Showing papers on "Rationality published in 2005"

Privacy and rationality in individual decision making

Abstract: Traditional theory suggests consumers should be able to manage their privacy. Yet, empirical and theoretical research suggests that consumers often lack enough information to make privacy-sensitive decisions and, even with sufficient information, are likely to trade off long-term privacy for short-term benefits

International Institutions and Socialization in Europe: Introduction and Framework

Abstract: International institutions are a ubiquitous feature of daily life in many world regions, and nowhere more so than contemporary Europe. While virtually all would agree that such institutions matter, there is less agreement on exactly how they have effects. This special issue brings together European Union specialists and international relations theorists who address the latter issue. In particular, we explore the socializing role of institutions in Europe, with our central concern being to better specify the mechanisms of socialization and the conditions under which they are expected to lead to the internalization of new roles or interests. Drawing on a multifaceted understanding of human rationality, we consider three generic social mechanisms—strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion—and their ability to promote socialization outcomes within international institutions. This disaggregation exercise not only helps consolidate nascent socialization research programs in international relations theory and EU studies; it also highlights points of contact and potential synergies between rationalism and social constructivism.For comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to two anonymous referees, IO editors Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse, as well as to John Duffield, Alexandra Gheciu, Liesbet Hooghe, Peter Katzenstein, Ron Mitchell, Frank Schimmelfennig, Martha Snodgrass, and Michael Zurn. More generally, thanks are owed to all the project participants for numerous and valuable discussions on the themes addressed in this volume.

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

Abstract: Preface 1. The will to believe 2. Is life worth living 3. The sentiment of rationality 4. Reflex action and theism 5. The dilemma of determinism 6. The moral philosopher and the moral life 7. Great men and their environment 8. The importance of individuals 9. On some Hegelisms 10. What psychical research has accomplished Index.

Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement

Abstract: This article examines why people violate rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal types of participation. The authors argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, the authors posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state-level data for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the authors present a series of two-stage least squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation.

Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts

Abstract: In this paper we describe a five-stage phenomenological model of skill acquisition, of which expertise is the highest stage. Contrary to the claims of knowledge engineers, we argue that expertise in general, and medical expertise in particular, cannot be captured in rule-based expert systems, since expertise is based on the making of immediate, unreflective situational responses; intuitive judgment is the hallmark of expertise. Deliberation is certainly used by experts, if time permits, but it is done for the purpose of improving intuition, not replacing it. The best way to avoid mistakes is to take responsibility for them when they occur, rather than try to prevent them by foolproof rules. In bureaucratic societies, however, there is the danger that expertise may be diminished through over-reliance on calculative rationality.

Why emotional intelligence is an invalid concept

Abstract: In this paper I argue that the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) is invalid both because it is not a form of intelligence and because it is defined so broadly and inclusively that it has no intelligible meaning. I distinguish the so-called concept of EI from actual intelligence and from rationality. I identify the actual relation between reason and emotion. I reveal the fundamental inadequacy of the concept of EI when applied to leadership. Finally, I suggest some alternatives to the EI concept. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why Be Rational

Abstract: Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person’s attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have.

The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality

Abstract: The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. This accessible and original monograph explores a central aspect of the imagination, the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality, and claims that imaginative thoughts are guided by the same principles that underlie rational thoughts. Research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed; in The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne argues that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People often create alternatives to reality and imagine how events might have turned out "if only" something had been different. Byrne explores the "fault lines" of reality, the aspects of reality that are more readily changed in imaginative thoughts. She finds that our tendencies to imagine alternatives to actions, controllable events, socially unacceptable actions, causal and enabling relations, and events that come last in a temporal sequence provide clues to the cognitive processes upon which the counterfactual imagination depends. The explanation of these processes, Byrne argues, rests on the idea that imaginative thought and rational thought have much in common.

How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine

Abstract: Introduction: rationality in an uncertain practice PART 1: MEDICINE AS A PRACTICE 1. Medicine and the limits of knowledge 2. The misdescription of medicine 3. Clinical judgement and the interpretation of case PART 2: CLINICAL JUDGEMENT AND THE IDEA OF CAUSE 4. "What brings you here today?": the idea of cause in medical practice 5. The simplification of clinical cause 6. Clinical judgement and the problem of particularizing PART 3: THE FORMATION OF CLINICAL JUDGEMENT 7. Aphorisms, maxims, and old saws: some rules of clinical reasoning 8. "Don't think zebras": a theory of clinical knowing 9. Knowing one's place: the evaluation of clinical judgement PART 4: CLINICAL JUDGEMENT AND THE NATURE OF MEDICINE 10. The self in medicine: the use and misuse of the science claim 11. A medicine of neighbours 12. Uncertainty and the ethics of practice

Estimation and Testing of Forecast Rationality under Flexible Loss

Abstract: In situations where a sequence of forecasts is observed, a common strategy is to examine “rationality” conditional on a given loss function. We examine this from a different perspective— supposing that we have a family of loss functions indexed by unknown shape parameters, then given the forecasts can we back out the loss function parameters consistent with the forecasts being rational even when we do not observe the underlying forecasting model? We establish identification of the parameters of a general class of loss functions that nest popular loss functions as special cases and provide estimation methods and asymptotic distributional results for these parameters. This allows us to construct new tests of forecast rationality that allow for asymmetric loss. The methods are applied in an empirical analysis of IMF and OECD forecasts of budget deficits for the G7 countries. We find that allowing for asymmetric loss can significantly change the outcome of empirical tests of forecast rationality.

