Btw, my response, which Barkley was so nice about, is not an economist's response; on the contrary. It's a cognitive science response based on empirical research into cognitive processing. (I studied this stuff with Bob Nesbitt and Paul Thagard at Michigan, became a convert.) If prospect theory (as one version of it is called) were incorporated systematically into economic theory, as Daniel Kahneman (last year's Noberl winner) and Aaron Tversky argued that it shoud be, it would rip the guts out of neoclassical economics, upend all its theorems, and make the whole thing an empirical science. Scary, huh? Cass Sunstein has started to do some owrk onalong these lines in his behavioral law and economics project.
WS:
This as precisely the point I tried to make in my original posting. If you add cognitive framing, you end up with multiple rationalities, because you can selectively filter in or out factors to be considered in a decision making process. In that situation, your main theoretical task is to predict which rationality operates under which circumstances rather than what will be th eoutput given a particular input.
Wojtek