The BDI paradigm is a powerful means for constructing intelligent agents in terms of their beliefs, d esires, and i ntentions. For this paradigm to bear its full potential, it must incorporate considerations from rationality. This paper develops a set of postulates for intelligent agents who deliberate about their intentions and actions. However, even simple postulates can lead to paradoxical r...

Jack Russell Weinstein's new book sets itself two major tasks: to argue that Adam Smith offers " a coherent philosophy of education that permeates his system " (p. 216) and that Smith's thinking is interestingly attuned to the very modern problem of pluralism. The first strand of argument seeks to provide a way of reading Smith that demystifies some of the remaining ambiguity across his oeuvre....

A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wid...

0. Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of ―instrumental rationality‖? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a ―myth‖. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz‘s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz‘s conclusion ...

Fatalism and Rationality are two separate valuable attributes. In Rationalism and rationality, the active and creative role of human is emphasized, meaning ignorance aversion, imagination aversion, illusion removal and superstition removal. This concept is the opposite of the concept of fatalism in which human has the minimum activity and the emphasis is very much on the role of trans-physics i...

This paper raises the issue of ergonomics' role in giving primacy to fully rational individual human actors in the creation of system failure, despite its commitment to see action as constrained by design and operational features of work. Reflecting on recent contributions to the journal, ergonomics' dilemma is considered against Enlightenment assumptions about individual human reason as the ro...

Brandenburger, Friedenberg, and Keisler [Econometrica 76 (2008), 307352] show that rationality and common assumption of rationality (RCAR) is impossible in a complete and continuous type structure. We show, by inroducing an alternative notion of “weak assumption”, that rationality and common weak assumption of rationality (RCWAR) is possible in a complete and continuous type structure. This pos...

The rationality of a fuzzy choice function is a hot research topic in the study of fuzzy choice functions. In this paper, two common fuzzy sets are studied and analyzed in the framework of the Banerjee choice function. The complete rationality and bounded rationality of fuzzy choice functions are defined based on the two fuzzy sets. An assumption is presented to study the fuzzy choice function,...

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...