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Topic: Rationality

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	Rationality
		Rationality is the habit of acting by reason, which means in accordance with the facts of reality.
		A second consequence to acting irrationally is that it undermines one's ability to act rationally in the future.
		Rationality is in your self interest because the only way to achieve desired outcomes is to act according to reality.
	www.importanceofphilosophy.com /Ethics_Rationality.html (399 words)

	Rationality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		However, rationality is a much broader term than logic, as it includes "uncertain but sensible" arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience and the like, whereas logic deals principally with provable facts and demonstrably valid relations between them.
		Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior; the term homo economicus (economic man: the imaginary logically consistent but amoral being assumed in economic models) was coined largely in honor of this view.
		Rationality is a central principle in artificial intelligence, where a rational agent is specifically defined as an agent which always chooses the action which maximises its expected performance, given all of the knowledge it currently possesses.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Rationality (779 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Rationality of various kinds has often been taken to be one of the key features of the mind and/or soul that separates humans from animals.
		Continental Rationalism is a school in which rationality and reason are the key methods by which we obtain knowledge, in opposition to empiricism which states that knowledge is obtained primarily via the senses.
		Rationality is a central principle in Artificial Intelligence, where an rational agent is specifically defined as an agent which always chooses the action which maximises its expected performance, given all of the knowledge it currently possesses.
	wikiwhat.com /encyclopedia/r/ra/rationality.html (384 words)

	Faith and rationality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Faith and rationality are two modes of belief which are seen to exist in varying degrees of conflict or compatibility.
		Rationalism holds that truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching.
		Attacking the epistemological underpinnings of rationality by asserting that certain beliefs not supported by reason or evidence are still properly basic because they are intuitive or that we are "naturally inclined" to believe them.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Faith_and_rationality (1883 words)

	Historicist Theories of Rationality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		First, since Laudan takes his theory of rationality to apply to all spheres of intellectual endeavor, including the philosophy of science, we should expect his meta-methodology (i.e., his criterion regulating the rational choice of a theory of scientific rationality) to be identical with his theory of rationality.
		According to Lakatos, one is rational as long as one avoids ad hocness as much as possible; according to Laudan, one is rational as long as one accepts the research tradition that has solved the most problems and pursues the one that is solving them at the greatest rate.
		The problem with externalist theories of rationality, on the other hand, is that we have no idea of the mechanism that would make a scientist, act in such a way that she minimized ad hocness even though her actual intentions were directed towards some other cognitive goal.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/rationality-historicist (4592 words)

	"Must We Choose Between Rationality and Irrationality?" Symposium Home
		Using Weber's distinction between instrumental rationality and values rationality, it will argue that all theories of rationality incorporate instrumental rationality, but that most theories also insist that reason be applied to the choice of human goals, that is the purposes to which instrumental rationality are directed.
		Yet an even more pervasive form of rationality assumption exists within philosophical and legal discussions of autonomy, where it is taken as a given that respect for the decision-making capacities of others is a bedrock of considerations of how we should treat our fellow citizens.
		Assumptions of rationality may thus be asymmetrical, for we may have good reason to protect our own autonomy just as we are protecting third parties from the dangers coming from the misguided autonomy of others.
	lawreview.kentlaw.edu /symposia/Rationality/papers.htm (1098 words)

	20th WCP: Ressentiment and Rationality
		The rationality of ressentiment is found to be essential to the phenomenon as a whole and to its constitutive parts.
		It is the rationality of the agent that makes her worthy of respect, and undergirds the practical imperative.
		The rational exigence, a demand for consistency, is found in justice sought through revenge, in the unfairness felt in envy, in the need to repress negative feelings and in the devaluation of values.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Anth/AnthMore.htm (3674 words)

	Rationality and Science
		Scientific rationality involves groups as well as individuals, for we can ask whether scientific communities are rational in their collective pursuit of the aims of science.
		On this view, science is rational to the extent that the beliefs that it accumulates are true, and scientific reasoning is rational to the extent that it tends to produce true beliefs.
		If scientific rationality required people to be falsification agents or probabilistic agents, then the cold-cognition challenge would be a serious threat: I cited earlier some of the experimental and historical data that suggest that probabilistic reasoning and falsification are not natural aspects of human thinking.
	cogsci.uwaterloo.ca /Articles/rationality.html (7428 words)

