Pragmatic Intuitions and Rational Choice

The literature of rational choice is pervaded with apparent paradoxes. Often the paradoxes are contrived in the following sense. We consider a problem as though it were a realistic or typical choice problem similar to the kinds of problems we normally face in everyday life. Yet the conditions of the problem as specified defy normal experience. Reasoning through the problem under the specified conditions yields one result while baldly attacking the problem from the intuitions developed from our normal experience yields a contrary result. Hence we think there is a paradox.