Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

203582

Knowledge, belief and counterfactual reasoning in games

Robert Stalnaker

pp. 895-922

Abstract

Deliberation about what to do in any context requires reasoning about what will or would happen in various alternative situations, including situations that the agent knows will never in fact be realized. In contexts that involve two or more agents who have to take account of each others' deliberation, the counterfactual reasoning may become quite complex. When I deliberate, I have to consider not only what the causal effects would be of alternative choices that I might make, but also what other agents might believe about the potential effects of my choices, and how their alternative possible actions might affect my beliefs. Counter factual possibilities are implicit in the models that game theorists and decision theorists have developed – in the alternative branches in the trees that model extensive form games and the different cells of the matrices of strategic form representations – but much of the reasoning about those possibilities remains in the informal commentary on and motivation for the models developed. Puzzlement is sometimes expressed by game theorists about the relevance of what happens in a game "off the equilibrium path": of what would happen if what is (according to the theory) both true and known by the players to be true were instead false. My aim in this paper is to make some suggestions for clarifying some of the concepts involved in counterfactual reasoning in strategic contexts, both the reasoning of the rational agents being modeled, and the reasoning of the theorist who is doing the modeling, and to bring together some ideas and technical tools developed by philosophers and logicians that I think might be relevant to the analysis of strategic reasoning, and more generally to the conceptual foundations of game theory.

Publication details

Published in:

Arló-Costa Horacio, Hendricks Vincent F., van Benthem Johan (2016) Readings in formal epistemology: sourcebook. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 895-922

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20451-2_42

Full citation:

Stalnaker Robert (2016) „Knowledge, belief and counterfactual reasoning in games“, In: H. Arló-Costa, V. F. Hendricks & J. Van Benthem (eds.), Readings in formal epistemology, Dordrecht, Springer, 895–922.