The first reference on rationality that integrates accounts from psychology and philosophy, covering descriptive and normative theories from both disciplines. Both analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology have made dramatic advances in understanding rationality, but there has been little interaction between the disciplines. This volume offers the first integrated overview of the state of the art in the psychology and philosophy of rationality. Written by leading experts from both disciplines, The Handbook of Rationality covers the main normative and descriptive theories of rationality—how people ought to think, how they actually think, and why we often deviate from what we can call rational. It also offers insights from other fields such as artificial intelligence, economics, the social sciences, and cognitive neuroscience. The Handbook proposes a novel classification system for researchers in human rationality, and it creates new connections between rationality research in philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines. Following the basic distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, the book first considers the theoretical side, including normative and descriptive theories of logical, probabilistic, causal, and defeasible reasoning. It then turns to the practical side, discussing topics such as decision making, bounded rationality, game theory, deontic and legal reasoning, and the relation between rationality and morality. Finally, it covers topics that arise in both theoretical and practical rationality, including visual and spatial thinking, scientific rationality, how children learn to reason rationally, and the connection between intelligence and rationality.

In Rationality and the Reflective Mind, Keith Stanovich attempts to resolve the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science--the debate about how much irrationality to ascribe to human cognition. He shows how the insights of dual-process theory and evolutionary psychology can be combined to explain why humans are sometimes irrational even though they possess remarkably adaptive cognitive machinery. Stanovich argues that to fully characterize differences in rational thinking, we need to replace dual-process theories with tripartite models of cognition. Using a unique individual differences approach, he shows that the traditional second system (System 2) of dual-process theory must be further divided into the reflective mind and the algorithmic mind. Distinguishing them will allow us to better appreciate the significant differences in their key functions: The key function of the reflective mind is to detect the need to interrupt autonomous processing and to begin simulation activities, whereas that of the algorithmic mind is to sustain the processing of decoupled secondary representations in cognitive simulation. Stanovich then uses this algorithmic/reflective distinction to develop a taxonomy of cognitive errors made on tasks in the heuristics and biases literature. He presents the empirical data to show that the tendency to make these thinking errors is not highly related to intelligence. Using his tripartite model of cognition, Stanovich shows how, when both are properly defined, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence, and that IQ tests fail to assess individual differences in rational thought. He then goes on to discuss the types of thinking processes that would be measured if rational thinking were to be assessed as IQ has been.

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium was launched in the early eighties. It began during a particularly lean period in the American economy. But its success is linked as much to the need to be in touch with the rapidly changing currents of the philosophical climate as with the need to insure an adequately stocked professional community in the Philadelphia area faced, perhaps permanently, with the threat of increasing attrition. The member schools of the Consortium now include Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Villanova University, that is, the schools of the area that offer advanced degrees in philosophy. The philosophy faculties of these schools form the core of the Consortium, which offers graduate students the instructional and library facilities of each member school. The Consortium is also supported by the associated faculties of other regional schools that do not offer advanced degrees - notably, those at Drexel University, Haverford College, La Salle University, and Swarthmore College - both philosophers and members of other departments as well as interested and professionally qualified persons from the entire region. The affiliated and core professionals now number several hundreds, and the Consortium's various ventures have been received most enthusiastically by the academic community. At this moment, the Consortium is planning its fifth year of what it calls the Conferences on the Philosophy of the Human Studies.

The concept of rationality and its significance for theory and empirical research in social science are key topics of scholarly discussion. In the tradition of an analytical as well as empirical approach in social science, this volume assembles novel contributions on methodological foundations and basic assumptions of theories of rational choice. The volume highlights the use of rational choice assumptions for research on fundamental problems in social theory such as the emergence, dynamics, and effects of social norms and the conditions for cooperation and prosociality.

Leading psychologist, lecturer, and author Windy Dryden has compiled his most valuable writings on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy from the last thirty five years. This collection reveals the thinking, concepts and practical experience that have made Dryden one of the most respected and cited REBT authorities of our time. Dryden has authored or edited over 195 books and established Europe’s first Masters in REBT. While his primary allegiance remains with REBT, he has published extensively on CBT and the wider issues of psychotherapy. Dryden’s pluralistic perspective on REBT comes through in such seminal pieces as: The therapeutic alliance in rational-emotive individual therapy Compromises in rational-emotive therapy Adapting CBT to a broad clientele Unconditional self-acceptance and self-compassion

