Abstract
After reviewing rapidly the transformation of the concept of irrationality in its relation to our changing concept of rationality, this chapter argues that, given the normative dimension of rationality, even the most basic forms of rationality implies a conception of the good.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Translation by me, Paul Dumouchel: “ce qui peut donner un démenti à nos speculations et nous amener à corriger nos premières descriptions”.
- 3.
See Broom (1990) for an illustration of this strategy.
- 4.
One of the interests of the research pioneered by Amos Tversky and David Kahneman is that it rests on an experimental design that rendered highly difficult such re-descriptions of the counter examples.
- 5.
An example of a creative re-description that is informative rather than purely ad hoc is Russell Hardin (1995), which argues that much of the interethnic violence that took place in ex-Yugoslavia was not to be explained by recourse to irrational fears and hatred, but was best seen as the expression of individual rationality in particular circumstances. Interestingly, Hardin also views group conflicts as instances of solutions to the collective action problem.
- 6.
- 7.
Even if, as Popper (1967) paradoxically claims, it is patently false!
- 8.
For example, J. -P. Derriennic (2001) argues that if violence is not rational it cannot be understood and the political scientists must give up doing science.
- 9.
There is something like an evolutionary process involved here in the sense that new positions appear and tend to become dominant, though it is still possible to find authors who adhere to any one of the positions mentioned above.
- 10.
Because we may be wrong and often are wrong about what is and the relations between what is, it is clear that neither realism nor the world are equivalent to what is real.
- 11.
I do not claim that all dreams like the one described above, lack a world in that sense, though I suspect that all do. It is enough for my argument that some dreams are like that.
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Dumouchel, P. (2018). Rationality, Irrationality, Realism and the Good. In: Bronner, G., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Mystery of Rationality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94028-1_5
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