Subjective metaphysics and learning from experience: The causal psychology of rational choice

The evaluation of a decision maker's degree of rationality has to do with the way in which (s)he collects and processes 'relevant' information. However, while the efficiency of information processing procedures is a relatively unambiguous notion, the same cannot be said of the judgements of relevance as to the information to be processed. In this paper we argue that individual decision-making processes are necessarily based on a set of meta-empirical assumptions that we call subjective metaphysics. Subjective metaphysics in turn induce the individual's causal psychology through which (s)he interprets the observed evidence. The relationship between causal psychology and individual rationality is discussed with special reference to a simple infinite horizon model of choice under uncertainty.