There is a wealth of experimental data showing that the way a problem is framed may have an effect on people's choices and decisions. Based on a semantic analysis of evaluative expressions like ‘good’, I propose a new explanation of such framing effects. The key idea is that our choices and decisions reveal a counterfactual systematicity: they carry information about the choices and decisions we would have made if the facts had been otherwise. It is these counterfactual alternatives that may (...) diverge between otherwise equivalent versions of the same task, and thus explain the effects of framing. (shrink)

This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or ‘framed’. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options specify the number of people who will be saved or the corresponding number who will die. It is standardly assumed (...) that such responses violate a foundational tenet of rational decision-making, known as the principle of description invariance. We discuss recent theoretical and empirical research that challenges the dominant ‘irrationalist’ narrative. These approaches typically pay close attention to how decision-makers represent decision problems (including their interpretation of numerical quantifiers or predicate choice) and they highlight the need for a more robust characterization of the description invariance principle. We conclude by indicating avenues for future research that could bring us closer to a complete—and potentially rationalizing—explanation of framing effects. (shrink)

I use the psychological phenomenon of ‘attribute framing’ as a case study for exploring philosophical conceptions of semantics and the semantics-pragmatics divide. Attribute frames are pairs of sentences that use contradictory expressions to predicate the same property of an individual or object. Despite their equivalence, pairs of attribute frames have been observed to induce systematic variability in hearers’ responses. One explanation of such framing effects appeals to the distinct ‘reference point information’ conveyed by alternative frames. Although this information is taken (...) to be pragmatic, a live debate in the philosophy of language concerns the extent to which pragmatic information can really be held apart from semantics. Therefore, in this article I examine whether – and how – reference point information might be thought to intrude on the semantics of an attribute frame. I describe two ways in which the information might be considered broadly semantic, due to its being directly communicated or conventional. However, I argue that the framing data in fact support a narrower conception of semantics, and a semantics-pragmatics distinction that separates standing sentence meaning from enriched communicated meaning. (shrink)

Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. (...) The central claim of this account is that people represent the numbers in framing problems in a ‘gist-like’ way, as ‘some’; and that this creates a categorical contrast between ‘some’ people being saved (or dying) and ‘no’ people being saved (or dying). I argue that fuzzy-trace theory’s gist-like representation, ‘some’, must have the semantics of ‘some and possibly all’, not ‘some but not all’. I show how this commits fuzzy-trace theory to a modest version of a rival ‘lower bounding hypothesis’, according to which lower-bounded interpretations of quantities contribute to framing effects by rendering the alternative descriptions extensionally inequivalent. As a result, fuzzy-trace theory is incoherent as it stands. Making sense of it requires dropping, or refining, the claim that decision-makers perceive alternatively framed options as extensionally equivalent; and the related claim that framing effects are irrational. I end by suggesting that, whereas the modest lower bounding hypothesis is well supported, there is currently less evidence for the core element of the fuzzy trace account. (shrink)