Choice

If I have a theory about why people choose things – if I can predict what they will choose – can I still call it choice?

Is their perception of this relevant? If it is, wouldn’t I say ‘They believe they are choosing, but really they are obeying a law of nature’. Can I claim both that they are choosing and that they are rule-bound?

There may be a long argument to be had here, but I don’t think we can. We do not attribute ‘choice’ to inanimate objects – even to complex objects such as machines or computers – if we have a mechanical account of their behaviour and interactions.

We attribute choice when it is convenient to attribute intentional states, and we must attribute choice when we must attribute intentional states - e.g. to interlocutors. This bounds any theory of choice, of course, since all our theories are grounded (ultimately) in the possibility of theorising – the possibility of language. Any attempt to ‘ground’ a theory of choice would find that it had to presume the possibility of choice in order to make theorising intelligible (since it is something that we do with interlocutors).

This is a slightly more circuitous version of the OQ paradox generated by the concept of ‘rational choice’ directly – that we cannot give an intelligible account of how we might rationally choose a method of making rational choices.

It has a novel coda with respect to the tired debate about mechanical determinism, however: The language in which our mechanical theories are constructed is only intelligible if we attribute the capacity to choose to our interlocutors.