/lit/ - Literature

>>18761001
Do you think that preferences are transitive? I'm not very familiar with economics but reading some social choice literature recently and they all predicate their social utility functions on a preference set which they take to be transitive (if i prefer a to b, and b to c, i prefer a to c). This, i assume, is basically an ordinal utility function.
But, i guess i'm skeptical of whether you can really claim preferences are transitive unless the goods compared are uniform or close substitutes. Which doesn't make much sense to me when comparing 'baskets' of entire social outcomes which include such disparate possible outcomes which seem to me not easily comparable. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by non-ordinal. And it probably isn't a problem with the average utility curve anyway, which focuses only on the quantity of one good.
Sorry, i'm just rambling. I really don't know what i'm talking about.

William James, Principles of Psychology
>A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. We realize for the first time,”we then say, ‘what that means!” This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief. Those to whom “God” and “Duty” are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day.
Pascal, Pensées
>You want to find faith and you do not know the way.-* You want to cure yourself of unbelief and you ask for the remedies? Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began: by behaving just as if they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you believe quite naturally, and according to your animal reactions.' 'But that is what I am afraid of.' 'Why.? What do you have to lose.'' In order to show you that this is where it leads, it is because it diminishes the passions, which are your great stumbling-blocks, etc.
Further read James' 'Will to Believe'

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