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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 149 rationality considerations that motivate the imposition of the conditions also generate the structural inconsistencies that undermine them. This suggests that imposing such restrictive conditions on preference rankings may not be the most efficient way to protect the consistency of those rankings, because counterexamples to those conditions remain logically consistent with them. Instead of protecting preference consistency, imposing these conditions merely restricts the scope of application of the theory to the narrowly normative, thereby diminishing its empirical applicability and inviting structural inconsistencies like the ones above. Now we have already seen that a theory can be both explanatory and normative if it explains the behavior of an ideal agent who sets a standard we are exhorted to emulate. However, a theory that can be explanatory when and only when it is normative is not doing the work a theory is supposed to do. In Volume II of this project I take up the challenge to protect the consistency of rational choice using classical logic as a resource rather than rejecting it as a threat. 2. The Ramsey-Savage Concept of a Simple Ordering In "Truth and Probability," Ramsey demonstrates that imposing certain consistency conditions on an agent's choices among an unlimited set of alternatives yields the interpretation that she seeks to maximize utility in her 20 behavior, i.e. (U). This is the original idea on which the theory of revealed preference is based. Ramsey's consistency constraints on preference rankings are generally assumed to rescue the behavioral interpretation of the concept of utility from vacuity or logical inconsistency. There are two reasons why they do not. First, particular axioms in Ramsey's system that help define in what consistency consists overlook the intensionality of preference and so at best spell out a sub-logical conception of consistency that does not clearly apply to it. Second, these constraints presuppose a more primitive concept of utilitymaximization, namely (U), that is even more vulnerable to the reproach of vacuity under the revealed preference interpretation than under earlier ones. 2.1. Ramsey's Value Axioms Ramsey begins with the assumption that [1] we act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desires, so that a person's actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions … [2] we seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people's pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our 20 Frank P. Ramsey, "Truth and Probability," in The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, Ed. R. B. Braithwaite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 157-198. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
