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A unificationist defence of revealed preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2019

Kate Vredenburgh
Kate Vredenburgh*
Affiliation:
Emerson Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
*
Email: kvredenburgh@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Revealed preference approaches to modelling agents’ choices face two seemingly devastating explanatory objections. The no self-explanation objection imputes a problematic explanatory circularity to revealed preference approaches, while the causal explanation objection argues that, all things equal, a scientific theory should provide causal explanations, but revealed preference approaches decidedly do not. Both objections assume a view of explanation, the constraint-based view, that the revealed preference theorist ought to reject. Instead, the revealed preference theorist should adopt a unificationist account of explanation, allowing her to escape the two explanatory problems discussed in this paper.

Keywords

rational choice theoryrevealed preferencescausal explanationunificationism
Type
Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 149 - 169
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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