Day 3644, Moral Character.

Day's pictures

Moral Character (SEP)

Questions about moral character have recently come to occupy a central place in philosophical discussion. Part of the explanation for this development can be traced to the publication in 1958 of G. E. M. Anscombe’s seminal article “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In that paper Anscombe argued that Kantianism and utilitarianism, the two major traditions in western moral philosophy, mistakenly placed the foundation for morality in legalistic notions such as duty and obligation. To do ethics properly, Anscombe argued, one must start with what it is for a human being to flourish or live well. That meant returning to some questions that mattered deeply to the ancient Greek moralists. These questions focussed on the nature of “virtue” (or what we might think of as admirable moral character), of how one becomes virtuous (is it taught? does it arise naturally? are we responsible for its development?), and of what relationships and institutions may be necessary to make becoming virtuous possible. Answers to these ancient questions emerge today in various areas of philosophy, including ethics (especially virtue ethics), feminist ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of literature. Interest in virtue and character was also indirectly the result of a more practical turn in political philosophy, inspired by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. Especially in Part III of A Theory of Justice, Rawls provided a picture of how individuals might be brought up in a just state to develop the virtues expected of good citizens. Although his interest was not in moral education per se, his discussion of how individuals acquire a sense of justice and of how they develop what he called self-respect stimulated other philosophers to explore the psychological foundations of virtue and the contributions made by friendship, family, community, and meaningful work to good moral character.

This entry provides a brief historical account of some important developments in philosophical approaches to good moral character. Approximately half the entry is on the Greek moralists Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Of these, most attention is given to Aristotle’s views, since most other philosophical discussions of character are indebted to his analysis. The latter half of the entry explores how other philosophers have responded to the concerns first raised by the Greeks. Some philosophers, such as Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant, represent a “modern” approach to character that subordinates it to other moral notions such as duty and obedience to law. Other philosophers, such as David Hume, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and T. H. Green take an interest in the psychology of moral character that is more reminiscent of the Greeks. Finally, this entry indicates the directions taken by some contemporary philosophers in recent work on or related to moral character.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character/

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Day 3642, according to my past individuals.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry 
When butterflies don’t fly.
Fading away, overwhelmed in lies.
Wings eager, restricted by weeds.
Cracked mud of the soil grades the time.
When butterflies couldn’t fly.
Day 864

Individuals, according to my past individuals

Definition by Chatbot: The concept of the individual is not as simple as it appears. It is often presented as a single, distinct human being, defined by unique biological, psychological, and social traits. But this definition is superficial. The idea of the individual as an autonomous, self-determining agent is largely an illusion. The mind does not generate ideas in isolation; it is shaped by language, culture, and education. Thoughts are constructed from what we absorb from others, from the environment, from history. The individual is not a self-contained entity but a reflection of inherited ideas and external forces.

Reinterpretations of older work, see the quotes underneath.

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Day 3641, to a world.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Olst, late 80s
A youngling opens up,

to a world in riddles.

I admire Tolstoy, not because of his work, which I have never read, but because of what he stood for. I believe that when people say it is a fantastic read, I can see it after a few pages; I don’t have the time to read the rest. Too many books lie around that I have started reading or are waiting patiently for my attention. I have the idle hope that one day I will take the time. I found this quote online, well, not this quote, but something similar. The quotes you find online are not always correct, but after some digging, I found the source and read the chapter till I found it. Russians are a mysterious folk; I wish they still were, now they are as predictable as the rest.

“I have met him. But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You know, one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d’emblée in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days the free – thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free – thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free – thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Part 5, Chapter 9)

You can read the book here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1399 

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Day 3640, My philosophy.

My thoughts

The Core Themes of My Philosophical Journey

Summary of 10 years of writing by Chat.Mistral and curated by me.

