Nagel on Appiah- Pudd'nhead Philosophy

Thomas Nagel, reviewing Kwame Appiah's new book, writes 

'.. if we use the theory of economic rationality to think about the behavior of real human beings, we are treating them as if they were superrational (“Cognitive Angels,” in Appiah’s phrase); we are employing a useful fiction, which allows us to bring human action under quantitative laws.'

 Nagel could just as well have said-  'if we use the theory of Astrology to think about the behaviour of real human beings, we are treating them as if they were perfectly susceptible to the influence of celestial objects. We are employing a useful fiction which allows us to classify human beings under their Sun Signs.'

Astrology, like Economics, solves a coordination problem. In India, under the Dynasty, Astrologers had more power than Economists. Frankly, they were working a lesser mischief on the commonweal.

Suppose I am in charge of hiring workers for a Public Sector undertaking or a large Public limited Company. It is revealed that I use Astrology, not some rational calculus of productivity, in making my decisions. It is likely that I would be sacked or suffer some other punishment because I had not shown a duty of diligence and standard of care such as a reasonable person would show in the management of her own affairs. There is a culpa levis type failure here. I may have a defence in law or in the court of public opinion if I can show that reliance on Astrology leads to superior outcomes. However, I would still face an up-hill battle because I have to show Numerology or Chiroscopy might not have yielded a superior result which however might have run against the grain of my prejudices or partisan preferences.Thus, for safety's sake, the default 'duty of care' methodology is the conventional one. In the old days there was a slogan- 'nobody got sacked for buying IBM'. Similarly the 'rational choice' solution is merely whichever one is conventionally believed to be the one you won't get sacked for choosing. But this is 'regret minimisation' not 'utility maximisation' as might appear.

Ariston or Aristotle, or some other such pederast or pedagogue, pointed out long ago that nomos (conventions) is more important than phusis (objective reality of the type that concerns Scientists) though, conventionally, the former may claim to arise from the latter. Why? Nomos involves protocol bound 'artificial reason'. Phusis is a mathesis facing an infinite regress. About the former, we need no 'useful fictions'- indeed, they are counterproductive- because they will delude us simply. There is no point going to Law because one has the fiction, 'Courts are always Just', in one's head. One is bound to be disappointed. This is a theme for Comedy or Tragedy- it is not Philosophic.

When it comes to open questions in Physics or other Natural Sciences, however, it makes sense to proceed by way of conjecture and hypothesis building. This 'isonomia'- i.e. nomothetic 'laws' of Physics which apply equally to all objects of their class- is wholly defeasible, features no 'rigid designators' and thus involves no 'buck stopping' juristic mechanism. However there can be no nomothetic isonomia of nomos itself precisely because the latter is arbitrarily buck stopped.

Consider the nonsense we get when we treat idiographic Nomos as nomothetic Phusis-

Appiah writes

 In earlier work of my own, for example, I have argued both that races, strictly speaking, don’t exist, and that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of a person’s race. This can usually be parsed out in a way that is not strictly inconsistent: What is wrong is discrimination against someone because you believe her to be, say, a Negro even though there are, in fact, strictly speaking, no Negroes. But in responding to discrimination with affirmative action, we find ourselves assigning people to racial categories. We think it justified to treat people as if they had races even when we officially believe that they don’t.

There is no difficulty parsing this at all. Race, in America- like Caste in India, but not Class in England- was and is a Juristic term. It is a buck-stopped rigid designator. The fact that nothing biological corresponded to it was irrelevant. There is no fact about Geology which says that this land belongs to x and yet there is indeed an x to whom this land belongs.

Appiah is being unjust to himself. He was not relying upon two different 'idealizations'. He was saying that the Law was wrong to make a particular distinction because Science had progressed and shown it to be bogus. However, the Law still had a definition of Race which could be used for affirmative action to redress a historical wrong.

Nagel writes

'These cases do not start out as idealizations. “Negro” and “homosexual” became important social identities because it was widely believed that they were essential properties possessed by some people and not others, and that they had behavioral, social, and moral consequences.

Once again 'idealizations' don't matter. The Law does. Certain people were defined as 'Negro' by the Law for a specific economic and administrative purpose. The one drop rule meant that this was a rigid designator for all future time. Similarly 'homosexual identity' was associated with certain acts the Law considered criminal.