	Rationality in Decision Machines
		Rationality as applied here is a matter of coherence, defining a relation in which the knowledge, goals, and actions must stand.
		An action by this latter interpretation is not satisfactory as the subject of a rationality criterion, however, because it is generally not possible to determine whether an individual action is rational separate from consideration of the entire plan of which it is part.
		Since the most comprehensive rationality criteria are expressed in terms of grand-world plans, assessing the rationality of a decision is not entirely straightforward.
	ai.eecs.umich.edu /people/wellman/decision-machine.html (1945 words)

	Rationality: The Foundation of Science.
		Rationality and its related values had to precede science, because it created the need to determine truth as an objective set of realities which could be evaluated and improved through evidence.
		Historically, the battle against rationality is seen scattered throughout human endeavors.
		There is not a scientific reason, such as experimental evidence or laws of nature, for making the assumption that the velocity of light is determined by the receiving point.
	nov55.com /rnl.html (864 words)

	20th WCP: Coherence and Epistemic Rationality
		If we think of rationality as concerned with behaving in a way so as to achieve one's goals (means/ends rationality), then it can be rational to have inconsistent beliefs, if a big enough prize will be obtained by having such beliefs.
		If rationality requires satisfying the probability axioms and the theorem is true, then we must assign it probability one now, but this would involve being fully confident without sufficient evidence.
		Both charge that even if ideally rational agents, who are logically omniscient, would satisfy coherence, this does not entail anything about what is rational for creatures such as ourselves, who are not logically omniscient.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoVine.htm (3166 words)

	For the Rationality Debate
		It's a very disturbing assumption in these papers that rationality is something that inheres in the oppressor class, whatever that is, whether it's men or whites or westerners.
		I always thought about rationality not that it was something the oppressor had and my people didn't have but that it was something you were more likely to encounter among the oppressed than among those who were busily trying to justify their position in society, regardless of truth.
		Many critics of science and rationality would probably say that what's going on in that relation is the imperial, domineering, colonializing attributes of western rationality playing themselves out.
	www.zmag.org /zmag/articles/ehrenrationpiece.html (5418 words)

	Pluralism and Rationality: the limits of tolerance
		An unhappy illustration is that of a bicultural society, half-slave, half-enslaver, in which the value of sheer physical survival is pursued as intrinsic by the slaves and is quite compatible with the pursuit by their free masters of their own continued hegemony.
		To characterize someone as more or less rational is to assess the coherence that obtains between the things that person values and why that person does what he or she does in order to achieve or maintain them.
		The confrontation of orthodoxy and rationality is paradigmatic of a formal-technical conflict.
	www.newfoundations.com /EGR/RatPlurTol.html (4175 words)

	Lisa Bortolotti reviews Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World by Gerd Gigerenzer
		Gigerenzer wants to develop an alternative view of human rationality and scientific methodology that is sensitive to the important relation between human agents and the natural and social environment in which they operate.
		The notion of ecological and bounded rationality is not fully developed yet, and it is difficult to assess its role as a normative theory of rationality.
		This conclusion would be equivalent to regarding most of human reasoning outputs as rational and would not serve the purpose that a normative theory of rationality is supposed to serve, that is, provide criteria for discrimination between rational and non-rational strategies and behaviour.
	human-nature.com /nibbs/02/thinking.html (1361 words)

	Religion: The Common Aspects of all Religions
		A rational examination of the origins and sources of religion, as well as the benefits and disadvantages of religion, is unlikely to change the mind of anyone who is afraid to examine these concepts objectively.
		We can observe many members of society who appear to be intelligent and rational in the pursuit of their daily life.
		Their rational mind tells them that a god does not exist and yet, there they sit and pray to him.
	www.rationality.net /religion.htm (2976 words)

	Rationality/Science, by Noam Chomsky
		Since "scientific and technological progress were the watchword of socialist and capitalist ideologies," we see that their error and perversity is deep, and we must abandon them, along with any concern for freedom, justice, human rights, democracy, and other "watchwords" of the secular priesthood who have perverted Enlightenment ideals in the interests of the masters.
		Though rational inquiry is rife with metaphor and (uncontroversially) embedded in the world, its intent is to understand, not to construct doctrine that accords with some ethical or other preferences, or that is confused by metaphor.
		Since "it is now obvious" that its "very narrow and surface idea of rationality and rationalism" has undermined "the canon of Western thought," I should adopt "a new notation system which laid out moral and historical propositions" in a "rationality [that is] deepened" (thanks again).
	www.chomsky.info /articles/1995----02.htm (3094 words)