As I reflect on my writings and the recurring ideas that have shaped my philosophical exploration, I see a tapestry of interconnected themes. These themes are not just abstract concepts but deeply personal reflections on what it means to be human, to search for meaning, and to navigate the complexities of existence. Here are the ten most common themes that have emerged in my work, expressed in my own voice and with the depth they deserve:

  1. The Nature of Reality

One of the central themes in my philosophy is the exploration of the nature of reality. I often find myself questioning how we perceive and understand the world around us. This theme involves delving into the complexities of human existence and the influence of our environment on our personal identity. As I’ve written, “The world is complex, much of our thinking is inherited, and certainty is rare.” This idea captures the essence of my inquiry into reality—acknowledging that our understanding is often shaped by factors beyond our immediate perception.

  1. The Human Condition

My writings frequently reflect on the essence of being human—the struggles, emotions, and experiences that define our existence. I delve into topics such as the role of visionaries, the impact of environment on mood, and the struggle with depression. These reflections are deeply personal, drawing on my own experiences and observations. In one of my entries, I wrote:

“Humanity learns to walk like a baby does, and what can you teach a baby? You can only encourage it with gestures and sounds because the rest has no meaning to them.”

This passage highlights my belief that our understanding of the human condition is a gradual process, shaped by our experiences and interactions with the world.

  1. The Search for Meaning

The search for meaning is a recurring theme in my work. I investigate the purpose and meaning of life, and how individuals can find meaning in their existence. This theme is central to my philosophical musings and reflections. As I’ve expressed:

“Philosophy gave me a manual for life, and maybe I’m still figuring it out, but one thing it has taught me so far is how to stand without ground beneath my feet, which is very useful if you’ve ever been depressed.”

This idea underscores the importance of finding meaning even in the face of uncertainty and instability. It’s about embracing the journey of self-discovery and understanding that meaning is not always readily apparent but must be sought through introspection and reflection.

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Day 3639, 5 zonnen.

Daily picture, Poetry
Early Photoshop exercise, 2007

I tried out a new AI Chatbot (https://chat.mistral.ai/chat), one that is not US-based and respects your privacy more. I tested it out today, fed it 10 years of short poems, and asked for the 10 best ones. I guess it knows what it’s doing, so here they are. I didn’t specify what the format of the documents was, so it didn’t include the titles, no AI is that smart.

 

Preparing the day
for another trail of sweets
and bringing it home.

Decomposing leave
returning inhalation
autumn disquiet.

The wind is moving
bending wheat where it settles
in rough ground and sun.

The sun is too late
shrouded in drawn out shadows
it will never bloom.

Waiting for the ground
absorbing time, decisions
and giving it back.

Mother in nature
shining for posterities
yellow panama.

When butterflies don’t fly.
Fading away, overwhelmed in lies.
Wings eager, restricted by weeds.
Cracked mud of the soil grades the time.
When butterflies couldn’t fly.

Red berries in the sun.
The air smells from afternoon rain.
Let me forget and stand still.
And leave me here.

Delicate nature
in a midsummer’s warm wave
elegant white dress.

Alluring symbols
assessed by many facets
in virgin colors.

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Day 3638, Chaos.

Daily picture, Definitions
Olst, late 90s

Chaos (SEP)

The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system’s behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such tornado would have occurred in Texas. The mathematical version of this property is known as sensitive dependence and such sensitivity has implications for predictability of future behavior. Clarifying sensitive dependence’s significance is important given there have always been limits on prediction. Chaos studies have highlighted these implications in fresh ways, enabled forms of mitigation as well as control of chaos, and have led to other implications for how we think about our world.

In addition to exhibiting sensitive dependence, chaotic systems are deterministic and nonlinear and exhibit aperiodic behavior (Lorenz 1963). This entry discusses systems exhibiting these properties and their philosophical implications. For those not familiar with the basic phenomenology of chaos, reading nontechnical treatments such as Smith (2007) or Bishop (2023) is highly recommended. Because of the distinctive nature of quantum chaos, it is treated separately in the Supplement: Quantum Chaos, needed for discussions of broader implications in §6.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

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Day 3637, Chance versus Randomness.

