supervisor:	Bradley, Richard and List, Christian
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4791

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