Having dark skin was not essential for one to be a Negro. Mark Twain wrote a novel about a slave woman substituting her infant for the 'Master's' heir. Both looked white but one was (wrongly) defined as negro. Thanks to some fingerprints taken at the time of birth, this 'manifest injustice' is corrected.

The problem with Sen or Appiah, or other victims of White Privilege's tokenist subterfuge, is that they have to appear to be as stupid as Puddenhead Wilson. They have to say 'well, rather than fix the whole problem- which we can't do because...urm... that would involve 'ideal type theory' and we aint cent per cent White, nor much cop at our day jobs, so we can't prescribe an ideal- we must tackle that fraction of injustice that is glaringly manifest. But, in Twain's novel, this proves a terrible idea. The 'victim'- the white guy wrongly classed as a negro, loses what little relational enfranchisement he has and suffers a sort of 'social death'.

Let us look again at the quip for which a smart lawyer was condemned as a 'Pudd'nead'.

He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud--
"I wish I owned half of that dog."
"Why?" somebody asked.
"Because I would kill my half."

The Appiah or Sen type theorist asserts a fractional entitlement when it is their own prodromally rabid research program which needs a bullet in the head.

In Economics, we have the Second Best theorem. Contra the textbooks, what this actually says is-'if you see a manifest market failure don't fix it.  Consider what other markets are missing and, on the basis of general equilibrium (which is an 'ideal', not comparative, theory) decide what 'second best solution' can be applied. In other words, the repair is dictated by the ideal. It does not arise by 'comparison'. Indeed, 'comparisons are odious' is a good Copybook heading for us to take as a God.

The fact that 'ideals' are computationally inaccessible is a good thing. It baffles parasites and predators. But such ideals still serve to solve coordination problems and to dam up capacitance diversity in discoordination games. But, this is only the case in the realm of Nomos- not Physics.

Idealizations unconnected with the Law or Administrative practice don't matter. In the Seventies, many kids around the world thought that anyone who looked a bit Chinese must be good at Kung Fu. No doubt, this was annoying to Chinese people living in the West but it had no behavioural, social or moral consequences- unless, of course, all Chinese people decided to take up Kung Fu and, because 'expectations create reality', turned out to be very good at it. But if that had happened, a mimetic effect- not an idealization- would have been responsible.

Appiah maintains that when someone who does not share these beliefs goes on using the terms, this is not just the verbal acknowledgment of a misguided but tenacious social illusion; it is an example of fictional thinking.

In the case of 'Negroes' and 'Homosexuals', even if the most discriminatory type of Law had been changed, a culture of Law Enforcement and Administrative practice had not. No doubt 'Fictional thinking' did occur, but the Political Engagement it arose from was wholly fictitious.

We do not truly distance ourselves from these categories and perhaps should not:

'Identities, conceived of as stable features of a social ontology grounded in natural facts, are often…assumed in our moral thinking, even though, in our theoretical hearts, we know them not to be real. They are one of our most potent idealizations.'

This invites the question: When are these idealizations indispensable, and when on the contrary should we resist them, by appealing to the more complex truth? Appiah addresses this and related questions with great insight in an earlier book, The Ethics of Identity,4 but not here.

Moral thinking can't involve 'stable features of social ontology'- because to do so would be to render itself pointless. But if a cognitive process is pointless, we don't call it 'thinking' but wool gathering or building Castles in Spain or some similar act of either stupidity or grandiose folly.

Idealizations are silly. The Law isn't. Economic models are hilariously wrong-headed and arise out of Physics envy. The truth isn't more complex than a nomothetic model or an idealization. It is simpler because it is idiographic and thus has a much narrower domain.

 Appiah considers another type of idealization that he calls “counter-normative”: thinking or acting as if a moral principle is true although we know it isn’t.

This isn't thinking, it is talking shite. This is not 'acting' but playacting.

He believes we do this when we treat certain prohibitions—against murder or torture, for example—as moral absolutes.

We don't treat anything as a moral absolute. There is no point in doing so. We might say this or think this but then we talk and think shite almost all the time we aren't doing something useful.

His view is that strictly, there are exceptions to any such rule, but it may be better to treat it as exceptionless. In that way we will be sure to avoid unjustified violations, without countervailing risk, since “it is remarkably unlikely that I will ever be in one of those situations where it might be that murder was permissible (and even less likely that I will ever be in one where it is required).”