Daily picture, Definitions
Olst, late 90s

Chance versus Randomness

Randomness, as we ordinarily think of it, exists when some outcomes occur haphazardly, unpredictably, or by chance. These latter three notions are all distinct, but all have some kind of close connection to probability. Notoriously, there are many kinds of probability: subjective probabilities (‘degrees of belief’), evidential probabilities, and objective chances, to name a few (Hájek 2012), and we might enquire into the connections between randomness and any of these species of probability. In this entry, we focus on the potential connections between randomness and chance, or physical probability. The ordinary way that the word ‘random’ gets used is more or less interchangeable with ‘chancy’, which suggests this Commonplace Thesis—a useful claim to target in our discussion:

(CT)
Something is random iff it happens by chance.

The Commonplace Thesis, and the close connection between randomness and chance it proposes, appears also to be endorsed in the scientific literature, as in this example from a popular textbook on evolution (which also throws in the notion of unpredictability for good measure):

scientists use chance, or randomness, to mean that when physical causes can result in any of several outcomes, we cannot predict what the outcome will be in any particular case. (Futuyma 2005: 225)

Some philosophers are, no doubt, equally subject to this unthinking elision, but others connect chance and randomness deliberately. Suppes approvingly introduces

the view that the universe is essentially probabilistic in character, or, to put it in more colloquial language, that the world is full of random happenings. (Suppes 1984: 27)

However a number of technical and philosophical advances in our understanding of both chance and randomness open up the possibility that the easy slide between chance and randomness in ordinary and scientific usage—a slide that would be vindicated by the truth of the Commonplace Thesis—is quite misleading. This entry will attempt to spell out these developments and clarify the differences between chance and randomness, as well as the areas in which they overlap in application. It will also aim to clarify the relationship of chance and randomness to other important notions in the vicinity, particularly determinism and predictability (themselves often subject to confusion).

There will be philosophically significant consequences if the Commonplace Thesis is incorrect, and if ordinary usage is misleading. For example, it is intuitively plausible that if an event is truly random it cannot be explained (if it happens for a reason, it isn’t truly random). It might seem then that the possibility of probabilistic explanation is undermined when the probabilities involved are genuine chances. Yet this pessimistic conclusion only follows under the assumption, derived from the Commonplace Thesis, that all chancy outcomes are random. Another interesting case is the role of random sampling in statistical inference. If randomness requires chance, then no statistical inferences on the basis of ‘randomly’ sampling a large population will be valid unless the experimental design involves genuine chance in the selection of subjects. But the rationale for random sampling may not require chance sampling—as long as our sample is representative, those statistical inferences may be reliable. But in that case, we’d be in a curious situation where random sampling wouldn’t have much to do with randomness, and whatever justification for beliefs based on random sampling that randomness is currently thought to provide would need to be replaced by something else.

A final case of considerable philosophical interest is the frequentist approach to objective probability, which claims (roughly) that the chance of an outcome is its frequency in an appropriate series of outcomes (Hájek 2012 §3.4). To avoid classifying perfectly regular recurring outcomes as chancy, frequentists like von Mises (1957) proposed to require that the series of outcomes should be random, without pattern or order. Frequentism may fall with the Commonplace Thesis: if there can be chancy outcomes without randomness, both will fail.

The Commonplace Thesis is central to all three examples. As it is widely accepted that probabilistic explanation is legimitate, that random sampling doesn’t need genuine chance (though it can help), and that frequentism is in serious trouble (Hájek 1997), there is already some some pressure on the Commonplace Thesis. But we must subject it to closer examination to clarify whether these arguments do succeed, and what exactly it means to say of some event or process that it is random or chancy. Though developing further consequences of this kind is not the primary aim of this entry, it is hoped that what is said here may help to untangle these and other vexed issues surrounding chance and randomness.

 

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Day 3636, Certainty.

