Seminar on History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract: Rather than deciding between all of the options on the menu in one fell swoop, you could instead structure your deliberation by splitting your decision up into smaller sub-decisions. First, decide whether to order a chicken or fish dish. Then, decide which dish of the chosen category to order. That is, rather than deliberating about the synchronic, all-at-once decision you actually face, you could instead deliberate about a hypothetical diachronic decision with two choice-points: first, choose a submenu, and next, choose an option from that submenu. In this talk, I'll defend two theses about this kind of structured deliberation. The first thesis is that structured deliberation can lead you to dismiss a perfectly rational option for bad reasons. The second thesis is that we nonetheless do structure our deliberation about complicated decisions in this way. For this reason, our intuitions about complicated decisions are susceptible to a novel kind of framing effect. I apply this lesson to some recent decisions discussed by Jack Spencer, Ian Wells, and Joe Horton.