The monograph is about a meta-theory of knowledge-production process and the logical pathway that connects the epistemic possibility to the epistemic reality. It examines the general conditions of paradigms for information processing and isolates the classical and fuzzy paradigms for comparative analysis. The sets of conditions that give rise to them are defined, stated and analyzed to abstract the corresponding sets of laws of thought. The fuzzy paradigm with its corresponding logic and mathematics is related to inexact symbolism for the defective information structure where the results of the knowledge production must satisfy the epistemic conditionality, composed of fuzzy conditionality and fuzzy-stochastic conditionality under the principle of logical duality with continuum. The classical paradigm with its corresponding logic and mathematics is related to exact symbolism for exact information structure where the vagueness component of the defectiveness is assumed away, and where the results of the knowledge production must satisfy no epistemic conditionality or at the maximum only the stochastic conditionality under the principle of logical dualism with excluded middle. It is argued that the epistemic path that links ontological space to the epistemological space is information. The ontological space is taken as the primary category of reality while the epistemological space is shone to be a derivative. Such information is universally defective and together with assumptions imposed guides the development of paradigms with their laws of thought, logic of reasoning, mathematics and computational techniques. The relational structure is seen in terms of logical trinity with a given example as matter-information-energy transformational trinity which is supported by the time trinity of past-present-future relationality. The book is written for professionals, researchers and students working in philosophy of science, decision-choice theories, economies, sciences, computer science, engineering, cognitive psychology and researchers working on, or interested in fuzzy paradigm, fuzzy logic, fuzzy decisions, and phenomena of vagueness and ambiguities, fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy-stochastic processes and theory of knowledge. It is further aimed at research institutions and libraries. The subject matter belongs to extensive research and development taking place on fuzzy phenomena and the debate between the fuzzy paradigm and the classical paradigm relative to informatics, synergetic science and complexity theory. The book will have a global appeal and across disciplines. Its strength, besides the contents, is the special effort that is undertaken to make it relevant and accessible to different areas of sciences and knowledge production.

Early in the 20th century, our world was small and closed with boundaries. And, there were no appreciable changes. Therefore, we could foresee the future. These days, however, we could apply mathematical rationality and solve problems without any difficulty. As our world began to expand rapidly and boundaries disappeared, the problem of bounded rationality emerged. Engineers put forth tremendous effort to overcome this difficulty and succeeded in expanding the bounds of mathematical rationality, thereby establishing the "Controllable World." However, our world continues to expand. Therefore such an approach can no longer be applied. We have no other choice than "satisficing" (Herbert A. Simon's word, Satisfy + Suffice). This expanding open world brought us frequent and extensive changes which are unpredictable and diversification and personalization of customer expectations. To cope with these situations, we need diverse knowledge and experience. Thus, to satisfy our customers, we need teamwork. These changes of environments and situations transformed the meaning of value. It used to mean excellent functions and exact reproducibility. Now, it means how good and flexible we can be to adapt to the situations. Thus, adaptability is the value today. Although these changes were big, and we needed to re-define value, a greater shift in engineering is now emerging. The Internet of Things (IoT) brought us the "Connected Society," where things are connected. Things include not only products, but also humans. As changes are so frequent and extensive, only users know what is happening right now. Thus, the user in this Connected Society needs to be a playing manager—he or she should manage to control the product-human team on the pitch. Moreover, this Connected Society will bring us another big shift in engineering. Engineering in this framework will become Social Networking, with engineering no longer developing individual products and managing team products. The Internet works two ways between the sender and the receiver. Our engineering has ever been only one way. Thus, how we establish a social networking framework for engineering is a big challenge facing us today. This will change our engineering. Engineers are expected to develop not only products, but also such dream society. This book discusses these issues and points out that New Horizons are emerging before us. It is hoped that this book helps readers explore and establish their own New Worlds.

The unifying theme of the 23 contributions to this book is the social interaction of rational individuals. The work of John C. Harsanyi on game theory, social choice, and the philosophy of science finds an echo in these essays. Contributions by well known game theorists and economists present a great variety of stimulating theoretical investigations. Part I contains six papers on non-cooperative game theory written by Maschler, Owen, Myerson, Peleg, Rosenmüller, Hart and Mas-Collel. Part II with three contributions by Kalei, Samet, van Damme, d'Aspremont, and Gérard-Varet is devoted to the use of non-cooperative game theory in the analysis of problems of mechanism design. Basic questions of non-cooperative game theory are discussed in three essays by Güth, Hardin, and Sugden in Part III. Applied game models are discussed in three papers by Friedman, Selten, and Shubik in Part IV. Problems of social choice are investigated in Part V which deals with utilitarianism and related topics in five contributions by Hammond, Binmore, Arrow, Roemer, and Broome. Finally, Part VI contains three papers: an interdisciplinary comparison of physics and economics by Samuelson, a methodological essay by Brock, and an appraisal of the work of John C. Harsanyi.

Statistical illiteracy can have an enormously negative impact on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader understanding and sound decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions under uncertainty, explaining why these are very often more rational than probability models. After a critical look at behavioral theories that do not model actual psychological processes, the book concludes with a call for a heuristic revolution that will enable us to understand the ecological rationality of both statistics and heuristics, and bring a dose of sanity to the study of rationality.

What is knowledge? Where does it come from? What kinds of knowledge are there? Can we know anything at all? This lucid and engaging introduction grapples with these central questions in the theory of knowledge, offering a clear, non-partisan view of the main themes of epistemology. Both traditional issues and contemporary ideas are discussed in sixteen easily digestible chapters, each of which conclude with a useful summary of the main ideas discussed, study questions, annotated further reading and a guide to internet resources. Each chapter also features text boxes providing bite-sized summaries of key concepts and major philosophers, and clear and interesting examples are used throughout. The book concludes with an annotated guide to general introductions to epistemology, a glossary of key terms, and a summary of the main examples used in epistemology, This an ideal first textbook in the theory of knowledge for undergraduates coming to philosophy for the first time. The third edition has been revised and updated throughout and features two new chapters, on religious knowledge and scientific knowledge, as part of a whole new section on what kinds of knowledge there are. In addition, the text as a whole has been refreshed to keep it up to date with current developments.