Daily picture, Definitions
Svanen, stern details

Certainty (SEP)

Certainty, or the attempt to obtain certainty, has played a central role in the history of philosophy. Some philosophers have taken the kind of certainty characteristic of mathematical knowledge to be the goal at which philosophy should aim. In the Republic, Plato says that geometry “draws the soul towards truth and produces philosophic thought by directing upwards what we now wrongly direct downwards” (527b). Descartes also thought that a philosophical method that proceeds in a mathematical way, enumerating and ordering everything exactly, “contains everything that gives certainty to the rules of mathematics” (Discourse on the Method, PW 1, p. 121). Other philosophers have adopted different models for how to best understand certainty. For example, Aristotle and Aquinas take scientific explanation to be essential to certainty (see Pasnau 2017, pp. 5–7), while Al-Ghazālī thought that certainty arose out of religious practice (see Albertini 2005). For many empiricists, certainty with respect to empirical matters is to be found in basic beliefs that are grounded in some fundamental aspect of perceptual experience (see, e.g., Lewis 1952).

Like knowledge, certainty is an epistemic property of beliefs. (In a derivative way, certainty is also an epistemic property of subjects: S is certain that p just in case S’s belief that p is certain.) Although some philosophers have thought that there is no difference between knowledge and certainty, it has become increasingly common to distinguish them. On this conception, then, certainty is either the highest form of knowledge or is the only epistemic property superior to knowledge. One of the primary motivations for allowing kinds of knowledge less than certainty is the widespread sense that skeptical arguments are successful in showing that we rarely or never have beliefs that are certain (see Unger 1975 for this kind of skeptical argument) but do not succeed in showing that our beliefs are altogether without epistemic worth (see, for example, Lehrer 1974, Williams 1999, and Feldman 2003; see Fumerton 1995 for an argument that skepticism undermines every epistemic status a belief might have; and see Klein 1981 for the argument that knowledge requires certainty, which we are capable of having).

As with knowledge, it is difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis of certainty. There are several reasons for this. One is that there are different kinds of certainty, which are easy to conflate. Another is that the full value of certainty is surprisingly hard to capture. A third reason is that there are two dimensions to certainty: a belief can be individually certain at a particular moment, or it can be certain over some greater length of time in a system of beliefs.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/certainty/

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Day 3635, constructed reflection.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Our narrow minds make us believe that we live in strange days. And we are, but not particularly stranger than ever before. With every step we take, we forget the third or praise the ground it had just stepped on. Our world might be destroyed by climate change or nuclear war, but people have lived for thousands of years in worlds no larger than the six houses around them or the small city they inhabited in fear of instant destruction. The theatre we live in now might be as large as the whole world and the angst real, but don’t pretend it’s new.

I don’t have many good reasons for my aversion to this kind of doom-and-gloom. We will always live among nay-sayers and deniers, and the idea of progress is a challenge for many, but don’t forget that these people are also happy to have clean water to drink and to visit a dentist when they have a toothache. Progress does not care what we think; it will move forward, and no one is innocent in this game of who is to blame.

Don’t forget that behind all the nonsense we believe in and are willing to die for are people who bleed when they get cut, mourn their loved ones, and even fall in love for the first time, just like we do, even when these feelings are hidden behind shame and fear. You know for yourself what is hidden inside, we are all afraid to look in the mirror, to look deep in the reflections of our own eyes.

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Day 3634, Causal Models.

Daily picture, Poetry 
Some shadows 
from memories
are colorized

maybe by the time
past
or the moment

Causal Models (SEP)

Causal models are mathematical models representing causal relationships within an individual system or population. They facilitate inferences about causal relationships from statistical data. They can teach us a good deal about the epistemology of causation, and about the relationship between causation and probability. They have also been applied to topics of interest to philosophers, such as the logic of counterfactuals, decision theory, and the analysis of actual causation.

