In this paper I will approach the subject of intuition from a different angle from what has been usual in the philosophy of mathematics, by beginning with some descriptive remarks about Reason and observing that something that has been called intuition arises naturally in that context. These considerations are quite general, not specific to mathematics. The conception of intuition might be call...

On the face of things, it would seem that suffering can have significant value for creatures like us. It is overwhelmingly plausible from the point of view of both naı̈ve reflection and broadly empirical investigation that sensory/psychological suffering is a necessary condition on a certain kind of fitness-preserving causal motivation, and one that assists and supports rational activity. On suc...

We introduce a “reason-based” way of rationalizing an agent’s choice behaviour, which explains choices by specifying which properties of the options or choice context the agent cares about (the “motivationally salient properties”) and how he or she cares about these properties (the “fundamental preference relation”). Reason-based rationalizations can explain non-classical choice behaviour, incl...

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and I put forward a "propaganda model" as a framework for analysing and understanding how the mainstream U.S. media work and why they perform as they do (Herman and Chomsky 1988). We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate on the basis of a set of ideological premises, depend heavily...

This paper describes the conceptual framework for reason maintenance developed as part of WP2. Keyword List reason maintenance, reasoning, explanation, rules Project funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme. c © KIWI 2009