Avishai Margalit

How vicious are cycles of intransitive choice

AbstractTransitivity is a compelling requirement of rational choice, and a transitivity axiom is included in all classical theories of both individual and group choice. Nonetheless, choice contexts exist in which choice might well be systematically intransitive. Moreover, this can occur even when the context is transparent, and the decision maker is reflective. The present paper catalogues such choice contexts, dividing them roughly into the following classes:1.Contexts where the intransitivity results from the employment of a choice rule which is justified on ethical or moral grounds (typically, choice by or on behalf of a group).2.Contexts where the intransitivity results from the employment of a choice rule that is justified on economic or pragmatic grounds (typically, multi-attribute choice).2.Contexts where the choice is intrinsically comparative, namely, where the utility from any chosen alternative depends intrinsically on the rejected alternative(s) as well (typically, certain competitive contexts). In the latter, independence from irrelevant alternatives may be violated, as well as transitivity. However, the classical money-pump argument against intransitive choice cycles is inapplicable to these contexts. We conclude that the requirement for transitivity, though powerful, is not always overriding.

II—Avishai Margalit: Recognizing the Brother and the Other

Recognition is a name of a problem rooted in German idealism and Hegels thought. It is not one problem but a family of problems. Indeed, it is a research programme, in which Axel Honneth is an important practitioner. The tree of knowledge, like other trees, should be inspected by its fruits and not by exposing its roots. So my main concern is in rendering the problem of recognition in current idiom, rather than in Hegels original idiom. What I shall try to do here is to present an account of the problem of recognition, which is parallel to the account suggested in Honneths Struggle of Recognition. It is parallel in Plutarchs sense of ‘parallel’ lives, namely as an object of comparison.

Metaphors in an Open-Class Test

There are phenomena whose existence is secure but for which we lack an explanation as to how they are brought about. Hypnosis is one example of such a phenomenon. There are other phenomena whose existence is in doubt even though there are people who offer putative explanations for them. Telepathy is an example of the latter. A distinction should be made between securing a phenomenon and saving a phenomenon — that is, between guaranteeing its existence and explaining how it has come about. Sometimes doubt is cast on the saving of a phenomenon, that is, on a particular explanation being offered for the phenomenon, while at other times it is the very existence of the phenomenon that is doubted. The story is told that Dr. Rhine once had dinner at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton with Einstein and Von Neumann. He told them about the wonders of telepathic communication between someone in New York and someone in San Francisco. Von Neumann became very excited. He started offering hypotheses about the possibility of various sorts of waves that might explain the phenomenon. Einstein, according to the story, asked where the two people had been. “New York and San Francisco? That’s too far.” In our terms, Von Neumann assumed that the phenomenon is secure and that the problem is to explain it.

Rejoinder to Levi’s Reply

To give up the categorical or absolute idiom of certainty in favor of the relative idiom is just to give up talking of sentences (or beliefs) as certain, i. e. immune to error, and to speak instead of the conviction that persons may have in them.

Knowledge in Pursuit of Knowledge — A Few Worries

Let me sketch what I take to be the kernel of Professor Levi’s picture of our hard-core knowledge. I shall then spell out some of my worries about it.

Talking with Children, Piaget Style

In one of the passages of his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (148–149), Wittgenstein asks us to make the following thought experiment: Imagine a society whose merchants “piled timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying heights and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles.”