What Rationality Assumption? Or, How “Positive Political Theory” Rests on a Mistake
نویسندگان
چکیده
Science,” co-hosted by Political Studies and The Centre for Research Methods in the Social Sciences, Oxford University, June 2008. I thank Susan Orr for her skeptical comments on this version. I presented earlier versions as a discussion paper at a conference on “Epistemologies of Rational Choice,” Department of Politics, NYU, December 2004 and as part of the Blalock Lectures on Advanced Topics in Social Research. ICPSR Summer Program University of Michigan, August 2005. What Rationality Assumption? Or, How “Positive Political Theory” Rests on a Mistake
منابع مشابه
The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science
Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismisse...
متن کاملRationality and the Foundations of Positive Political Theory
In this paper, we discuss and debunk the four most common critiques of the rational choice research program (which we prefer to call Positive Political Theory) by explaining and advocating its foundations: the rationality assumption, component analysis (abstraction), strategic behavior, and theory building, in turn. We argue that the rationality assumption and component analysis, properly under...
متن کاملMistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”
Van Dijk et al describe how society’s influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibil...
متن کاملIn Defense of Right Reason
Rational requirements have a special status in the theory of rationality. This is obvious in one sense: they supply the content of that theory. But I want to suggest that rational requirements have another special status—as objects of the theory of rationality. In slogan form, my thesis is: Fixed Point Thesis: Mistakes about the requirements of rationality are mistakes of rationality. The key c...
متن کاملRational Choice Theory: An Overview
It seems easy to accept that rationality involves many features that cannot be summarized in terms of some straightforward formula, such as binary consistency. However, this recognition does not immediately lead to alternative characterizations that might be regarded as satisfactory, even though the inadequacies of the traditional assumptions of rational behavior standard used in economic theo...
متن کامل