"To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable." (Epictetus, "Discourses", cca. 100 AD)
"To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual." (Georg W F Hegel, "Lectures on the Philosophy of History", 1832)
"As a 'rational' being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)
"All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts." (Ludwig von Mises, "Socialism", 1922)
"In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"It is impossible for the behavior of a single, isolated individual to reach a high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in rationality is hard to conceive. [...] Actual behavior falls short in at least three ways, of objective rationality." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Rationality requires a choice among all possible alternative behaviors. In actual behavior, only a very few of all these possible alternatives come to mind." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior", 1947)
"More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought." (Hyman G Rickover, [address] 1954)
"Unlike pure theorists, we shall not assume at the outset that rational behavior exists or that rational behavior constitutes the topic of economic analysis. We shall study economic behavior as we find it. In describing and classifying different reactions, as well as the circumstances that elicit them, we shall raise the question whether and in what sense certain reactions may be called rational. After having answered that question and thus defined our terms, we shall study the fundamental problem: Under what conditions do more and under what conditions do less rational forms of behavior occur?" (George Katona, "Psychological Analysis of Economic Behavior", 1951)
"Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a 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." (Herbert A Simon, "A behavioral model of rational choice", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69 (1), 1955)
"Because of the extended time image and the extended relationship images, man is capable of ‘rational behavior,’ that is to say, his response is not to an immediate stimulus but to an image of the future filtered through an elaborate value system. His image contains not only what is, but what might be." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal." (Herbert A Simon, "Models of Man", 1957)
"The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality." (Anatol Rapoport, "Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution", 1974)
"The tendency to be rational is the consistent and hence predictable element in human behavior." (David Friedman, "Price Theory: An Intermediate Text", 1986)
"Even though principles of rationality seem as often violated as followed, we still cling to the notion that human thought should be rational, logical, and orderly. Much of law is based upon the concept of rational thought and behavior. Much of economic theory is based upon the model of the rational human who attempts to optimize personal benefit, utility, or comfort. Many scientists who study artificial intelligence use the mathematics of formal logic - the predicate calculus - as their major tool to simulate thought. [...] Human thought is not like logic; it is fundamentally different in kind and spirit. The difference is neither worse nor better. But it is the difference that leads to creative discovery and to great robustness of behavior." (Donald Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things", 1988)
"Human rational behavior [...] is shaped by the scissors whose two blades are the structure of the task environment and the computational capabilities of the actor. (Herbert A Simon, "Invariants of Human Behavior", Annual Review of Psychology 41(1), 1990)
"The Minimax Theorem applies to games in which there are just two players and for which the total payoff to both parties is zero, regardless of what actions the players choose. The advantage of these two properties is that with two players whose interests are directly opposed we have a game of pure competition, which allows us to define a clear-cut mathematical notion of rational behavior that leads to a single, unambiguous rule as to how each player should behave." (John L Casti, "Five Golden Rules", 1995)
"Game theory is a theory of strategic interaction. That is to say, it is a theory of rational behavior in social situations in which each player has to choose his moves on the basis of what he thinks the other players' countermoves are likely to be." (John Harsanyi, "Games with Incomplete Information", The American Economic Review Vol. 85 (3), 1997)
"Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings." (Jordan Peterson, "Maps of Meaning", 1999)
"The assumption of perfectly rational, maximizing behavior won out until recently in the art of modeling, not because it often reflects reality, but because it was useful." (Didier Sornette, "Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Systems", 2003)
"A person's behavior is rational if it is in his best interests, given his information." (Robert Aumann, "War and Peace", 2005)
"Rational maximization should not be confused with conscious calculation. Economics is not a theory about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser." (Richard Posner, "Economic Analysis of Law" 7th ed., 2007)
"Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not. From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made the demands of reason his own that the latter may give rise to, and possibly explain, specific behaviors. The assessment of the actor and that of the observer need not coincide." (Jon Elster, "Reason and Rationality", 2009)
"Game theory postulates rational behavior for each participant. Each player is conscious of the rules and behaves in accordance with them, each player has sufficient knowledge of the situation in which he or she is involved to be able to evaluate what the best option is when it comes to taking action (a move), and each player takes into account the decisions that might be made by other participants and their repercussions with respect to his or her own decision. Game theory about zero-sum games with two participants is relevant for chess. In this type of situation, each action that is favorable to one participant (player) is proportionally unfavorable for the opponent. Thus, the gain of one represents the loss of the other." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)
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