Practical reasoning, rule-following and belief revision: an account in terms of Jeffrey’s rule
Résumé
This paper provides a conceptual exploration of the implication of Jeffrey’s rule of belief revision to account for rule-following behavior in a game-theoretic framework. Jeffrey’s rule reflects the fact that in many cases learning something new does not imply that one has full assurance about the true content of the information. In other words, the same information may be both perceived and interpreted in several different ways. I develop an account of rule-following behavior according to which, in the context of strategic interactions, following a rule is defined by two conditions. First, that agents must frame the interaction in a sufficiently similar way and be aware of the same salient properties, i.e. they must have the same partition of the event. Second, they must ascribe to others the same revised probabilities to what they take to be the common partition. In a game-theoretic framework, this also indicates that rule-following behavior cannot be identified merely to the existence of a common prior.