Decision Theory

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In decision theory, consistency really dictates what you should do pretty strongly. And especially given the evidence or how and how should my probabilities respond to evidence. That's not the part where I've argued for something that's different from the mainstream. But so in particular we might imagine that the armchair thinking about rationality leads us to a certain picture but then we notice people not behaving that way. We can be better at describing what it means to be rational. Yeah, or at least we need to,. How people behave isn't relevant, isn't directly relevant to what rationality is. It's just sort of like a datum and we either have to say, oh that's a way in which

Life is rich with moments of uncertainty, where we’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen next. We often find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between different kinds of uncertainty; maybe one option is very likely to have a “pretty good” outcome, while another has some probability for “great” and some for “truly awful.” In such circumstances, what’s the rational way to choose? Is it rational to go to great lengths to avoid choices where the worst outcome is very bad? Lara Buchak argues that it is, thereby expanding and generalizing the usual rules of rational choice in conditions of risk.

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Lara Buchak received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently a professor of philosophy at Princeton. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. She was the inaugural winner of the Alvin Plantinga Prize of the American Philosophical Association. Her book Risk and Rationality proposes a new way of dealing with risk in rational-choice theory.

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