It is very unlikely that I will ever find the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat. Thus it does no harm if I take as my moral absolute 'always shit upon the doorstep of 10 Downing Street when you destroy that horcrux.'
In this way I avoid unjustified violations of the right of the British Prime Minister not to step in my poo.

Appiah's argument is actually against being so foolish as to formulate moral absolutes.

Appiah adds that sometimes the advantage of the fiction will depend on its acceptance not by an individual but by a community. Perhaps the strict rule against making false promises would be an example, since even if it is not universally obeyed, the general belief that it is generally accepted encourages people to trust one another.

 Utter nonsense! Making false promises is fine. Breaching a contract isn't. What matters is whether or not consideration has passed. A high trust Society will feature lower transactional Uncertainty and thus lower hedging. This means an exogenous supply shock will have a bigger impact. It may wipe out the community or prevent it from rising much above subsistence. No Fiction is useful in our Social life. No Lie is Noble. History teaches nothing else which is why Historians are condemned to repeat it.

Which moral rules one regards as fictions or idealizations will depend on what one believes to be the basis of moral truth.

Very true! If one believes the basis of moral truth is telling stupid lies, one may well distinguish between 'fictions'- like all human beings are human, with facts, like most humans, with the exception of us guys, are cellular automata for whom we must prescribe rules so their Game of Life can commence on a proper moral basis.

Appiah does not take up this large topic, but his discussion seems most consistent with the view that the ultimate standard of right and wrong is what will produce the best overall outcomes.

Because outcomes have already been scored by omniscient Yelp reviewers and your Smartphone can work backwards from them and tell you how to continually change your ultimate standard of right and wrong till you reach your destination.

Counternormative fictions then become useful if we will not achieve the best overall outcomes by aiming in each case at the best overall outcome: it is better to put murder and torture entirely off the table.

Yup! Our smartphone ought not to be able to tell us to drive through a wall to get to the best overall outcome coz we might end up in hospital.

Still, it must be said, torture and murder are excellent ways to achieve consensus on ultimate standards of right and wrong.

This is an area of perennial controversy, but those who think the prohibitions on murder, torture, and false promises have a different source, dependent on the intrinsic character of those acts rather than overall outcomes, may be less prone than Appiah to attribute their strictness to idealization.

Not if you beat them enough or threaten to rape their fathers and kill their mothers.

Appiah concludes with a topic of great philosophical interest, that of idealization in moral theory itself.

Moral theory exists because of the fantasy that it does some good. It doesn't at all. It is a mischievous availability cascade we are inoculated against in adolescence by stupid pedagogues.

There is some possibility of confusion here, because he is talking about idealization in a sense somewhat different from that discussed so far.
Every morality is an ideal; it enjoins us to conform to standards of conduct and character that we are often tempted to violate, and it is predictable that ordinary human beings will sometimes fail to conform, even if they accept the morality as correct.

Either the 'ideal' is embodied in a plan or it has no tie to action. If it is a plan, then the question is- is it feasible? Consider my own moral code- which is that of fighting for Truth, Justice & the Iyer way. My plan is to utter the magic word 'Aiyayo' whenever I see any crime or calamity and immediately transform into Super-Iyer who then eats plenty of idli- sambar & masala dosai and thus saves the world. It is predictable that I sometimes fail to conform to this ideal, though I accept its morality as correct. This is because I can't be arsed to go down to Tooting and pig out at the Shravana Bhavan. So what?

This by itself does not involve idealization in Appiah’s sense. The moral principles need depend on no assumptions that are not strictly true. A morality describes not how people do behave but how they should behave; and it has to assume only that they could behave in that way, even if at the moment many of them do not.
The idealization that interests Appiah occurs when political thinkers or philosophers theorize about morality. In developing their accounts, they will often imagine situations or possibilities that differ from what is true in the actual world, as an aid to evaluating moral or political hypotheses.

Very true! However, they may not be uttering the magic word 'Aiyayo' and proceeding to pig out at Shravana Bhavan. Thus they are all evil bastards.

One type of idealization consists in evaluating a moral or political principle by considering what things would be like if everyone complied with it. But as Appiah points out, this is far from decisive:
Consider a familiar kind of dispute.

