Bounded Reasoning and Higher-Order Uncertainty

A standard assumption in game theory is that players have an infinite depth of reasoning: they think about what others think and about what others think that othersthink, and so on, ad infinitum. However, in practice, players may have a finite depth of reasoning. For example, a player may reason about what other players think, but not about what others think he thinks. This paper proposes a class of type spaces that generalizes the type space formalism due to Harsanyi (1967) so that it can model players with an arbitrary depth of reasoning. I show that the type space formalism does not impose any restrictions on the belief hierarchies that can be modeled, thus generalizing the classic result of Mertens and Zamir (1985). However, there is no universal type space that contains all type spaces.

Proceduralism and implicatures in dialogue

This article aims at discussing some of the problems for the construction of a shared moral point of view in dialogical context, through a revision of both Habermas’ proceduralistic discourse ethics and Grice’s pragmatist conversational implicatures project. I claim that a) by discounting the undue idealization of both projects, supported by their Kantian underpinnings, and b) by refreshing them with a consequentialist approach to rationality in a fallibilistic bounded reasoning approach, one could achieve a more realistic understanding of the dialogical problems between moral strangers. By following such a revision, I suggest to be then possible to operate c) a reversal of the principle of rational cooperation in Grice, in convergence with Sperber & Wilson’s relevance theory, while also considering the role of other additional mechanisms in interaction, such as empathy (in Alvin Goldman’s sense). These modifications result in a fallibilistic understanding of the process of the dialogical construction of a shared moral point of view among moral strangers, with the aid of a non-idealized use of procedures and implicatures.