<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Publishing DTD v1.0 20120330//EN" "JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd"><article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article"><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">INFORMATICA</journal-id><journal-title-group><journal-title>Informatica</journal-title></journal-title-group><issn pub-type="epub">0868-4952</issn><issn pub-type="ppub">0868-4952</issn><publisher><publisher-name>VU</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">INF12108</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.3233/INF-2001-12108</article-id><article-categories><subj-group subj-group-type="heading"><subject>Research article</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Philosophical Aspects of Incommensurability and Incomparability<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1"><sup>✩</sup></xref></article-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="Author"><name><surname>Rauschmayer</surname><given-names>Felix</given-names></name><email xlink:href="mailto:rauschma@rz.uni-leipzig.de">rauschma@rz.uni-leipzig.de</email><xref ref-type="aff" rid="j_INFORMATICA_aff_000"/></contrib><aff id="j_INFORMATICA_aff_000">Institute of Philosophy, University of Leipzig, Burgstr. 21, 04109 Leipzig, Germany</aff></contrib-group><author-notes><fn id="fn1"><label><sup>✩</sup></label><p>This article is based on a paper presented at the 52<sup>nd</sup> meeting of the European working group “Multicriteria Aid for Decisions”, 5<sup>th</sup> to 7<sup>th</sup> October 2000 in Vilnius, Lithuania.</p></fn></author-notes><pub-date pub-type="epub"><day>01</day><month>01</month><year>2001</year></pub-date><volume>12</volume><issue>1</issue><fpage>119</fpage><lpage>132</lpage><history><date date-type="received"><day>01</day><month>01</month><year>2001</year></date></history><abstract><p>Ex ante decision analysis has other problems than ex post analysis. One of the problems is the nature of the value system of the deciding person. Mostly, it will contain different values (criteria, points of view) which are not reducible to one measure. These cases of incommensurability are one reason for the incomparability of the decision options. There are other reasons why it seems highly unrealistic that we may assume the comparability of options as a general case for a rational decision maker.</p></abstract><kwd-group><label>Keywords</label><kwd>multi criteria decision analysis</kwd><kwd>philosophy</kwd><kwd>incomparability</kwd><kwd>incommensurability</kwd><kwd>rationality</kwd></kwd-group></article-meta></front></article>