Social science employs teleological explanations which depend upon the rationality principle, according to which people exhibit instrumental rationality. Popper points out that people also exhibit critical rationality, the tendency to stand back from, and to question or criticise, their views. I explain how our critical rationality impugns the explanatory value of the rationality principle and ...

Economists claim that principles of rationality are normative principles. Nevertheless, they go on to explain why it is in a person’s own interest to be rational. If this were true, being rational itself would be a means to an end, and rationality could be interpreted in a non-normative or naturalistic way. The alternative is not attractive: if the only argument in favor of principles of ration...

rationality of religious belief is one of the most important issues in the philosophy of religion and includes five epistemological approaches. up till recent times, evidentialism was the approach prevalent in the field of rationality of religious beliefs. and it was considered as a symbol of maximal rationalism. reformed epistemology, however, is a newly-emerged school which opposes evidential...

A Review of Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake Environment and Our Health. By Michael A. Livermore Richard L. Revesz.

RATIONALITY IS ESSENTIALLY connected with norms. In Western philosophy, while there has been much disagreement over what the norms of rationality are, there seems to have been substantial agreement that these norms are narrowly prescriptive; in fact there is a pronounced tendency to see rationality as leaving the agent no scope for choice in matters of thought, belief, inference and behaviour. ...