Decision Making: The Complexity of Choice Processes

This article is part of a project in Mathematical and Linguistic Foundations for Intuitive Decisions. It explores decision-making processes in different realities: virtual and real. Linguistic foundations are bases to distinguish these realities, explained through the Discourse Analysis (DA) theory, which takes language effects as caused by ideology, on a virtual plane, and takes evidentiary information as a way to understand the historical record, in the real socio-historical context. The discursive theory studies language production conditions to give rise to meaning oriented by presupposed conditions. We identified this discursive as an early interpretation which gives a meaning in advance and decontaminates other meaning possibilities. We compare such discursive functioning to a mathematical structure of logical reasoning (classical logic), which puts beforehand a “perceived truth” (“speaking intersubjectivity”) to eliminate supposed ambiguities, without reference to a particular meaning or context. However, as subjectivity is not crystallized, it can be understood as a place with a dual role: that of disclosing subjection and that of disclosing its subversion, thus breaking the vicious circle of idealism. This means dealing with incomplete, fragmentary and unpredictable information which will re-work meaning and interfere in the subject’s choice. We differentiate this situation from classical logic, and we choose polyvalent logic (Neutrosophy) to exemplify it. Instead of interpretation’s assigning False or True values, polyvalent logic works with possibilities (the propositions assume different values in each possibility) and admits more than two truth values, thus rejecting the principle of bivalence: In addition to the False (F) and True (T) values, polyvalent logic works with a third value, the Indetermined (I), it treats information under uncertainty. We combined the Discourse Analysis theory with Neutrosophy in order to observe meanings/ideas that will draw the paths of decision-making in the field of the Indetermined (I). The comparison of these decision-making mechanisms makes us aware of the fact that we are not be able to claim that this is the definite understanding of the decision-making phenomenon, but it gives us the hope of shedding light on mastering the complexity of choice processes.