Philosophy of social science: the philosophical foundations of social thought

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition Introduction to the First Edition Empiricism and Positivism in Science Some Problems of Empiricism and Positivism Science, Nature and Society: Some Alternatives to Empiricism Interpretive Approaches 1: Instrumental Rationality Interpretive Approaches 2: Rationality as Rule-Following: Cultures, Traditions and Hermeneutics Interpretive Approaches 3: Critical Rationality Critical Realism and the Social Sciences Feminism, Knowledge and Society Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism Conclusion: In Defence of Philosophy Commentary on Recent Developments Appendix I: Personal Conclusions Appendix II: Obituary for Professor Ian Craib Glossary Bibliography Index

Everyday Discourse and Common Sense: The Theory of Social Representations

Abstract: Introduction.- Everyday Life, Knowledge and Rationality.- Universes of Everyday Knowledge.- Introducing Social Representations.- The Topography of Modern Mentality.- The Organisation and Structure of Social Representations.- Dynamics of Social Representations.- Discourse, Transmission and the Shared Universe.- Action, Objectification and Social Reality.- Epistemological Aspects of Social Representation Theory.- Methods in Social Representation Research References.- Endnotes.- Index.

Rationality and Psychology in International Politics

Abstract: The ubiquitous yet inaccurate belief in international relations scholarship that cognitive biases and emotion cause only mistakes distorts the field's understanding of the relationship between rationality and psychology in three ways. If psychology explains only mistakes (or deviations from rationality), then (1) rationality must be free of psychology; (2) psychological explanations require rational baselines; and (3) psychology cannot explain accurate judgments. This view of the relationship between rationality and psychology is coherent and logical, but wrong. Although undermining one of these three beliefs is sufficient to undermine the others, I address each belief—or myth—in turn. The point is not that psychological models should replace rational models, but that no single approach has a lock on understanding rationality. In some important contexts (such as in strategic choice) or when using certain concepts (such as trust, identity, justice, or reputation), an explicitly psychological approach to rationality may beat a rationalist one.I thank Deborah Avant, James Caporaso, James Davis, Bryan Jones, Margaret Levi, Peter Liberman, Lisa Martin, Susan Peterson, Jason Scheideman, Jack Snyder, Michael Taylor, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Robert Jervis and Elizabeth Kier for their thoughtful comments and critiques. Jason Scheideman also helped with research assistance.

Individual Irrationality and Aggregate Outcomes

Abstract: There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full rationality of all agents. Thus, a key question is how the interactions between rational and irrational people shape the aggregate outcome in markets and other institutions. We discuss evidence indicating that strategic complementarity and strategic substitutability are decisive determinants of aggregate outcomes. Under strategic complementarity, a small amount of individual irrationality may lead to large deviations from the aggregate predictions of rational models, whereas a minority of rational agents may suffice to generate aggregate outcomes consistent with the predictions of rational models under strategic substitutability.

Individual Irrationality and Aggregate Outcomes

Abstract: There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptionsnroutinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations ofnindividual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economicnmodels that assume full rationality of all agents. Thus, a key question is how the interactions between rational and irrational people shape the aggregate outcome in markets and other institutions. We discuss evidence indicating that strategic complementarity and strategic substitutability are decisive determinants of aggregate outcomes. Under strategic complementarity, a small amount of individual irrationality may lead to large deviations from the aggregate predictions of rational models, whereas a minority of rational agents may suffice to generate aggregate outcomes consistent with the predictions of rational models under strategic substitutability.

Affect: from information to interaction

Abstract: While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. In affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of information - discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity.

Communication in emergency medicine: Implications for patient safety

Abstract: Emergency medicine is largely a communicative activity, and medical mishaps that occur in this context are too often the result of vulnerable communication processes. In this year-long qualitative study of two academic emergency departments, an interdisciplinary research team identified four such processes: triage, testing and evaluation, handoffs, and admitting. In each case, we found that narrative rationality (the patient's story) was consistently subjugated to technical rationality (actionable lists). Process changes are proposed to encourage caregivers to either reconsider their course of action or request additional contextual information. A heightened awareness of the bias for technical over narrative rationality and a better recognition of uncertainty in emergency medicine communication are important first steps toward anticipating potential failures and ensuring patient safety.

Mothering, Class and Rationality:

Abstract: Class theorists ask for research on the ‘paradox of class’ – the fact that while class appears to be materially just as important as ever, it hardly features as part of a self-conscious social iden...

