Download or read book Group Rationality in Scientific Research written by Husain Sarkar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-16 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under what conditions is a group of scientists rational? How would rational scientists collectively agree to make their group more effective? What sorts of negotiations would occur among them and under what conditions? What effect would their final agreement have on science and society? These questions have been central to the philosophy of science for the last two decades. In this 2007 book, Husain Sarkar proposes answers to them by building on classical solutions - the skeptical view, two versions of the subjectivist view, the objectivist view, and the view of Hilary Putnam. Although he finds these solutions not completely adequate, Sarkar retrieves what is of value from them and also expropriates the arguments of John Rawls and Amartya Sen, in order to weave a richer, deeper, and more developed theory of group rationality.

Download or read book The Rationality of Science written by W.H. Newton-Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-02-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, original and systematic introduction to philosophy of science which examines the theories of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend before proposing a new, temperate rationalist perspective.

Download or read book Progress and Rationality in Science written by G. Radnitzky and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays has evolved through the co-operative efforts, which began in the fall of 1974, of the participants in a workshop sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The idea of holding one or more small colloquia devoted to the topics of rational choice in science and scientific progress originated in a conversation in the summer of 1973 between one of the editors (GR) and the late Imre Lakatos. Unfortunately Lakatos himself was never able to see this project through, but his thought-provoking methodology of scientific research programmes was ably expounded and defended by his successors. Indeed, this volume continues and deepens the debate inaugurated in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave), a book which grew out of a conference held in 1965. That debate has continued during the years that have passed since that conference. The group of discussions about the place of rationality in science which have been held between those who emphasize the history of science (with Feyerabend and Kuhn as the most prominent exponents) and the critical rationalists (Popper and his followers), with Imre Lakatos defending a middle ground, these discussions were seen by almost all commentators as the most important event in the philosophy of science in the last decade. This problem area constituted the central theme of our Thyssen workshop. The workshop operated in the following manner.

Download or read book Reason and Rationality in Natural Science written by Nicholas Rescher and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on fundamental issues regarding scientific knowledge. Contents: Systematic Essays: Science and the Epistemic Authority of Logical Analysis, Jay F. Rosenberg; Varieties of Understanding, Robert Brandom; Theory Families, Plausibility and the Defense of Modest Realism, Rom Harre; Scientific Rationality and Its Reconstruction, Jurgen Mittelstrass; Conservatism and the Data Base, William Lycan. Historical Essays: Darwin's Achievement, Philip Kitcher; "A Purely Scientific Temper": Victorian Expressions of the Ideal of an Autonomous Science, Robert E. Butts.

Download or read book Rationality written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'Punchy, funny and invigorating ... Pinker is the high priest of rationalism' Sunday Times 'If you've ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead. It's cheaper, more entertaining, and more effective' Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower. 'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Rationality written by Alfred R. Mele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-08 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as scholars in other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and law. The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is an indispensable reference to the current state of play in this vital and interdisciplinary area of study. Twenty-two newly commissioned chapters by a roster of distinguished philosophers provide an overview of the prominent views on rationality, with each author also developing a unique and distinctive argument.

Download or read book How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind written by Paul Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Download or read book Complex Economics written by Alan Kirman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The direct interaction between individuals, firms and banks does not simply produce imperfections in the functioning of the economy but is the very basis of the functioning of a modern economy. This book suggests a way of analysing the economy which takes this point of view. The economy should be considered as a complex adaptive system in which the agents constantly react to, influence and are influenced by, the other individuals in the economy. In such systems which are familiar from statistical physics and biology for example, the behaviour of the aggregate cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the average, or "representative" individual. Just as the organised activity of an ants’ nest cannot be understood from the behaviour of a "representative ant" so macroeconomic phenomena should not be assimilated to those associated with the "representative agent". This book provides examples where this can clearly be seen. The examples range from Schelling’s model of segregation, to contributions to public goods, the evolution of buyer seller relations in fish markets, to financial models based on the foraging behaviour of ants. The message of the book is that coordination rather than efficiency is the central problem in economics. How do the myriads of individual choices and decisions come to be coordinated? How does the economy or a market, "self organise" and how does this sometimes result in major upheavals, or to use the phrase from physics, "phase transitions"? The sort of system described in this book is not in equilibrium in the standard sense, it is constantly changing and moving from state to state and its very structure is always being modified. The economy is not a ship sailing on a well-defined trajectory which occasionally gets knocked off course. It is more like the slime described in the book "emergence", constantly reorganising itself so as to slide collectively in directions which are neither understood nor necessarily desired by its components.

