[SydPhil] Reminder: Philippe Mongin (CNRS, Paris) @ Wed 20 Mar 2013 15:30 - 17:30 (Seminars)

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Title: Philippe Mongin (CNRS, Paris)
The Allais Paradox: What it Was Not, What it Became, What it Could Have Been

Abstract

Few problems in decision theory have raised more interest, and be followed  
by more technical work, than the celebrated Allais paradox of the 1950s.  
Enough has been written on this paradox at the level of decision theory  
itself for history and philosophy of science now to enter stage. This seems  
to be the moment for the owl of Minerva to spread its wings over the field.

First playing the role of the historian, I will recount the paradox as it  
arose, i.e., in 1952, at a conference in Paris attended by the great  
decision theorists of the time. The "American school" drew renewed  
confidence in expected utility theory (EUT) from the way von Neumann and  
Morgenstern had axiomatized it in 1947, and Allais devised his puzzle  
precisely to shaken this confidence. As I will emphasize, the issue between  
the two camps was only the normative side of EUT, but this fact of the  
matter became lost in the developments of the 1970s and 1980s that - rather  
belatedly - brought fame to the "Allais paradox". At that time, it became  
interpreted as an empirical problem, and a major one at that, since all the  
new, non-EU theories, made a point of recovering it in order to prove their  
explanatory credentials.

Now playing the role of the philosopher, I will try to evaluate the  
dramatic shift of interpretation that took place between 1952 and the  
1970s. Were decision theorists right to turn their back to the normative  
issues that Allais had initially in mind? They were to an extent, because  
the change in meaning was accompanied with a surge of experiments, and  
owing to them, it became possible to conclude safely that EUT was  
empirically refuted, that a certain independence axiom of von  
Neumann-Morgentern was the main culprit, and that the next stage for  
empirical decision theory would be to relax this axiom appropriately.  
However, the decision theorists were also wrong to a very significant  
extent, because they discarded the point that in a field like theirs, the  
empirical refutations that matter are those which the agents are prepared  
to endorse reflectingly, i.e., those which they endow with some normative  
value. As I reconstruct him, Allais had already seen that brute choice  
experiments were of limited interest even to empirical decision theory, and  
that they should give way to more complex schemes, in which the subjects  
could express their own rationality concerns and confront them with those  
of the experimenter. I will try to make these schemes a little more precise  
than I found them in Allais, and eventually suggest that they offer an  
interesting alternative to the current orthodox ones in empirical decision  
theory.

The paper is in progress, but it will borrow some its contents from  
Duhemian Themes in Expected Utility Theory,  in French Studies in the  
Philosophy of Science, A. Brenner and J. Gayon eds, Springer, 2009, p.  
303-357.
When: Wed 20 Mar 2013 15:30 – 17:30 Eastern Time - Melbourne, Sydney
Where: S401, Level 4, via Lobby B (or Southern Vestibule), Quadrangle  
Building, University Place, The University of Sydney.
Calendar: Seminars
Who:
     * samuel.thomas.baron at gmail.com- creator

Event details:  
https://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=VIEW&eid=b25yOTAzdDJnam9hY3Jkb2dsc2xoMWJvZ28gMm1lN2M3ZnIzb21wbDRyaHZrcG1sYTUzNjhAZw

Invitation from Google Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/

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