Rationality

About: Rationality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 20459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 617787 citations.

Flexible Rigidities: Industrial Policy and Structural Adjustment in the Japanese Economy, 1970-1980

Abstract: Professor Ronald Dore examines how, despite the Japanese 'flagrantly flouting all received principles of capitalist rationality', they are able to adjust so successfully to the challenge of shifting world economic conditions. First published in 1986, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

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.

Reasoning about beliefs and actions under computational resource constraints

Abstract: Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete normative analysis impossible. We attempt to move discussion beyond the debate over the scope of the problems that can be handled effectively to cases where it is clear that there is insufficient computational or engineering resource to perform an analysis deemed to be complete. Under these conditions, we stress the importance of considering the expected costs and benefits of applying alternative approximation procedures and heuristics for computation and knowledge-acquisition. We discuss bow knowledge about the structure of user utility can be used to control value tradeoffs for tailoring inference to alternative contexts. We finally address the notion of real-time rationality, focusing on the application of knowledge about the expected timewise-refinement abilities of reasoning strategies to balance the benefits of additional computation with the costs of acting with a partial result.

Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently emphasize the disparate ways in which this term is employed and occasionally question its theoretical usefulness on this account.' With an eye towards such concerns, I will in what follows consider only examples in which the correctness of its application is more or less uncontroversial. Thus, if I have strong, undefeated evidence that the butler committed the crime, and my belief that the butler committed the crime is based on that evidence, then my belief that he did so is epistemically rational. By instrumental rationality, I mean the rationality which one displays in taking the means to one's ends. Thus, if I have the goal of asking the speaker a question, and I know that I will only be able to ask the speaker a question if I raise my hand, then (all else being equal) it is instrumentally rational for me to raise my hand. How are epistemic and instrumental rationality related? Here is a particularly radical suggestion: epistemic rationality jusr is instrumental rationality. More precisely: epistemic rationality is a species of instrumental rationality, viz. instrumental rationality in the service of one's cognitive or epistemic goals. Call this way of thinking about epistemic rationality the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rationality. My primary concem in this paper is to explore the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rational' Plantinga (1993) distinguishes five 'varieties' of rationality; Goldman (1986) explicitly

The Rationality of Informal Argumentation: A Bayesian Approach to Reasoning Fallacies

Abstract: Classical informal reasoning "fallacies," for example, begging the question or arguing from ignorance, while ubiquitous in everyday argumentation, have been subject to little systematic investigation in cognitive psychology. In this article it is argued that these "fallacies" provide a rich taxonomy of argument forms that can be differentially strong, dependent on their content. A Bayesian theory of content-dependent argument strength is presented. Possible psychological mechanisms are identified. Experiments are presented investigating whether people's judgments of the strength of 3 fallacies--the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the circular argument or petitio principii, and the slippery slope argument--are affected by the factors a Bayesian account predicts. This research suggests that Bayesian accounts of reasoning can be extended to the more general human activity of argumentation.