ABSTRACT
Chapters 1 and 2 established my agenda. Here I reflect on that agenda before moving into the detailed analyses that comprise this book’s main substance. To put things simply, the descriptive enterprise and every component of the representations I employ (including knowledge and resources, goals, beliefs and orientations, subjective valuations and subjective expected values) can be called into question. How can one claim that such representations capture behavior in some way? What is the epistemological status of something like an orientation, given that it is impossible to “get inside people’s heads” to find out what they think-and the people whose behavior I am modeling might deny having the orientations I attribute to them? Are goals as omnipresent as my characterizations would have them?