How probabilities reflect evidence

Abstract: Many philosophers think of Bayesianism as a theory of practical rationality. This is not at all surprising given that the view’s most striking successes have come in decision theory. Ramsey (1931), Savage (1972), and De Finetti (1964) showed how to interpret subjective degrees of belief in terms of betting behavior, and how to derive the central probabilistic requirement of coherence from reflections on the nature of rational choice. This focus on decision-making can obscure the fact that Bayesianism is also an epistemology. Indeed, the great statistician Harold Jeffries (1939), who did more than anyone else to further Bayesian methods, paid rather little heed to the work of Ramsey, de Finetti, and Savage. Jeffries, and those who followed him, saw Bayesianism as a theory of inductive evidence, whose primary role was not to help people make wise choices, but to facilitate sound scientific reasoning. This paper seeks to promote a broadly Bayesian approach to epistemology by showing how certain central questions about the nature of evidence can be addressed using the apparatus of subjective probability theory. Epistemic Bayesianism, as understood here, is the view that evidential relationships are best represented probabilistically. It has three central components:

Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality

Abstract: In Deliberative Environmental Politics, Walter Baber and Robert Bartlett link political theory with the practice of environmental politics, arguing that the "deliberative turn" in democratic theory presents an opportunity to move beyond the policy stalemates of interest-group liberalism and offers a foundation for reconciling rationality, strong democracy, and demanding environmentalism. Deliberative democracy, which presumes that the essence of democracy is deliberation -- thoughtful and discursive public participation in decision making -- rather than voting, interest aggregation, or rights, has the potential to produce more environmentally sound policy decisions and a more ecologically rational form of environmental governance.Baber and Bartlett defend deliberative democracy's relevance to environmental politics in the twenty-first century against criticisms from other theorists. They critically examine three major models for deliberative democracy -- those of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and advocates of full liberalism such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, and James Bohman -- and analyze the implications of each of these approaches for ecologically rational environmental politics as well as for institutions, citizens, experts, and social movements. In order to establish that democracy is ecologically sustainable and that environmental protection can (and must) become a norm of culture rather than a mere fact of government, they argue, new models of ecological deliberation and deliberative environmentalism are required.

Validating New Measures of the Fear of Crime

Abstract: This study assesses the scaling properties of some new measures of the fear of crime. The new conceptualization—a range of distinct but related constructs that constitute the fear of crime—comprises the interplay between emotion, risk perception and environmental perception. Data from a small‐scale survey are analysed using confirmatory factor analysis showing good scaling properties of the multiple indicators. Two implications of the new conceptualization for the rationality of the fear of crime are discussed. First, perceptions of the risk of crime seem to be a product of how individuals make sense of their social and physical environment. Second, the fear of crime may constitute such evaluations of community cohesion and moral consensus as well as specific experiences of ‘fear’ of ‘crime’—a way of seeing as well as a way of feeling. The conclusions consider ramifications for the rationality of the fear of crime, particularly in the context of reassurance policing in England and Wales.

Habermas and validity claims

Abstract: At the heart of Jurgen Habermas’s explication of communicative rationality is the contention that all speech acts oriented to understanding raise three different kinds of validity claims simultaneously: claims to truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness. This paper argues that Habermas presents exactly three distinct, logically independent arguments for his simultaneity thesis: an argument from structure; an argument from criticizability/rejectability; and an argument from understanding/reaching understanding. It is further maintained that the simultaneity thesis receives cogent support only from the Argument from understanding/reaching understanding, and only if the notion of ‘understanding’ is expanded to that of ‘agreement’.

The Logic of Private and Collective Action

Abstract: Since Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action (1965), it is impossible for political scientists to conceive of political participation without reference to his powerful argument linking numbers of participants, public goods, and participatory outcomes. What is puzzling is the poor empirical support for this argument in the domain where it should work best, namely explaining business political activity. Olson thought his arguments principally applicable to economic groups, and for the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests, the most active segment of the interest group community. We explore these arguments with business political activities data by examining the statistical performance of various measures of market structure in determining business political activity, and find little empirical support. We do offer an alternative basis for business behavior lodged in both private and collective goods that preserves business rationality and also helps explain not only the amount of business political participation but the modes of business participation. W hen we think about the paradox of participation, one of the formative puzzles of modern political science, we tend to think first of voting and citizen participation. We think of the large numbers involved, the small probability that an individual vote will be decisive, and we conclude that no one will vote. The puzzle then becomes why so many people do vote. To find a solution we tend to plead some sort of “diminished rationality,” such as the costs of voting are too low even to consider carefully or that they are outweighed by the norm of civic duty. In this article, we examine the paradox of participation in the principal context that Olson (1965) considered it. For the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests. He observed that business was the most active segment of the interest group community and noted that for large numbers of participants seeking pubic goods, the dominant choice is to do nothing. He argued that business activity derived from multiple markets and related industries segmenting the larger business community into small groups. In an oligopolistic market it is rational for the individual firm to participate in association with others or on its own: “A

An intricate fabric: understanding the rationality of practice

Abstract: This article provides an account of a ‘neo-Aristotelian’ conception of practice. It introduces this account through an analysis of internal and external goods of practices. It then delineates a crucial distinction between practical and technical rationality and grounds this distinction in an analysis of the priority of ‘material’ over ‘method’ in different domains of activity. It concludes by addressing some possible misgivings about the account and by tracing some of its most significant implications for the relationship of theory and practice.