Defeasible Decisions: What the Proposal is and isn't
  In two recent papers, I have proposed a description of decision analysis that
differs from the Bayesian picture painted by Savage, Jeffrey and other classic
authors. Response to this view has been either overly enthusiastic or unduly
pessimistic. In this paper I try to place the idea in its proper place, which
must be somewhere in between. Looking at decision analysis as defeasible
reasoning produces a framework in which planning and decision theory can be
integrated, but work on the details has barely begun. It also produces a
framework in which the meta-decision regress can be stopped in a reasonable
way, but it does not allow us to ignore meta-level decisions. The heuristics
for producing arguments that I have presented are only supposed to be
suggestive; but they are not open to the egregious errors about which some have
worried. And though the idea is familiar to those who have studied heuristic
search, it is somewhat richer because the control of dialectic is more
interesting than the deepening of search.
