Action in Uncertainty

3Anticipation and Planning

3.1. A more desirable state of the world

As we saw in Chapter 1, even if the action is natural, it is almost always exercised to change a state of the world. In this book, we will adopt the vocabulary of decision theorists, which has the advantage of being simple and precise. We will therefore speak of a state of the world for a present situation such as could be described by an observer; in the state of the world, we must include the past and the psychological state of the individuals. The decision-maker thus observes a state of the world and wishes, by their action, to arrive at a more desirable state. For example, the decision-maker rents a house and then makes the decision to build, because they think it is better not to pay rent and to own. The same is true when a student decides to go on vacation to take a nice break from their studious routine. Even free action serves the psychic state of the one who undertakes it¹. From the smallest to the biggest decision, there is the will to change for the better. However, it happens that we do so much that things go from bad to worse, but with very few exceptions, we have not done so on purpose. In fact, what happens in this case is that things did not turn out as planned, which brings us onto anticipations.

3.2. Anticipations

The outcome of an action or undertaking is by nature uncertain since, to use the image from the introduction, once we have chosen a path, we are not in control of the events that ...