7. Richard Bradley | How should we make decisions under uncertainty?

Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast

Welcome to the seventh episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “How should we make decisions under uncertainty?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Richard Bradley.

In this episode we discuss:

• The relationship between descriptive and normative decision theory
• Expected utility theory
• Rationality constraints and representation theorems
• vNM and Savage’s representation theorems
• Foundationalism vs. reflective equilibrium
• Idealizations within expected utility theory
• Confidence, resilience, and the paradox of ideal evidence
• Unawareness, cluelessness, and ‘medium-termism’
• Evaluative uncertainty
• The relationship between ideal and bounded rationality

About our guest:

Richard Bradley is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and a leading thinker in philosophical decision theory. He also works in related fields such as formal epistemology and semantics. Recently, he has been working on the nature of chance and our attitudes towards it, as well as the issue of decision-making under severe uncertainty. He is also the author of the book Decision Theory with a Human Face, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Check out Richard's website here: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/bradleyr/

Link to Decision Theory with a Human Face (Bradley, 2017): https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-science/decision-theory-human-face?format=HB&isbn=9781107003217

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.