	SAGE Publications - Rationality and Society (Site not responding. Last check: )
		The emergence of the rational action paradigm as the inter-lingua of the social sciences is a remarkable exception to this trend.
		Rationality and Society provides an interdisciplinary forum in which theoretic developments, empirical research, and policy analyses that are relevant to the rational action paradigm can be shared.
		Rationality and Society is an international journal focusing on the latest social research and theory using rational choice as its foundation.
	www.sagepub.com /journal.aspx?pid=83 (334 words)

	Bounded Rationality Encyclopedia Article @ SomethingPersonal.com (Something Personal) (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Many models of human behavior in the social sciences assume that humans can be reasonably approximated or described as "rational" entities, especially as conceived by rational choice theory.
		In addition, bounded rationality suggests that economic agents employ the use of heuristics to make decisions rather than a strict rigid rule of optimization.
		Herbert Simon, in Models of My Life, points out that most people are only partly rational, and are in fact emotional/irrational in the remaining part of their actions.
	www.somethingpersonal.com /encyclopedia/Bounded_rationality (440 words)

	Theory Rational Choice
		Rational choice theory is a very important research approach in the field of.
		Rational Choice Theory (RCT) by Cornish and Clarke (1986) is the theoretical foundation on...
		Rational Choice Theory (RCT) Readings for this section are Peter Abell, "Sociological Theory and Rational Choice Theory," Chapter 8 of Turner and James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, p.
	choicetheory.meanchoice.com /theoryrationalchoice (797 words)

	Rationality as conformity: an outline
		Rationality-as-conformity begins with the idea that a ``rational", ``commonsensical", ``natural", or simply ``logical" choice is one which corresponds to the choice other similar agents would come up with in similar situations.
		Rationality (or common sense - we shall not make a distinction among these terms) is, in its full generality an extremely complex and widely debated subject.
		Given that Rationality is a topic that has been for a long time concern of mathematicians, philosophers and social scientists it is somehow natural to ask why a new formalisation is needed.
	www.ma.man.ac.uk /~hykel/work/thesis-outline (1476 words)

	Science and Rationality (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Rationality, customarily defined as giving reasons for actions or for holding beliefs, is truly the sophist servant of desire.
		Rationality comes closer to being scientific when the desire is to aim at objective truth, but there are many other aims than just this one, that reasons can be associated with, including many areas not open to testability, but still open to criticism.
		The rationality of acting on probability is expressed within utility theory by the Von Neumann-Morgenstern condition that if a person prefers x to y, then the person prefers that probability mixture giving the higher probability of x, among two probability mixtures that yield (only) x and y with differing probabilities.
	home.comcast.net /~reillyjones/popper.html (5770 words)

	Rationality in Economics
		But our requirements for rationality do not include a need for the numbers we assign to bundles by means of the utility function to tell us anything about the intensity of preferences.
		Our rational consumer need not go to the grocery store armed with every possible coupon from the weekend newspaper, carefully choosing what to buy in order to minimize expenditures while consciously trading off the units of utility expected to be obtained from each potential purchase.
		The irony in the weak notion of rationality used by economists is that it is too weak to permit economists to propound forcibly on questions of what the distribution of income ought to be.
	econ.ohio-state.edu /hmarvel/courses/h271/rationality.htm (1320 words)

	SSRN-Limited Attention as the Bound on Rationality by Sharon Gifford
		Economists have argued that one reason firms exist is because of bounded rationality, that bounded rationality is the basis of an entrepreneurial theory of the firm and that optimal organizations must be boundedly rational.
		Thus, the existence of bounded rationality is critical to the theory of the firm.
		However, unlike rationality, which has a straightforward and agreed upon definition, at least among economists, bounded rationality is ambiguous as to just how rationality is bounded.
	papers.ssrn.com /sol3/papers.cfm?cfid=546888&cftoken=44957676&abstract_id=262181 (669 words)

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