Quotes About Rationality

loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

Because our propositional reasoning frees us from similarity and stereotypes, it enables the highest achievements of human rationality, such as science, morality, and law.

emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you're allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you're not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31

The beliefs, moreover, must be held in service of a goal. No one gets rationality credit for merely thinking true thoughts, like calculating the digits of ?

Even the humdrum rationality of seeing rather than hallucinating is in the service of the ever-present goal built into our visual systems of knowing our surroundings.

With this definition the case for rationality seems all too obvious: do you want things or don't you? If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

Each day my reason tells me so; But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.

We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said." Love is the only rational act.

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamoured of its own brilliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug. Literary, existential philosophers, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard, conceived of this mode of Being as "inauthentic." An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown.

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist.

rationality is subject to the single worst temptation--to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.

The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being.

Maybe individual people seem irrational because they aren't really individuals! Each one of us is a little nation-state, doing our best to settle disputes and broker compromises between the squabbling voices that drive us.

Mathematics is common sense.

irrational behavior is as unacceptable to a certain species of economist as the irrational magnitude of the hypotenuse was to the Pythagoreans. It doesn't fit their model of what can be; and yet it is.

the mathematical approach is a formalized version of our natural mental reckonings, an extension of common sense by other means.

A person terrified with the imagination of spectres is more reasonable than one who thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and groundless.

Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively.