Comments onMindsets, rationality and emotion in Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

Abstract

The paper’s call for a linking of facts and factbased theory across disciplines and, in particular, the fields of ethics, neuro-physiology and decision sciences to create a common groundwork of explanation, raises some important issues, long ignored by the MCDA community. Much of the literature on MCDA has been and still is to a large extent bogged down in developing clever computational techniques for finding the ‘best’ or ‘preferred’ solution to decision problems with multiple objectives, while remaining stuck in the hard OR paradigm that problem situations are clearly defined, i.e. the objectives, their importance, and trade-offs between them are given or can be elicited from the decision maker(s), that constraints and decision choices are known, and people are mainly seen as passive information sources and recipients and not an integral part of the problem situation. Most approaches are based on the illusion that the interpretation of facts is objective, i.e. independent of the worldview of the observer or analyst, when in fact we, as humans interpret the real world through our perceptions, which by definition are subjective. (In my prevailing ‘mindset’, the only operational meaning of objectivity is Ackoff’s (1974) ‘consensual subjectivity’, namely the [temporary] ‘social product of the open interaction of a wide variety of individual subjectivities’.) The explicitly or implicitly accepted assumption is that facts (or ‘beliefs’ in Wenstp’s terminology), values, and the relevant context or system defined for the problem situation are separable. However, Ulrich’s ‘eternal triangle’ (Ulrich, 2000, p. 252) of judgements about boundary choices, values and facts, made explicitly or implicitly for both the ‘system of concern’ and the ‘context of application’ (the latter being all those aspects that either affect or are affected by the system of concern considered), clearly illustrates the selectivity of these choices in any decision process. Different facts become relevant or their interpretation changes as we modify our boundary choices or modify our value set. For example, when evaluating the effectiveness of a medical procedure, expanding the boundaries to include quality of life requires new facts and may change the interpretation of other facts. Our value set, the importance of the corresponding objectives, and the criteria used for their evaluation may