Great Rationality Debate

The Rationality Debate—also called the Great Rationality Debate—is the question of whether humans are rational or not. This issue is a topic in the study of cognition and is important in fields such as economics where it is relevant to the theories of market efficiency.

The idea that man is a rational animal is commonly attributed to Aristotle.

Many studies in experimental psychology have shown that humans often reason in a way that is inaccurate or imperfect—that they do not naturally chose the ideal method or solution.[1] An example of a problem which causes difficulty and debate is the St. Petersburg paradox.[2] This is a lottery which is constructed so that the expected value is infinite but unlikely so that most people will not pay a large fee to play. Gerd Gigerenzer explained that, in this case, mathematicians refined their formulae to model this pragmatic behaviour.[3] Keith Stanovich characterizes this as a Panglossian position in the debate—that humans are fundamentally rational and any variance between the normative position and empirical outcomes may be explained by such adjustments.[4]

See also

References

Citations
  1. Stanovich, West & Toplak 2011, p. 356.
  2. Stanovich, West & Toplak 2011, p. 360.
  3. Gigerenzer 1991, p. 21.
  4. Stanovich, West & Toplak 2011, p. 361.

Sources
  • Gigerenzer, Gerd (1991), "How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond "Heuristics and Biases"" (PDF), European Review of Social Psychology, John Wiley, 2: 83–115, doi:10.1080/14792779143000033
  • Stanovich, Keith (2011), Rationality and the Reflective Mind, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195341140
  • Stanovich, Keith; West, Richard; Toplak, Maggie (2011), "The Great Rationality Debate", The Science of Reason, Psychology Press, ISBN 9781136939099
  • Stein, Edward (1996), Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780191584725
  • Tetlock, Philip; Mellers, Barbara (January 2002), "The Great Rationality Debate", Psychological Science, 13 (1): 94–99, doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00418


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