Thinking about Acting

Logical Foundations for Rational Decision Making

By: John L. Pollock

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Hardcover | 1 July 2006

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280 Pages

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John Pollock aims to construct a theory of rational decision making for real agents--not ideal agents. Real agents have limited cognitive powers, but traditional theories of rationality have applied only to idealized agents that lack such constraints. Pollock argues that theories of ideal rationality are largely irrelevant to the decision making of real agents. Thinking about Acting aims to provide a theory of "real rationality."

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Rational Choice and Classical Decision Theory	p. 3
Rational Cognition	p. 3
Ideal Rationality and Real Rationality	p. 5
Human Rationality and Generic Rationality	p. 8
Decision Making	p. 12
Classical Decision Theory and the Optimality Prescription	p. 14
Values
Evaluative Cognition and the Evaluative Database	p. 23
The Doxastic/Conative Loop	p. 23
Preference Rankings	p. 24
Analog Representations of Values	p. 30
Conclusions	p. 35
Evaluative Induction	p. 37
The Need for Evaluative Induction	p. 37
Human Conative States	p. 38
Evaluative Induction	p. 43
Evaluative Induction as a Q&I Module	p. 50
Conclusions	p. 54
Some Observations about Evaluative Cognition	p. 55
Liking Activities	p. 55
Evaluating the Human Cognitive Architecture	p. 56
State Liking	p. 59
Conclusions	p. 66
The Database Calculation	p. 67
The Database Calculation	p. 68
Justifying the Database Calculation	p. 72
Feature-Based Evaluative Cognition	p. 77
Probabilities
Subjective Probabilities	p. 81
Two Kinds of Probabilities	p. 81
Subjective Probabilities and Degrees of Belief	p. 82
Belief Simpliciter	p. 86
Subjective Expected Utility Theory	p. 87
Rational Decision Making	p. 88
Do Subjective Probabilities Exist	p. 90
Deriving the Optimality Prescription from Rationality Constraints	p. 92
Subjective Probabilities from Epistemology	p. 93
A Return to Objective Probabilities	p. 98
Objective Probabilities	p. 101
Physical Probabilities and Relative Frequencies	p. 101
Empirical Theories	p. 104
Nomic Probability	p. 106
Mixed Physical/Epistemic Probabilities	p. 111
Conclusions	p. 116
Causal Probabilities	p. 117
Causal Decision Theory	p. 117
Probabilistic Causation	p. 118
Skyrms and Lewis	p. 122
Defining Causal Probability	p. 125
Conditional Causal Probability	p. 128
C-PROB[subscript A] and K-PROB[subscript A]	p. 130
Computing Causal Probabilities	p. 135
Computing Conditional Causal Probabilities	p. 138
Simplifying the Computation Defeasibly	p. 140
Conclusions	p. 142
Decisions
Rational Choice and Action Omnipotence	p. 145
Actions and the Optimality Prescription	p. 145
Action Omnipotence	p. 146
Restricting the Scope of the Optimality Prescription	p. 147
Expected Utility	p. 155
Conditional Policies and Expected Utilities	p. 160
Two Problems	p. 163
Computing Expected-Utilities	p. 165
Conclusions	p. 166
Plans and Decisions	p. 167
Against Optimality	p. 167
The Logical Structure of Practical Deliberation	p. 168
Groups of Actions	p. 175
Actions and Plans	p. 178
Choosing between Plans	p. 180
AI Planning Theory: The Real World versus Toy Problems	p. 183
When Is a Plan a Good One?	p. 184
Locally Global Planning	p. 187
Conclusions	p. 189
Plans and Their Expected Utilities	p. 193
Linear Plans	p. 193
Linear Policies	p. 195
Nonlinear Plans	p. 199
Conditional Plans	p. 201
An Example	p. 203
Conclusions	p. 211
Locally Global Planning	p. 213
The Theory	p. 213
Incremental Decision-Theoretic Planning	p. 213
Goal-Directed Planning	p. 215
Presumptively Additive Expected Utilities	p. 220
Finding and Repairing Decision-Theoretic Interference	p. 221
Conclusions	p. 223
The Theory of Nomic Probability	p. 225
Introduction	p. 225
Computational Principles	p. 227
The Statistical Syllogism	p. 232
Direct Inference and Definite Probabilities	p. 236
Indefinite Probabilities and Probability Distributions	p. 241
Induction	p. 242
Conclusions	p. 251
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 263
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Thinking about Acting

Logical Foundations for Rational Decision Making

At a Glance

Hardcover

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