One philosopher—let us call her Dr. Welfare—proposes that we should act in a way that maximizes human well-being. What could be more evident than that this would make for the best world? Another—Prof. Partiality—proposes instead that we should avoid harm to others in general but focus our benevolence on those to whom we have special ties. There is every reason to doubt that this will make a world in which everyone is as well off as could be. But a world in which everyone is succeeding in complying pretty well with Prof. Partiality’s prescription might be better (by standards they share) than a world where most of us are failing pretty miserably to comply with Dr. Welfare’s. And given what people are actually like, one might suppose that these are the likely outcomes.

An ideal that cannot be implemented is futile.

My Super-Iyer ideal can be implemented. It only requires me to 'manage the news' such that I only become aware of crimes or calamities when I'm hungry and standing outside a Shravana Bhavan. Saying 'Aiyayo' is a piece of cake. There is nothing futile, as opposed to fartogenic, with respect to my subsequent pigging out at Shravana Bhavan.

No doubt, if cognition is costly- i.e. thinking has an opportunity cost- neither Dr. Welfare nor Prof. Partiality nor my turning into Super-Iyer should exist in a well ordered world. But cognition isn't costly when practised by stupid pedagogues or soi disant Pundits.

The question is, how much of a drag on moral ideals should be exercised by the stubborn facts of human psychology? How far can moral ideals ask us to transcend our self-centered human dispositions without becoming unrealistically utopian? As Appiah says,

Some aspects of human nature have to be taken as given in normative theorizing…, but to take us exactly as we are would involve giving up ideals altogether. So when should we ignore, and when insist on, human nature?

I would suggest that to idealize in this context is not to ignore human nature but to regard it, rightly or wrongly, as capable of change. Only if the change is impossible or undesirable is the idealization utopian.

Human nature dictates that stupid pedagogues and soi disant Pundits will talk worthless shite. This could be changed- for example by beating them or micturating mightily upon them any time they open their mouths- but, why bother? They aren't doing any actual harm because there is no signal to which they are adding noise.

Appiah illustrates a different kind of reason to avoid excessive idealization with the example of immigration policy. To even pose the problem that faces us we have to take the existence of national boundaries as given, as well as the fact that some states treat their own citizens with flagrant injustice or are beset by chaos and severe deprivation. In thinking about what obligations such a situation places on stable and prosperous states, it is no use imagining a unified world without state boundaries, or a world of uniformly just states in which people are free to move from one to another. Such ideal possibilities do not tell us what we should do now, as things are.

Nonsense! The ideal and actual position are one and the same. Some countries feature exit pressures and others face entry pressures. Exit countries need to do what Entry countries have done and Entry countries need to ensure they can sustain whatever made them desirable in the first place. Migrants face an information asymmetry problem and have little Voice. So Entry countries need to send alethic signals about likely outcomes. This means, if in fact new migrants will be much worse off than was previously the case, the State should deter entry. If the opposite is the case, it should proactively fetch the migrants rather than let them suffer terrible traumas on their journey because this will save money in the long run.

Appiah’s response relies on the idea of fortunate nations each doing their fair share toward alleviating the plight of those seeking asylum, while acknowledging that many nations probably won’t meet this standard.

So Appiah's response is meaningless pi-jaw- if not outright mischievous. Migrants gain if they can be geographically concentrated. 'Fair share' policies hurt them because they get dispersed and lose valuable 'external economy' type skills, entitlements and capabilities. When the Ugandan Asians began to exercise their right of Entry to Britain, Leicester Council took out advertisements in local papers saying 'don't come here'. The Asians did the opposite because they realised that there was a already an Asian community in Leicester. Since the Ugandan Asians were well educated and had previously enjoyed a good standard of living, Leicester actually did well out of their influx. Obviously, the same thing cannot be said of every ethnic enclave that has formed since then in inner cities around the globe. However, there is always some subsidiarity based mechanism design which can improve those neighborhoods. But such mechanism design can have no truck with the stupid Appiahs of this world.

This too is an ideal, but it doesn’t depend on imagining a world very different from the actual one.

Merkel imagined that Appiah's world was the actual one. The result was that Europe moved in Orban's direction. Trump may get re-elected because Appiah type shite scares working class Democrats straight.

