Economics for Real

6  Are preferences for real?

Choice theory, folk psychology, and the hard case for commonsensible realism¹

Francesco Guala

1 Introduction

‘Commonsensibles’ are entities – like tables, chairs, flowers, and birds – that belong to our ordinary view of the world. Most contemporary philosophers – and ordinary people, for that matter – are realist about commonsensibles: if we know anything at all, surely we must know that tables and chairs exist. Commonsensibles are epistemically primary, in the sense that they constitute the basic building blocks upon which all knowledge of the external (and, perhaps, internal) world is constructed. This does not mean that intuitions about commonsensibles are incorrigible of course. But the existence of commonsensibles ...