Decisions and Revisions: Philosophical Essays on Knowledge and Value

This is a collection of Isaac Levi’s philosophical papers. Over the period represented by the work here, Professor Levi has developed an interrelated set of views, in the tradition of Peirce and Dewey, on epistemology and the philosophy of science and social science. This focus has been on the problem of induction and the growth of knowledge, the foundations of probability and the theory of rational decision making. His most important essays in these areas are assembled here, with an introduction setting out their main themes and connections. Part I considers how the aims of scientific inquiry should constrain its practice, employing the crucial notion of ‘epistemic utility’. The essays in Part II explain Professor Levi’s conception of human knowledge; those in Part III consider objective or statistical probability and evaluate the notion of potential surprise; while Part IV extends his views to central questions of individual and collective decision making. As a whole the volume presents a coherent, elaborated position which will be of great interest to a range of philosophers, decision theorists, welfare and social choice theorists and cognitive scientists.