Immigration is a special case, but Appiah deploys a more general form of the argument—unsuccessfully, in my view—to criticize the structure of John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls presents his most general principles of justice by the device of what he called “ideal theory.” That is, he tries to describe the structure and functioning of a fully just or “well-ordered” society, in which “everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions.” Rawls held that ideal theory was the natural first stage in formulating principles of justice, before proceeding to a systematic treatment of the various forms of injustice and the right ways to deal with them—such as criminal law and principles of rectification. The latter enterprise he described as “nonideal theory,” and he held that it depends on the results of ideal theory.

However Rawls thought that ideal theory depended on universally accepted nomothetic truths re. Econ, Psychology etc. But, these disciplines are idiographic. Thus policy space is multidimensional. Hence 'agenda control' gains salience. Rawlsian theory is 'anything goes'. It suffers the same state space explosion as Sen-tentious shite.

Appiah objects that the description of a fully just society is no help with the problem we actually face, which is how to make improvements in our actual, seriously unjust society.

Nothing blathershites say  is any help. Improvements in our actual, seriously unjust, society are made by people contesting Loyalty, using Voice, or Exiting such situations.

He adds:

The history of our collective moral learning doesn’t start with the growing acceptance of a picture of an ideal society.

There has been no 'collective moral learning'. There has been mechanism design. Imagine an aeronautical engineer saying 'the history of our collective aeronautical learning doesn't start with the growing acceptance of a picture of an ideal society where man can fly.'

It starts with the rejection of some current actual practice or structure, which we come to see as wrong.

 Thus the Wright brothers rejected the contemporary practice of flapping one's arms in the airs and hopping. Orville said to Wilbur, 'Listen bro, this hopping business is just wrong. It discriminates against legless people. We must do something to redress this injustice.'

You learn to be in favor of equality by noticing what is wrong with unequal treatment of blacks, or women, or working-class or lower-caste people.

Very true! You learn to be against rape by noticing what is wrong with raped people- viz. that they are bleeding and crying and trying to kill themselves and saying 'You fucking bastard! You've ruined my life. May you rot in Hell!' Of course you soon forget what you have learned- except maybe how to better dispose off the bodies of your victims so as to evade detection.

You learn to be in favor of freedom by seeing what is wrong in the life of the enslaved or of women in purdah.

Absolutely! The ante-bellum American South was full of people who had learned to be in favor of freedom because they, unlike us, could see what was wrong in the life of the enslaved. In fact, the Civil War was about these very learned people in the South trying to persuade the North to learn to favour freedom. Similarly, it is notorious, Saudi Arabians are much more in favor of freedom than Americans because they can see with their own eyes what is wrong in the life of women in purdah.

But this is misguided as a response to Rawls, whose method in moral theory is to begin precisely with intuitively obvious examples of injustice like those Appiah cites. Rawls’s philosophical project is to discover general principles that give a morally illuminating account of what is wrong in those cases by showing how they deviate from the standards that we should want to govern our society.

Rawls was foolish. He didn't get that people in the original position might, by reason of indoctrination in a specific economic or psychological theory, choose a Society featuring Slavery and Purdah. As a matter of fact, price, wage and service provision discrimination are predicted and justified by conventional Econ 101 where 'natural' monopoly or monopsony exists. In the case of Public Goods, it must be the case that, at the margin, discrimination exists. A threat against a Judge will be dealt with differently to a threat against some random homeless dude.

Such general principles are needed to help us judge what would be right in less obvious cases.

No. Idiographic, 'expert cognition' is needed to judge anything actual. Anything else is just 'noise' not 'signal'.

Both levels of inquiry are essential to the systematic pursuit and philosophical understanding of justice, and the whole aim of Rawls’s theory is to unite them.

The systematic pursuit and philosophical understanding of anything is a complete waste of time. Co-evolution has an uncertain fitness landscape. Canalisation and capacitance diversity is the regret minimizing solution. Philosophy is merely a displacement activity.

It is highly implausible to claim that an understanding of the general principles that would govern a fully just society will not help us to decide what kinds of social or legal or economic changes to our actual society will make it more just.

Sadly this isn't true. It is highly plausible to claim that worthless pedagogues who think they can  'understand general principles'- despite the fact that co-evolved processes must be highly idiographic and hysteresis ridden (otherwise an extinction event is imminent)- are utter shitheads who can't help us to decide anything at all- let alone stuff which could destroy our pension pot or turn our country into Syriza's Greece or Chavez's Venezuela.