Download or read book The Rationality Quotient written by Keith E. Stanovich and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to assess critical aspects of cognitive functioning that are not measured by IQ tests: rational thinking skills. Why are we surprised when smart people act foolishly? Smart people do foolish things all the time. Misjudgments and bad decisions by highly educated bankers and money managers, for example, brought us the financial crisis of 2008. Smart people do foolish things because intelligence is not the same as the capacity for rational thinking. The Rationality Quotient explains that these two traits, often (and incorrectly) thought of as one, refer to different cognitive functions. The standard IQ test, the authors argue, doesn't measure any of the broad components of rationality—adaptive responding, good judgment, and good decision making. The authors show that rational thinking, like intelligence, is a measurable cognitive competence. Drawing on theoretical work and empirical research from the last two decades, they present the first prototype for an assessment of rational thinking analogous to the IQ test: the CART (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking). The authors describe the theoretical underpinnings of the CART, distinguishing the algorithmic mind from the reflective mind. They discuss the logic of the tasks used to measure cognitive biases, and they develop a unique typology of thinking errors. The Rationality Quotient explains the components of rational thought assessed by the CART, including probabilistic and scientific reasoning; the avoidance of “miserly” information processing; and the knowledge structures needed for rational thinking. Finally, the authors discuss studies of the CART and the social and practical implications of such a test. An appendix offers sample items from the test.

Download or read book Scientific Realism and the Rationality of Science written by Howard Sankey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature.

Download or read book Rationality and Decision Making written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume Rationality and Decision Making: From Normative Rules to Heuristics analyses rational and irrational decision making by individuals as well as by groups. The contributors adopt methodological, logical, linguistic, psychological, historical, and evolutionary perspectives.

Download or read book Social Science Research written by Anol Bhattacherjee and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.

Download or read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Words Objects and Events in Economics written by Peter Róna and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book examines from a variety of perspectives the disappearance of moral content and ethical judgment from the models employed in the formulation of modern economic theory, and some of the papers contain important proposals about how moral judgment could be reintroduced in economic theory. The chapters collected in this volume result from the favorable reception of the first volume of the Virtues in Economics series and represent further contributions to the themes set out in that volume: (i) examining the philosophical and methodological fallacies of this turn in modern economic theory that the removal of the moral motivation of economic agents from modern economic theory has entailed; and (ii) proposing a return descriptive economics as the means with which the moral content of economic life could be restored in economic theory. This book is of interest to researchers and students of the methodology of economics, ethics, philosophers concerned with agency and economists who build economic models that rest in the intention of the agent.

Download or read book The Handbook of Rationality written by Markus Knauff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 879 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Rational Decisions in Organisations written by Frédéric Adam and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managers in organisations must make rational decisions. Rational decision making is the opposite of intuitive decision making. It is a strict procedure utilising objective knowledge and logic. It involves identifying the problem to solve, gathering facts, identifying options and outcomes, analysing them, considering all the relationships and selecting the decision. Rational decision making requires support: methods and software tools. The identification of the problem to solve needs methods that would measure and evaluate the current situation. Identification and evaluation of options and analysis of the available possibilities involves analysis and optimisation methods. Incorporating intuition into rational decision making needs adequate methods that would translate ideas or observed behaviours into hard data. Communication, observation and opinions recording is hardly possible today without adequate software. Information and data that form the input, intermediate variables and the output must be stored, managed and made accessible in a user-friendly manner. Rational Decisions in Organisations: Theoretical and Practical Aspects presents selected recent developments in the support of the widely understood rational decision making in organisations, illustrated through case studies. The book shows not only the variety of perspectives involved in decision making, but also the variety of domains where rational decision support systems are needed. The case studies present decision making by medical doctors, students and managers of various universities, IT project teams, construction companies, banks and small and large manufacturing companies. Covering the richness of relationships in which the decisions should and must be taken, the book illustrates how modern organisations operate in chains and networks; they have multiple responsibilities, including social, legal, business and ethical duties. Nowadays, managers in organisations can make transparent decisions and consider a multitude of stakeholders and their diverse features, incorporating diverse criteria, using multiple types and drivers of information and decision-making patterns, and referring to numerous lessons learned. As the book makes clear, the marriage of theoretical ideas with the possibilities offered by technology can make the decisions in organisations more rational and, at the same time, more human.

Download or read book Rationality Relativism and Incommensurability written by Howard Sankey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1997, this volume brings together a series of essays on the philosophy of science and responds to the "crisis of rationality" which evolved from the denial of both a stable methodology and a common language for science. Howard Sankey holds that important insights about scientific methodology and rationality may be gleaned from the historical approach, from which the existence of profound conceptual change in science, as well as the absence of a neutral observation language, are important findings. Half of Sankey's essays concentrate specifically on the thesis that alternative scientific theories are incommensurable due to semantic differences between the vocabulary in which they are expressed. Several others seek to derive a new way of thinking about scientific rationality from the historical critique of the idea of a fixed scientific method. Still others demonstrate how some seemingly relativistic themes of the historical approach may be embraced in a non-relativistic manner within the context of a pluralistic and naturalistic theory of scientific methodology and rationality.