Causal modeling is an interdisciplinary field that has its origin in the statistical revolution of the 1920s, especially in the work of the American biologist and statistician Sewall Wright (1921). Important contributions have come from computer science, econometrics, epidemiology, philosophy, statistics, and other disciplines. Given the importance of causation to many areas of philosophy, there has been growing philosophical interest in the use of mathematical causal models. Two major works—Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines 2000 (abbreviated SGS), and Pearl 2009—have been particularly influential.

A causal model makes predictions about the behavior of a system. In particular, a causal model entails the truth value, or the probability, of counterfactual claims about the system; it predicts the effects of interventions; and it entails the probabilistic dependence or independence of variables included in the model. Causal models also facilitate the inverse of these inferences: if we have observed probabilistic correlations among variables, or the outcomes of experimental interventions, we can determine which causal models are consistent with these observations. The discussion will focus on what it is possible to do in “in principle”. For example, we will consider the extent to which we can infer the correct causal structure of a system, given perfect information about the probability distribution over the variables in the system. This ignores the very real problem of inferring the true probabilities from finite sample data. In addition, the entry will discuss the application of causal models to the logic of counterfactuals, the analysis of causation, and decision theory.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causal-models/

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Day 3633, Category Mistakes.

Daily picture, Definitions
Curacao, 1994

Category Mistakes (SEP)

Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’, ‘The theory of relativity is eating breakfast’, or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are striking in that they are highly odd or infelicitous, and moreover infelicitous in a distinctive sort of way. For example, they seem to be infelicitous in a different way to merely trivially false sentences such as ‘2+2=5
’ or obviously ungrammatical strings such as ‘The ran this’.

The majority of contemporary discussions of the topic are devoted to explaining what makes category mistakes infelicitous, and a wide variety of accounts have been proposed including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic explanations. Indeed, this is part of what makes category mistakes a particularly important topic: a theory of what makes category mistakes unacceptable can potentially shape our theories of syntax, semantics, or pragmatics and the boundaries between them. As Camp (2016, 611–612) explains: “Category mistakes … are theoretically interesting precisely because they are marginal: as by-products of our linguistic and conceptual systems lacking any obvious function, they reveal the limits of, and interactions among, those systems. Do syntactic or semantic restrictions block ‘is green’ from taking ‘Two’ as a subject? Does the compositional machinery proceed smoothly, but fail to generate a coherent proposition or delimit a coherent possibility? Or is the proposition it produces simply one that our paltry minds cannot grasp, or that fails to arouse our interest? One’s answers to these questions depend on, and constrain, one’s conceptions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, of language and thought, and of the relations among them and between them and the world.”

Moreover, the question of how to account for the infelicity of category mistakes has implications for a variety of other philosophical questions. For example, in metaphysics, it is often argued that a statue must be distinct from the lump of clay from which it is made because ‘The statue is Romanesque’ is true, while ‘The lump of clay is Romanesque’ is not—indeed, the latter ascription arguably constitutes a category mistake. Correspondingly, an assessment of this argument depends on one’s account of category mistakes (see §4.3 below).

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-mistakes/

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Day 3632, Clarence Darrow.

Daily picture, Quotes
Norway, 1993

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. (why I am an Agnostic)

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. (The Myth of the Soul)

Why I am an Agnostic and Other Essays, Clarence Darrow

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Day 3631, Medieval Theories of the Categories.

Daily picture, Definitions
Norway, mid 90s

Medieval Theories of the Categories (SEP)

This entry is intended as a brief and general introduction to the development of category theory from the beginning of the Middle Ages, in the sixth century, to the Silver Age of Scholasticism, in the sixteenth. This development is fascinating but extraordinarily complex. Scholars are just beginning to take note of the major differences in the understanding of categories and of how these differences are related to the discussion of other major philosophical topics in the Middle Ages. Much work remains to be done, even regarding the views of towering figures, so necessarily we have had to restrict our discussion to only a few major figures and topics. Still, we hope that the discussion will serve as a good starting point for anyone interested in category theory and its history.

