Seminar 3

Question

What, if any, objection to decision theory would arise from the truth of Dickinson’s dual-process theory of instrumental action?

Reading

You only need one of the new sources:

Hargreaves-Heap & Varoufakis (2004, p. Chapter 1) provides a very accessible overview of key objections to assumptions of decision theory. (Their stated concern is game theory; but game theory is built on decision theory, and most of the objections they cover are objections to the underlying decision theory.)
Sugden (1991, p. §§I--IV) is an excellent but very difficult discussion; try this if you have already encountered decision theory on another course.
Steele & Stefánsson (2020) provides an overview of decision theory as presented by Jeffrey’s and a discussion of some challenges (in §5).

This seminar’s question also requires reading set for previous seminars:

Dickinson (2016)

Preparation

Please follow the instructions for Seminar Tasks.

Lecture Notes

Where to Find the Reading?

In some cases the reference section of the lecture notes already includes a link to help you find the reading.

If there is no link in the lecture notes, start by searching for the title (and, if that fails, by title and authors) on google scholar. If this fails, the library has resources. If those fail, please check first with others on the course. If you still have problems, you may email your seminar tutor.

Ask a Question

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More information about asking questions.

Glossary

decision theory : I use ‘decision theory’ for the theory elaborated by Jeffrey (1983). Variants are variously called ‘expected utility theory’ (Hargreaves-Heap & Varoufakis, 2004), ‘revealed preference theory’ (Sen, 1973) and ‘the theory of rational choice’ (Sugden, 1991). As the differences between variants are not important for our purposes, the term can be used for any of core formal parts of the standard approaches based on Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1972).

dual-process theory of instrumental action : Instrumental action ‘is controlled by two dissociable processes: a goal-directed and an habitual process’ (Dickinson, 2016, p. 177). (See instrumental action.)

References

Dickinson, A. (2016). Instrumental conditioning revisited: Updating dual-process theory. In J. B. Trobalon & V. D. Chamizo (Eds.), Associative learning and cognition (Vol. 51, pp. 177–195). Edicions Universitat Barcelona.

Hargreaves-Heap, S., & Varoufakis, Y. (2004). Game theory: A critical introduction. London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2587142~S1

Jeffrey, R. C. (1983). The logic of decision, second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ramsey, F. (1931). Truth and probability. In R. Braithwaite (Ed.), The foundations of mathematics and other logical essays. London: Routledge.

Savage, L. J. (1972). The foundations of statistics (2nd rev. ed). New York: Dover Publications.

Sen, A. (1973). Behaviour and the Concept of Preference. Economica, 40(159), 241–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/2552796

Steele, K., & Stefánsson, H. O. (2020). Decision Theory. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Sugden, R. (1991). Rational Choice: A Survey of Contributions from Economics and Philosophy. The Economic Journal, 101(407), 751–785. https://doi.org/10.2307/2233854