This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

W. Deciding who to go for next for a philosophy bites interview is always a tricky business.

Approachability, eminence, clarity, these are some of the qualities we look for.

This time we decided to ask an expert in decision theory.

Richard Bradley is a professor at the London School of Economics.

Richard Bradley, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

We're going to focus on the topic of understanding decisions.

That's an aspect of decision theory.

But what is decision theory?

Decision theory broadly speaking is the theory that tells you how you ought to make up your mind about problems that you face.

What kinds of situations in which you have one or more options, one or more goals that you might be wanting to achieve,

and there are various features about the environment in which those actions are going to take place that you don't know about.

So could you give me an example of how a real life decision could be somehow illuminated by a decision theory?

Sure, I think the basic insight of modern decision theory is that actions are broadly speaking

like gambles and that every time you exercise an option or take an action

you're taking a kind of bet on the capacity of that action to deliver what you want

given whether or not certain risks that you face in the environment will actually prove to be real or not.

So even in very, very simple cases, like whether you're deciding whether to cross the road, to go to the bakery, to buy your favorite quas-on for breakfast or not,

you're facing a decision problem in which there are various contingencies,

there is traffic, you could possibly be hit by a car as you cross the road, you might get wet if it starts raining,

...