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Record W1990365400 · doi:10.1017/s0953820808003166

Nozick, Ramsey, and Symbolic Utility

2008· article· en· W1990365400 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueUtilitas · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsExpected utility hypothesisSubjective expected utilityVon Neumann–Morgenstern utility theoremRationalityMathematical economicsNormativeValue (mathematics)Decision theoryThe SymbolicEconomicsPositive economicsEpistemologyMicroeconomicsMathematicsPhilosophyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I explore a connection between Robert Nozick's account of decision value/symbolic utility in The Nature of Rationality 1 and F. P. Ramsey's discussion of ethically neutral propositions in his 1926 essay ‘Truth and Probability’, 2 a discussion that Brian Skyrms in Choice and Chance 3 credits with disclosing deeper foundations for expected utility than the celebrated Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 4 of von Neumann and Morgenstern. Ramsey's recognition of ethically non-neutral propositions is essential to his foundational work, and the similarity of these propositions to symbolic utility helps make the case that the latter belongs to the apparatus that constructs expected utility, rather than being reducible to it or being part of a proposal that can be cheerfully ignored. I conclude that decision value replaces expected utility as the central idea in (normative) decision theory. Expected utility becomes an approximation that is good enough when symbolic utility is not at stake.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.932
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.088
GPT teacher head0.208
Teacher spread0.120 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it