From Economics to Aesthetics: The Rectification of Preferences

Abstract

Nothing is more common as an opinion at work in the minds of social scientists, even if there is no social scientist who holds the opinion entirely consistently, than the opinion that preferences are ultimate, incorrigible, and without distinction as to deserts. The chief source of this opinion may well be the impression, which social scientists share with other people, that preferences are not only very diverse, taking one person with another; on many subjects, on most, maybe on all, preferences remain diverse as people's information increases, even to the current limit of expert information. Another important source lies in philosophical doctrines sharply separating attitudes or emotions expressed or elicited by value-judgments from beliefs expressed in assertions of fact. (Criticisms that philosophers now take for granted lag far behind these doctrines in their influence on social scientists.) A third source rises within the social sciences: it is the example offered by the treatment, in many respects admirably refined, which preferences receive from economists in the theory of consumer's behavior. I shall begin this paper by making some philosophical comments on this branch of social science; later I shall set forth some hypotheses which themselves belong to social science rather than to philosophy. Their philosophical interest lies in the effect which I hope they will have when they are combined with my comments on the theory of consumer's behavior, namely, the effect of restoring to view grounds for being confident that preferences can be rectified by imparting increased knowledge, though neither our provisions for rectification nor their connections with increases of knowledge are to be understood (let us give thanks) as threatening to