Richard C. Jeffrey’s Logic of First and Higher-Order Preferences

Abstract

In his article “Preferences Among Preferences” Richard C. Jeffrey endeavors to present a logic of preferences having successive orders. He claims that the formal analysis of complex implicational relations involving preferences (independently of how “first-order” preferences are interpreted) is possible through the use of a new preference connective belonging to the same syntactic category as C. I. Lewis’ symbol ‘→’, for strict implication. This connective is taken as providing a means for clearly expressing the intricate “modal involvement” which discourse concerning successive orders of preference comes to presuppose. Jeffrey’s innovation in part is to treat the mutually self-excluding constituents of preferences as sentential relata, which when related by the preference connective ‘Pref’, are found to convey complex molecular propositions.¹