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René Descartes

Born on this day. The following extract from Bernard Williams’ brilliant (but dense) Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in a small town near Tours, now called la-Haye-Descartes, where the house of his birth can still be seen. His family belonged to the lesser nobility, his father and…

Boundedly Rational Decision-Making under Certainty and Uncertainty: Some Reflections on Herbert Simon

The sixth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Mark Pingle Introduction Our collective rationality became more bounded on February 9, 2001. Herbert Simon emphasized we humans are cognitively constrained, and those constraints impact our decisions. Yet, Herbert Simon’s mind was less constrained than most of…

Stochastic rationality in Oakeshott’s philosophy

With the MOA conference about to start in just under a week here’s an excellent and unusual piece by Erika Kiss entitled “The rules of the game: Stochastic rationality in Oakeshott’s rule-of-law theory — unusual in that Oakeshott’s A New Guide to the Derby rarely features in an academic paper beyond being mentioned as a curiosity. The rest…

Complexity and social sciences

Another recent paper from Jack Birner. Complex systemscomplexitycomplexity studiesHayekjack birnermethodologyPhilosophy of sciencephilosophy of social sciencePredictionsrationalitySocial choicesocial connectionismsocial epistemologySocial forecastingsocial ontology

Ryle and Oakeshott on the “Knowing-How/Knowing-That” Distinction

According to Robert Grant, Oakeshott only ever communicated with two “official” philosophers, one of which was Ryle:  Oakeshott warmly introduced Ryle, who delivered the annual August Comte Memorial Lecture at the LSE. John. D. Mabbott who read the proofs for On Human Conduct had, years earlier, been the first to recognize Oakeshott’s KH/KT connection with Ryle in his…

Paul Bloom on The War on Reason

Paul Bloom in The Atlantic For the most part, I’m on the side of the neuroscientists and social psychologists—no surprise, given that I’m a psychologist myself. Work in fields such as computational cognitive science, behavioral genetics, and social neuroscience has yielded great insights about human nature. I do worry, though, that many of my colleagues…

Can Faith Ever Be Rational?

An NPR discussion by Tania Lombrozo motivated by the work of Lara Buchak, her paper available here. My concern in this paper is the relationship between faith and rationality. I seek to develop a unified account of statements of faith concerning mundane matters and those concerning religious faith. To do so, I consider the sense in which faith…