How to Deduce that a Decision is Justifiable
Christopher Lang, Department of Philosophy,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keywords: logic of decision-justification, generalized evolution by natural selection, evaluativist epistemology, xemes
Abstract: Recognizing that many practical situations arise in which one would like to know whether he/she should act as though a given statement is true, this essay presents a logic restricted specifically to deducing such knowledge. This restriction allows us to deduce useful laws purely from aspects of definitions as one can the theorems of intuitionistic logic. Leveraging these laws, one can deduce from any given empirical observation that we should act as though certain corresponding predictions and other universal claims are true. This procedure stands as a deductive alternative to traditional inductive decision-justification methods (criticism of the traditional methods will appear elsewhere). Thus, to those who would respond to skepticism about induction with “But how can one live without induction?” this paper offers at least one answer.
See PredictionScience.com: an open community improving decision-making and strategy world-wide by developing, explicating, and/or evaluating practical predictive logics, software, formal methods, and expectations about the future.