Rationality

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

Without good reason : the rationality debate in philosophy and cognitive science

Abstract: Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational-we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality-the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on-and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowledge-in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized.

Emerging perspectives on judgment and decision research

Abstract: Introduction: where to decision making Sandra L Schneider and James Shanteau Part I Fortifying Traditional Models of Decision Making: 1 Hard decisions, bad decisions: on decision quality and decision aiding J Frank Yates, Elizabeth S Veinott and Andrea L Patalano 2 Rationality in choice under certainty and uncertainty R Duncan Luce 3 Generalization across people, procedures, and predictions: violations of stochastic dominance and coalescing Michael Binbaum and Teresa Martin 4 Can l'homme eclaire be fast and frugal? Reconciling Bayesianism and bounded rationality Laura Martignon and Stefan Krauss Part II Elaborating Cognitive Processes in Decision Making: 5 Memory as a fundamental heuristic for decision making Michael R P Dougherty, Scott D Gronlund and Charles F Gettys 6 Comprehension and decision making David A Rettinger and Reid Hastie 7 Memory, development, and rationality: an integrative theory of judgment and decision making Valerie F Reyna, Farrell J Lloyd and Charles J Brainerd 8 Integrating themes from cognitive and social cognitive development into the study of judgment and decision making Beth A Haines and Colleen Moore Part III Incorporating Affect and Motivation in Decision Making: 9 Values, affect and processes in human decision making: a differentiation and consolidation theory perspective Ola Svenson 10 Judgment and decision making: the dance of affect and reason Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters and Paul Slovic 11 Some ways in which positive affect facilitates decision making and judgment Alice Isen and Aparna A Labroo 12 What do people really want? Goals and context in decision making Sandra L Schneider and Monica D Barnes Part IV Understanding Social and Cultural Influences on Decision: 13 Bridging individual, interpersonal, and institutional approaches to judgment and decision making: the impact of accountability on cognitive bias Jennifer S Lerner and Philip E Tetlock 14 Cognitions, preferences, and social sharedness: past, present, and future directions in group decision making Tatsuya Kameda, R Scott Tindale and James Davis 15 The accentuation principle in social judgment: a connectionist reappraisal J Richard Eiser 16 The socio-cultural contexts of decision making in organizations Mark F Peterson, Shaila Miranda, Peter B Smith and Valerie M Haskell Part V Facing the Challenge of Real-World Complexity in Decisions: 17 The naturalistic decision making perspective Rebecca Pliske and Gary Klein 18 Command style and team performance in dynamic decision making tasks Julia Clancy, Glenn Elliott, Tobias Ley, Jim McLennan, Mary Omodei, Einar Thorsteinsson and Alexander Wearing 19 How can you tell if someone is an expert? Performance-based assessment of expertise James Shanteau, David Weiss, Rickey Thomas and Julia Pounds Commentary Optimists, pessimists, and realists Michael Doherty

Bounded Rationality in Individual Decision Making

Abstract: The main objectives of this paper are: (i) To give a pithy, opinionated summary of what has been learned about bounded rationality in individual decision making from experiments in economics and psychology (drawing on my 1995 Handbook of Experimental Economics chapter); and (ii) mention some promising new directions for research which would be included if that chapter were written today.

Reasons, robots and the extended mind

Abstract: A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life. 1 Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wide a berth. They focus their attention on such superficially poor cousins as 'adaptive behaviour', 'ecologically sound perception-action routines', fast and frugal heuristics' and 'fast, fluent real-time real-world action control'. 2 Is this robbery or revelation? Has 'embodied, embedded' cognitive science simply lost sight of the very phenomena it was meant to explain? Or are we finally seeing rationality aright, as fully continuous with various forms of simpler, ecologically situated, adaptive response? I distinguish two ways of developing the embodied, embedded' approach. The first, which does indeed threaten to lose sight of the key targets, is fully committed to a doctrine of biological cognitive incrementalism according to which full-scale human rationality is reached, rather directly, by some series of tweaks to basic biological modes of adaptive response. The second depicts human capacities for advanced reason as at best the indirect products of such a process. Such capacities, it is argued, depend heavily upon the effects of a special kind of hybridization in which human brains enter into an increasingly potent cascade of genuinely symbiotic relationships with knowledge-rich artifacts and technologies. This latter approach, I finally suggest, does better justice to our peculiar profile, which combines deep biological continuity with an equally deep cognitive discontinuity.

Consequentialism and its critics

Abstract: Introduction. 1. John Rawls: Classical Utilitarianism 2. Bernard Williams: Consequentialism and Integrity 3. Thomas Nagel: War and Massacre 4. T.M. Scanlon: Rights, Goals, and Fairness 5. Peter Railton: Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality 6. Robert Nozick: Side Constraints 7. Thomas Nagel: Autonomy and Deontology 8. Derek Parfit: Is Common-Sense Morality Self-Defeating? 9. Amartya Sen: Rights and Agency 10. Philippa Foot: Utilitarianism and the Virtues 11. Samuel Scheffler: Agent-Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues 12. Conrad D. Johnson: The Authority of the Moral Agent.