Rationality, Rules, and Structure by W Spohn

Rationality, Rules, and Structure by W Spohn

It is an obvious fact that human agency is constrained and structured by many kinds of rules: rules that are constitutive for communication, morality, persons, and society, and juridical rules. So the question is: what roles are played by social rules and the structural traits of human agency in rational decision making? What bearing does this have on the theory of practical rationality? These issues can only be discussed within an interdisciplinary setting, with researchers drawn from philosophy, decision theory and the economic and social sciences. The problem is of profound, fundamental concern to the social scientist and has attracted a great deal of intellectual effort. Contributors include distinguished researchers in their respective fields and the book thus presents state-of-the-art theory. It can also be used as a textbook in advanced philosophy, economics and social science classes.

Wolfgang Spohn, born 1950, is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers and philosophers of science of Germany, editor-in-chief of Erkenntnis for more than 13 years, author of two books and more than 60 papers covering a wide range: epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science, philosophical logic, philosophy of language and mind, and the theory of practical rationality. This collection presents 15 of his most important essays on theoretical philosophy. The centre piece is his uniquely successful theory of the dynamics of belief, tantamount to an account of induction and nowadays widely acknowledged as 'ranking theory'. Like any account of induction, this theory has deep implications ingeniously elaborated in the papers included. They cover an account of deterministic and also probabilistic causation, initially subjectively relativized, but then objectivized in a projectivistic sense, and an account of explanation and of strict, of ceteris paribus, and of chance laws. They advance a coherentist epistemology, though giving foundationalist intuitions their due, and establish some coherence principles as a priori true, entailing even a weak principle of causality. They finally shed light on concept formation by more broadly embedding the epistemological considerations into the framework of two-dimensional semantics. All this is carried out with formal rigor when feasible.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9789048154630
ISBN 10	9048154634
Title	Rationality, Rules, and Structure
Author	W Spohn
Series	Theory And Decision Library A
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Springer
Year published	2010-12-08
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.