Under the independence and competence assumptions of Condorcet’s classical jury model, the probability of a correct majority decision converges to certainty as the jury size increases, a seemingly unrealistic result. Using Bayesian networks, we argue that the model’s independence assumption...

Bayesian epistemology tells us with great precision how we should move from prior to posterior beliefs in light of new evidence or information, but says little about where our prior beliefs come from. It o¤ers few resources to describe some prior beliefs as rational or well-justi�ed, and...

There is a surprising disconnect between formal rational choice theory and philosophical work on reasons. The one is silent on the role of reasons in rational choices, the other rarely engages with the formal models of decision problems used by social scientists. To bridge this gap, we propose a...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, pref- erences are usually assumed to be �xed and exogenously given. Building on related work on reasons and rational choice (Dietrich...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scienti�c theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behav- ioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

This paper characterizes different belief revision rules in a unified framework: Bayesian revision upon learning some event, Jeffrey revision upon learning new probabilities of some events, Adams revision upon learning some new conditional probabilities, and `dual-Jeffrey' revision upon learning...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in socialscientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people’s behavioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

We present a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. We show that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: (i) a specification of which properties of the objects of...

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and binary beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former – a so-called “belief-binarization rule” – without running into difficulties such as the lottery paradox? We show that this problem can be usefully analyzed from...

We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent’s choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the...