文档介绍：Thinking
about
Acting:
Logical Foundations
for Rational
Decision Making
John L. Pollock
Department of Philosophy
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721
******@
.edu/~pollock
Abstract
The objective of this book is to produce a theory of rational decision
making for realistically resource-bounded agents. My interest is not in “What
should I do if I were an ideal agent?”, but rather, “What should I do given
that I am who I am, with all my actual cognitive limitations?”
The book has three parts. Part One addresses the question of where
the e from that agents use in rational decision making. The most
comon view among philosophers is that they are based on preferences, but
I argue that this putationally impossible. I propose an alternative
theory somewhat reminiscent of Bentham, and explore how human beings
actually arrive at values and how they use them in decision making.
Part Two investigates the knowledge of probability that is required
for decision-theoretic reasoning. I argue that subjective probability makes
no sense as applied to realistic agents. I sketch a theory of objective probability
to put in its place. Then I use that to define a variety of causal probability
and argue that this is the kind of probability presupposed by rational decision
making. So what is to be defended is a variety of causal decision theory.
Part Three explores how these values and probabilities are to be
used in decision making. In chapter eight, it is argued first that actions
cannot be evaluated in terms of their expected values as ordinarily defined,
because that does not take account of the fact that a cognizer may be unable
to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform it. An
alternative notion of “expected utility” is defined to be used in place of
expected values. In chapter nine it is argued that individual actions cannot
be the proper objects of decision-theoretic evaluation. We must instead cho