Davidson, Donald and Patrick Suppes (4 results)

Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.01.

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. First separate edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. 'It is not easy to disentangle measurement theory and decision theory because the measurement of subjective probability and utility has been such a central part of decision theory. The separation that I make will therefore be somewhat arbitrary. My really serious interest in psychology began with experimental research on decision theory in collaboration with my philosophical colleague Donald Davidson and a graduate student in psychology at that time, Sidney Siegel. Davidson and I had begun collaborative work with McKinsey in 1953 on the theory of value and also on utility theory. We continued this work after McKinsey s death, and it is reflected in Davidson, McKinsey, and Suppes (1955a) and in the joint article with Davidson (1956c) on the finitistic axiomatization of subjective probability and utility' (Suppes' autobiography; please ask for online citation). 'For reasons I can't remember in detail now, rather early Don, the logician J. C. C. McKinsey, who had also joined the department in 1951, and I began discussing the theory of value in philosophy, concurrently with studying the theory of expected utility in game theory and economics. This led to our first joint publication: Davidson, McKinsey and Suppes, 'Outline of a formal theory of value, I' (1955). The writing was actually completed in 1953, shortly after McKinsey's death in that year' (Suppes, 'Memories of Donald Davidson', in M.C. Galavotti, ed., Cambridge and Vienna Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, 2006, pp. 251-2).

Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Davidson and Suppes's first book, a technical study on decision theory, based on empirical research; both went on to influential careers. Hardcover in plain glassine jacket (obsessively covered in modern mylar); publisher's review slip laid in. Text clean; [10], 121 pages; references, equations, tables, graphs. Size: Small Octavo.

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. Donald Davidson, J. C. C. McKinsey, and Patrick Suppes, Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value, I Report No. 1, February 10, 1954 Stanford Value Theory Project and Department of Philosophy. 8 ½ x 11 pamphlet with wraps, a duplication of a typescript. This is Donald Davidson s first publication of any kind that I know of. Davidson uses and develops the ideas in this work through his entire career. Davidson, with Quine and with right reason, came to realize that you cannot separate interpretation of another into a component where you figure out beliefs and a component where you figure out what the person wants. As he learned, Frank Plumpton Ramsey had discovered more or less the same thing in a paper in the 1930s on measuring belief via betting preferences. The core idea that belief and desire are determined together is central to Davidson s version of indeterminacy of interpretation and also to his concept of interpretation as the understanding of a kind of action, and so subject to constraints of rationality we apply when we interpret events as actions. This document is the beginning point of any adequate understanding of Davidson s intellectual trajectory. In his last works, versions of the early ideas adumbrated in these co-authored works are still key parts of his exposition and argument. I have never seen another copy. The 1954 piece is in some ways more radical than the version that he, Suppes, and McKinsey published in 1957, although that later work advances many of the same ideas.