in recent decades, rationality has become one of the important and controversial issues in the intellectual circles. there are many philosophers who have put (and still put) under question the status of reason and human rationality. among those who believe in human reason is popper. to show reason's ability, he rejects positivism and justifying approaches totally; and, designing falsificat...

D and normative modeling of decision making under risk and uncertainty have grown apart over the past decade. Psychological models attempt to accommodate the numerous violations of rationality axioms, including independence and transitivity. Meanwhile, normatively oriented decision analysts continue to insist on the applied usefulness of the subjective expected utility (SEU) model. As this gap ...

The introduction of a small amount of bounded rationality into a model sometimes has little effect, and sometimes has a dramatic impact on predicted behavior. We call a model robust to bounded rationality if small deviations from rationality result only in small changes in the equilibrium set. We also say that a model is structurally stable if the equilibrium set (given fully rational agents) v...

According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or episte...

When philosophers recommend an attitude to death, no less than when they recommend the correct attitude to sex, we presume such advice to be grounded in rational considerations about what is natural and proper. Two things must follow: first, that there will be room for perverted attitudes to death; second, that some objective facts about death can be found to justify such an evaluation. I explo...

My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently em...

Dependable cyber-physical systems strive to deliver anticipative, multi-objective performance anytime, facing deluges of inputs with varying and limited resources. This is even more challenging for life-long learning rational agents as they also have to contend with the varying and growing know-how accumulated from experience. These issues are of crucial practical value, yet have been only marg...

Academic institutions invest considerable resources in improving the website quality of their MBA courses, in the hope of increasing student retention and willingness to recommend the programs to others. Despite this investment, it seems that the old "keep it simple" rule is also true for e-learning. Data collected from students enrolled in a blended distance learning MBA program at the Open Un...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to discussion on the apparent dichotomy between traditional marketing theory/concept and the world of small business management practice. The paper commences with summary consideration of the predominantly unknowable, unpredictable external operating environment with which contemporary small businesses must cope if they are to survive and prosper. The util...

This article first addresses the persistent confusion between causation and excuse. It demonstrates that causation is not the equivalent of compulsion and that causation per se is not an excusing condition. Then the article examines the conceptual and practical difficulties presented by the excuse that is variously labeled "compulsion," "involuntariness," "volitional problems," "irresistible im...