Foley-Rationality Saved from Shope?
I think Foley's original definition of egocentric rationality probably commits the conditional fallacy. Without committing to that or saying how bad a thing I think that is I want to take the moves Kaplan 1996 makes to save his definition of full belief from the conditional fallacy (plus another two moves) and applied them to Foley.
(FR') S's belief B that p is rational iff were S to be sufficiently reflective concerning p, S would prefer to assert p.
Off hand it seems to circumvent the main form of the conditional fallacy, the form it's usually accused of committing. I'm worried about the following putative counter example a bit though. Go to a world in which S is rational but if S were to reflect sufficiently concerning p and evil demon would cause S to prefer not to assert p.
I have doubts about this c-e because I'm not sure that someone can really cause you--from the outside--to have preferences in the relevant sense. Suppose you're worried about retaining water and so prefer not to drink more than a few cups a day, but then I slip a bunch of salt in your meal and you have a burning desire to drink a gallon of water.
My intuition is that though I've given you a kind of desire it is not your preference in the sense in which (non operationist) decision theorists use that term. Perhaps I need to introduce a technical term "settled preference" defined in terms of higher-order preferences since the desire for water in this case is temporary and you would prefer not to have it.
Some work of Frankfurt and Fischer would probably help elucidate the right notion of preference for my purposes.
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