Understanding Action
An Essay on Reasons

Frederic Schick (Author)

9780521408868, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 July 1991

180 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.232 kg

"Frederic Schick's Understanding Action is an important book. It significantly enriches one's understanding of intentional action, deliberation, and practical reasoning by incorporating features that have been excluded both from the desire-belief model as it is typically presented and from the usual decision-theoretic...model that has dominated more formal treatments. Its thesis is both carefully presented and richly illustrated, and its implications traced out in rigorous terms. ...[It] provides a bridge between more standard accounts of decision theory and some recent and very important revisionist work (in particular, Kahneman and Tversky's theory of framing effects). ...This book is a must for all who are interested in the logic of deliberation and choice." Edward F. McClennen and Peter Boltuc, Economics and Philosophy

This is an important new book about human motivation, about the reasons people have for their actions. What is distinctively new about it is its focus on how people see or understand their situations, options, and prospects. By taking account of people's understandings (along with their beliefs and desires), Professor Schick is able to expand the current theory of decision and action. The author provides a perspective on the topic by outlining its history. He defends his new theory against criticism, considers its formal structure, and shows at length how it resolves many currently debated problems: the problems of conflict and weakness of will, Allais' problem, Kahneman and Tversky's problems, Newcomb's problem, and others. The book will be of special interest to philosophers, psychologists, and economists.

1. Introduction
2. Practical reason
3. A missing factor
4. Some applications
5. Seeing things right
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of mind [HPM]