This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life, and explores relations between language, communication, culture, and mind. It contains extensive data from the author's fieldwork on language and culture in Laos.
This book will transform the way you think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal to the medical equipment used to save lives. John Heskett goes beyond style and taste to look at how different cultures and individuals personalise objects.
Utility is a key concept in the economics of individual decision-making. However, utility is not measurable in a straightforward way. As a result, from the very beginning there has been debates about the meaning of utility as well as how to measure it. This book is an innovative investigation of how these arguments changed over time. Measuring Utility reconstructs economists' ideas and discussions about utility measurement from 1870 to 1985, as well as their attempts to measure utility empirically. The book brings into focus the interplay between the evolution of utility analysis, economists' ideas about utility measurement, and their conception of what measurement in general means. It also explores the relationships between the history of utility measurement in economics, the history of the measurement of sensations in psychology, and the history of measurement theory in general. Finally, the book discusses some methodological problems related to utility measurement, such as the epistemological status of the utility concept and its measures. The first part covers the period 1870-1910, and discusses the issue of utility measurement in the theories of Jevons, Menger, Walras and other early utility theorists. Part II deals with the emergence of the notions of ordinal and cardinal utility during the period 1900-1945, and discusses two early attempts to give an empirical content to the notion of utility. Part III focuses on the 1945-1955 debate on utility measurement that was originated by von Neumann and Morgenstern's expected utility theory (EUT). Part IV reconstructs the experimental attempts to measure the utility of money between 1950 and 1985 within the framework provided by EUT. This historical and epistemological overview provides keen insights into current debates about rational choice theory and behavioral economics in the theory of individual decision-making and the philosophy of economics.
Valuing Health provides a philosophically sophisticated overview of generic health measurement systems, which clarifies their value commitments and criticizes their dependence on preference surveys to assign values to health states. In it, philosopher Daniel M. Hausman argues that the public value of health states depends on the activity limits and suffering that health states impose.
From a highly decorated general, a brilliant new way of understanding war and its role in the twenty-first century. Drawing on his vast experience as a commander during the first Gulf War, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith gives us a probing analysis of modern war. He demonstrates why today’s conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events, and makes clear why the current model of total war has failed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other recent campaigns. Smith offers a compelling contemporary vision for how to secure our world and the consequences of ignoring the new, shifting face of war.
This book offers a unified treatment of my research in the foundations of expected utility theory from around 1965 to 1980. While parts are new, the presentation draws heavily on published articles and a few chapters in my 1970 monograph on utility theory. The diverse notations and styles of the sources have of course been reconciled here, and their topics arranged in a logical sequence. The two parts of the book take their respective cues from the von Neumann-Morgenstern axiomatization of preferences between risky options and from Savage's foundational treatment of decision making under uncertainty. Both parts are studies in the axiomatics of preferences for decision situations and in numerical representations for preferences. Proofs of the representation and uniqueness theorems appear at the ends of the chapters so as not to impede the flow of the discussion. A few warnings on notation are in order. The numbers for theorems cited within a chapter have no prefix if they appear in that chapter, but otherwise carry a chapter prefix (Theorem 3.2 is Theorem 2 in Chapter 3). All lower case Greek letters refer to numbers in the closed interval from o to 1. The same symbol in different chapters has essentially the same meaning with one major exception: x, y, ... mean quite different things in different chapters. I am indebted to many people for their help and encouragement.
Classical decision theory evaluates entire worlds, specified so as to include everything a decision-maker cares about. Thus applying decision theory requires performing computations far beyond an ordinary decision-maker's ability. In this book Paul Weirich explains how individuals can simplify and streamline their choices. He shows how different 'parts' of options (intrinsic, temporal, spatiotemporal, causal) are separable, so that we can know what difference one part makes to the value of an option, regardless of what happens in the other parts. He suggests that the primary value of options is found in basic intrinsic attitudes towards outcomes: desires, aversions, or indifferences. And using these two facts he argues that we need only compare small parts of the options we face in order to make a rational decision. This important book will interest readers in decision theory, economics, and the behavioral sciences.
The author blends historical narrative with a topical approach and discusses such aspects of the theory as measurement, total value, and imputation. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
