Book contents
5 - Rationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
What do we mean by rationality? We often tend to reach for a characterization in formal terms. Rationality can be seen as logical consistency, for instance. We can call someone irrational who affirms both p and not-p. By extension, someone who acts flagrantly in violation of his own interests, or of his own avowed objectives, can be considered irrational.
This can be seen as a possible extension of the case of logical inconsistency, because we are imputing to this agent end E, and we throw in the principle: who wills the end wills the means. And then we see him acting to prevent means M from happening, acting as it were on the maxim: let me prevent M. Once you spell it out, this makes a formal inconsistency.
Can we then understand the irrationality in terms of the notion of inconsistency? It might appear so for the following reason: the mere fact of having E as an end and acting to prevent M is not sufficient to convict the agent of irrationality. He might not realize that the correct description of his end was ‘E’; he might not know that M was the indispensable means; he might not know that what he was now doing was incompatible with M. In short, he has to know, in some sense, that he is frustrating his own goals, before we are ready to call him irrational. Of course, the knowledge we attribute to him may be of a rather special kind.
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- Philosophical Papers , pp. 134 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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