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Introduction to Formal Philosophy pp 549–566Cite as

Preference Change

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Abstract

The notion of preference is important in philosophy, decision theory, and many other disciplines. It is the interplay of information and preferences that provides the driving force behind what we actually do. The chapter adds a new focus and argues that preference is not static, instead, it changes dynamically when triggered by various kinds of events. We show that how a wide variety of preference changes can be modeled in logic, thereby providing the formal philosopher with a natural extension of the scope of inquiry in the area of preference.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One might argue that this preference change has a cause, if not a reason: ‘getting bored’ with what we have. But we will not pursue this line.

  2. 2.

    One might also say that this preference change is triggered by information that a moral authority made the statement.

  3. 3.

    This raises delicate issues of consistency of agents’ preferences over time, that have been studied in philosophy and economics, see [24].

  4. 4.

    In this chapter, we use pre-orders since we want to allow for cases where different worlds are incomparable. Total preference orders, the norm in areas like game theory, provide an interesting specialization for our analysis.

  5. 5.

    These models are often called ‘betterness models’ since one may want to reserve the term ‘preference’ for an induced relation between propositions viewed as types of situations. We will not discuss this propositional view of preference, though it is in harmony with our analysis.

  6. 6.

    This very operation was proposed in the early source [70].

  7. 7.

    An alternative notation for this and other preference transformations is in terms of ‘program notation’ for the new relation created our of the old relation R. For radical upgrade, this would be ⇑ φ(R) := (?φ; R; ?φ) ∪ (?¬φ; R; ?¬φ) ∪

  8. 8.

    Hansson [29] looked at the changes caused by multiple or several sentences and showed its relationship with single step change.

  9. 9.

    We will not aim at full generality in our formulations. Readers can find technical details in [4, 66, 73].

  10. 10.

    An early source for the idea that conditionals effect model changes is [60], which explains conditionals as changing current rankings among worlds.

  11. 11.

    We will state only one way of deriving preferences, taken from [1].

  12. 12.

    van Benthem and Grossi [67] suggest that classic scenarios from meta-ethics provide systematic cues for extracting, not just deontic inferences as is usually done, but also normative priority structure, as well as relevant changes in both.

  13. 13.

    An example is deleting redundant double occurrences of the same proposition.

  14. 14.

    These are the two main topics of [44].

  15. 15.

    Such statements are crucial to analyzing off-equilibrium play in games.

  16. 16.

    A complete dynamic logic of belief change also needs recursion axioms for conditional beliefs and for the existential modality.

  17. 17.

    Here are two illustrations, with link-cutting operation as our knowledge update and ‘suggestion’ as our betterness upgrade: (i) 〈†φ〉〈≤〉ψ ↔〈≤〉〈†φ〉ψ., (ii) 〈♯φ〉〈K〉ψ ↔〈K〉〈♯φ〉ψ.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Fenrong Liu

  2. Tsinghua University – The University of Amsterdam JRC for Logic, Beijing, China

    Fenrong Liu

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

    Sven Ove Hansson

  2. Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Vincent F. Hendricks

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Liu, F. (2018). Preference Change. In: Hansson, S., Hendricks, V. (eds) Introduction to Formal Philosophy. Springer Undergraduate Texts in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77434-3_30

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