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Rationality is the quality of being based on clear thought and reason, or of making decisions based on clear thought and reason. Learn more about the meaning, usage and examples of rationality from Cambridge Dictionary.
- Rationality
the quality of being based on clear thought and reason, or...
- Polski
rationality definicja: 1. the quality of being based on...
- Rationalizing
RATIONALIZING definition: 1. present participle of...
- Objectivity
OBJECTIVITY definition: 1. the fact of being based on facts...
- Rationality
Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence.
- Overview
- Models of Rationality
- Why are people irrational?
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rationality, the use of knowledge to attain goals.
(Read Britannica’s biography of Steven Pinker, author of this entry.)
Rationality has a normative dimension, namely how an agent ought to reason in order to attain some goal, and a descriptive or psychological dimension, namely how human beings do reason.
Normative models from logic, mathematics, and artificial intelligence set benchmarks against which psychologists and behavioral economists can compare human judgment and decision making. These comparisons provide answers to the question “In which ways are humans rational or irrational?”
Formal logic, for example, consists of rules for deriving new true propositions (conclusions) from existing ones (premises). A common departure from formal logic is the fallacy of affirming the consequent, or leaping from “p implies q” to “q implies p,” for example, going from “If a person becomes a heroin addict, the person first smoked cannabis” to “If a person smokes cannabis, the person will become a heroin addict.”
Probability theory allows one to quantify the likelihood of an uncertain outcome. It may be estimated as the number of actual occurrences of that outcome divided by the number of opportunities for it to have taken place. Humans instead often base their subjective likelihood on the availability heuristic: the more available an image or anecdote is in memory, the likelier they judge it to be. Thus, people overestimate the likelihood of events that get intense media coverage, such as plane crashes and rampage shootings, and underestimate those that don’t, such as car crashes and everyday homicides.
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So, why do people so often make irrational judgments and decisions? It’s not that we’re an inherently irrational species. Humans have discovered the laws of nature, explored the solar system, and decimated disease and hunger. And, of course, we established the normative benchmarks that allow us to assess rationality in the first place. Humans can be irrational for several reasons.
First, rationality is always bounded. No mortal has unlimited time, data, or computational power, and these costs must be traded off against the benefits of the optimal solution. It makes little sense to spend 30 minutes studying a map to calculate a shortcut that would save you 10 minutes in travel time. Instead, people often must rely on fallible shortcuts and rules of thumb. For example, if one had to determine which of two cities has the larger population, then guessing that it’s the one with a major-league football team yields the correct result most of the time.
Second, human rationality is optimized for natural contexts. People indeed have trouble applying formulas that are couched in abstract variables like p and q, whose power comes from the fact that any values can be plugged into them. But people can be adept at logical and probability problems that are couched in concrete examples or pertain to significant challenges in living. When asked how to enforce the rule “If a bar patron drinks beer, the patron must be over 21,” everyone knows one must check the age of beer drinkers and the beverage of teenagers; no one fallaciously “affirms the consequent” by checking the beverage of an adult. And, when a diagnosis problem is reframed from abstract probabilities (“What is the likelihood that the woman has cancer?”) to frequencies (“How many women out of a thousand with this test result have cancer?”), they intuitively apply Bayes’s rule and answer correctly.
Third, rationality is always deployed in pursuit of a goal, and that goal is not always objective truth. It may be to win an argument, to persuade others of a conclusion that would benefit oneself (motivated reasoning), or to prove the wisdom and nobility of one’s own coalition and the stupidity and evil of the opposing one (myside bias). Many manifestations of public irrationality, such as conspiracy theories, fake news, and science denial, may be tactics to express loyalty to or avoid ostracism from one’s tribe or political faction.
Fourth, many of our rational beliefs are not grounded in arguments or data that we establish ourselves but are based on trusting institutions that were established to pursue truth, such as science, journalism, and government agencies. People may reject the consensus from these institutions if they sense that they are doctrinaire, politicized, or intolerant of dissent.
Many commentators have despaired about the future of rationality given the rise in political polarization and the ease of disseminating falsehoods through social media. Yet this pessimism may itself be a product of the availability heuristic, driven by conspicuous coverage of the most politicized examples. People, for example, are divided by vaccines but not by antibiotics, dentistry, or splints for fractures. And irrationality is nothing new but has been common throughout history, such as beliefs in human and animal sacrifice, miracles, necromancy, sorcery, bloodletting, and omens in eclipses and other natural events. Progress in spreading rationality, driven by scientific and data-based reasoning, is not automatic but propelled by the fact that rationality is the only means by which goals may be consistently attained.
Rationality is the use of knowledge to attain goals, as measured by normative and descriptive models from logic, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Humans are often irrational due to bounded rationality, natural contexts, and heuristics.
Rationality is the quality or state of being rational, agreeable to reason, or reasonable. Learn more about the word history, synonyms, examples, and related phrases of rationality from Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Rationality is the quality of being based on clear thought and reason, or of making decisions based on clear thought and reason. Learn more about the meaning, pronunciation, and usage of rationality with examples from various sources.
12. Apr. 2024 · rationalism, in Western philosophy, the view that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently logical structure, the rationalist asserts that a class of truths exists that the intellect can grasp directly.
RATIONALITY Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com. rationality. [ rash- uh - nal -i-tee ] Phonetic (Standard)IPA. noun. , plural ra·tion·al·i·ties. the state or quality of being rational. the possession of reason. agreeableness to reason; reasonableness. the exercise of reason. a reasonable view, practice, etc. Discover More. Other Words From.
