The Rhetoric of Decision Science, or Herbert A. Simon Says

Abstract

Rhetoric, Aristotle tells us, has to do with things about which we deliberate but for which we have no systematic rules. In more contemporary language, concerns uncertainty. Over the centuries, we have become less certain than Aristotle was about many things, and what we call the new rhetoric reflects the extension of uncertainty to matters other than Athenian civic affairs-beyond ethics and politics to philosophy, the academic disciplines in general. What is central to both the old, Aristotelian and this new, extended is the function of deliberation, which is made possible and useful by uncertainty; offers a theory of choice in human affairs. As the domain of has been extended, though, so has the influence of social which has developed an analogue to in science, a theory of choice with sources in economic theory. Decision science formalizes the elements of complex decision problems so that a set of logical axioms can be used to analyze and compare alternatives, one of which will, it is presumed, emerge as a correct, even obvious, choice. The analysis yields a quantified function, which represents the expected utility of each alternative; the quantities for a set of alternatives can be used to rank a decision maker's preferences for the alternatives. In various forms, these methods are widely used and accepted in industrial and governmental decision making such as operations research, cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, and the like. Comparing these two approaches to choice under uncertainty, that of traditional deliberative and that of decision should help