Risk's Place in Decision Rules

What a delight to celebrate the achievements of Peter Gärdenfors! His monumental book, Knowledge in Flux, gives new direction to epistemology. His judicious collection of readings, compiled with Nils-Eric Sahlin, Decision, Probability, and Utility, is a standard text for many courses on decision theory. These are just two items from a long list of impressive contributions to philosophy. To highlight some of Gärdenfors’s ideas, I will comment on an article from his collection on decision theory. He wrote it with his co-editor. It is entitled ”Unreliable Probabilities, Risk Taking, and Decision Making.” This article is a treasure of lucid and penetrating insights about rational decision making. I will review and reorganize some of those insights to show off their advantages when viewed from a new angle.