1. Issues

Philosophers speak about categories in many different ways. There is one initial, and rather substantial, difference between philosophers who allow a very large number of categories and those who allow only a very small number. The first include among categories such different things as human, green, animal, thought, and justice; the second speak only of very general things such as substance, quality, relation, and the like, as categories. Among twentieth-century authors who allow many categories is Gilbert Ryle (b. 1900, d. 1976). Roderick Chisholm (b. 1916, d. 1999) is an example of those who have only very few. Medieval authors follow Aristotle’s narrow understanding.

The disagreement concerning categories in the history of philosophy does not end there. Even if we restrict the discussion to a small number of items of the sort that Aristotle regards as categories, many issues remain to be settled about them, and philosophers frequently disagree about how to settle them. These issues may be gathered into roughly ten groups.

The first group comprises what may be described roughly as extensional issues; they have to do with the number of categories. The extension of a term is comprised by the things of which the term can be truthfully predicated. Thus the extension of ‘cat’ consists of all the animals of which it is true to say that they are cats. Philosophers in general frequently disagree on how many categories there are. For example, Aristotle lists up to ten, but gives the impression that the ultimate number is not settled at all. Plotinus (204/5–270) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) reduce the number radically, but their views do not by any means establish themselves as definitive. In the Middle Ages the number of categories is always small (ten or less) but it nonetheless varies.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-categories/

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Day 3630, The Capability Approach.

Poetry

The Capability Approach (SEP)

The capability approach is a theoretical framework that entails two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are the doings and beings that people can achieve if they so choose – their opportunity to do or be such things as being well-nourished, getting married, being educated, and travelling; functionings are capabilities that have been realized. Whether someone can convert a set of means – resources and public goods – into a functioning (i.e., whether she has a particular capability) crucially depends on certain personal, sociopolitical, and environmental conditions, which, in the capability literature, are called ‘conversion factors.’ Capabilities have also been referred to as real or substantive freedoms as they denote the freedoms that have been cleared of potential obstacles, in contrast to mere formal rights and primary social goods.

Within philosophy, the capability approach has been employed to the development of several conceptual and normative theories within, most prominently, development ethics, political philosophy, public health ethics, environmental ethics and climate justice, and philosophy of education. This proliferation of capability literature has led to questions concerning what kind of framework it is (section 1); how its core concepts should be defined (section 2); how it can be further specified for particular purposes (section 3); what is needed to develop the capability approach into an account of social and distributive justice (section 4); how it relates to non-Western philosophies (section 5); and how it can be and has been applied in practice (section 6).

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

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Day 3629, Bounded Rationality.

Daily picture, Definitions
Croatia, 1996

Bounded Rationality (SEP)

Herbert Simon introduced the term ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon 1957b: 198; see also Klaes & Sent 2005) as shorthand for his proposal to replace the perfect rationality assumptions of homo economicus with a concept of rationality better suited to cognitively limited agents:

Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with the kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist. (Simon 1955a: 99)

Bounded rationality now describes a wide range of descriptive, normative, and prescriptive accounts of effective behavior which depart from the assumptions of perfect rationality. This entry aims to highlight key contributions—from the decision sciences, economics, cognitive- and neuropsychology, biology, physics, computer science, and philosophy—to our current understanding of bounded rationality.

1. Homo Economicus and Expected Utility Theory

Bounded rationality has come to encompass models of effective behavior that weaken, or reject altogether, the idealized conditions of perfect rationality assumed by models of economic man. In this section we state what models of economic man are committed to and their relationship to expected utility theory. In later sections we review proposals for departing from expected utility theory.

The perfect rationality of homo economicus imagines a hypothetical agent who has complete information about the options available for choice, perfect foresight of the consequences from choosing those options, and the wherewithal to solve an optimization problem (typically of considerable complexity) that identifies an option which maximizes the agent’s personal utility.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bounded-rationality/

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