There is much more in this rich and illuminating book, including a fine discussion of our emotional response to fiction and drama. Appiah’s insight is that when we feel genuine sadness at the death of Ophelia, it is not because of what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but because of the suspension of “the normal affective response to disbelief.” We react as if we believe an unhappy young woman has died, although we do not believe it, so this is another case of idealization.

Oh dear. Is it really plausible that a man of Appiah's ancestry, culture and intellect hears Lear's cry-'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?"- and thinks, 'Oh! an unhappy young woman has died. I don't really believe she died.  But, this is a case of 'idealization' so I will stipulate to having been genuinely moved.'?

Cordelia is not 'an unhappy young woman'. She is happy, supremely so, discharging in every respect all her proper duties and enjoying such love and adoration as we ourselves have felt for mothers, sisters, wives, Sadhvis, Saints, and...daughters. Her parrhesia is joyous, eusocial, and of the nature of agape and eucharist. No 'unhappy consciousness' inhabits her. She lives as she dies in a Celtic Christianity that is the opposite of crepuscular and in which Arthur's bosom substitutes for Abraham's.
Alas! all are rendered ghostly to us now- through the agency of time, distance or change of manners.They breathe not in our arms and 'tis but as a dog, a horse, or- in my case- a rat, we yet have life who can remark nothing else.

Corrdelia lives. Lear dies but not entirely because nobody does not know this. That's what creates interessement here.
Nagel takes a different view- 

The examples that Appiah discusses are interesting in themselves, but he also thinks they offer a larger lesson:

A lesson larger than Shakespeare's? Marvellous!

Once we come to see that many of our best theories are idealizations, we will also see why our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it.

Really? But we each already have our own idiosyncratic plurality of ways of thinking about everything.  Why do we need to come to see that our best theories are stupid lies? Understanding the world means knowing how it works which in turn means knowing how to make it work for us. 'A Plurality of ways of thinking about it' does not help us to do this. Science works. Magic doesn't. Magic can accommodate Science within its own 'plurality of views'. Science, sadly, can do no such thing.

This book pictures the world as requiring us to have a multitude of pictures of the world because...urm... that's just how it is okay? If the world finds out you don't have a lot of different pictures of it- one as a cowboy, another as a Bharatnatyam dancer, a third as a tranny, a fourth as a Ninja warrior etc- the world will get really pissed off with you and fuck you up big time.

Nagel does not say that Appiah's work is worthless. No. He says it is a 

 a gentle jeremiad against theoretical monism. 

 But this book is theoretical. It is monistic. It says a certain 'idealizations' provide a 'covering set' for everything understandable about the world. To say 'I'd like to buy the world a Coke' is not qualitatively different from 'I'd like to buy the world a plurality of soft drinks including Coke, Pepsi and Fanta.' Frankly, it is sillier.

It isn’t just that we need different theories for different aspects of the world, but that our best understanding may come from theories or models that are not strictly true, and some of which may contradict one another.

So, the world is idiographic, not nomothetic. But, in that case, theories aren't salient. Expert cognition is.

This is a liberating outlook, though care must be taken not to let it become too liberating.

Whom does it liberate? To what good purpose does it liberate? People who indulge in this sort of gobshittery have done nothing useful for thousands of years. No doubt, we must deplore such shitheads becoming 'too liberated' and prancing around naked in Waitrose.

As Appiah insists, we should not allow the plurality of useful theories to undermine our belief in the existence of the truth, leaving us with nothing but a disparate collection of stories.

Till recently, physics and biology and economics and law were wholly separate. This did not undermine our belief in truth. No doubt, a 'theory of everything' is possible but indeterminacy will feature heavily in it and thus we need fear neither reductionism, on the one hand, nor nihilistic relativism on the other.

It is conscious deviation from the truth that makes a theory an idealization, and keeping this in mind is a condition of its value.

My Super-Iyer theory is a more conscious deviation from the truth than rational choice theory. It is firmly based on 'Idealization'. It better fulfills Vaihinger's condition of a pragmatically justified 'fiction'- at least for me.  Does this make it more valuable than a genuine solution to a particular coordination problem? Would I be well advised to  mount a defence against a 'standard of care' type prosecution by appealing to my Super-Iyer theory or, is it not rather the case that I should offer a univocal 'rational choice' defence?