The Fundamentalist Mindset is the culmination of a project that began as an online discussion and then grew to include a conference and monthly seminar. The current text is a compilation of papers collected on the various topics. The first two sections of the book focus on definitional issues and the underlying psychological characteristics of the mindset. These include the developmental antece...

At a time when global interdependence has become our destiny more than ever, empathy and the ability to empathize have been increasingly praised as skills necessary for better social political interactions. However, studies on international politics of emotion argued, is culturally historically contingent its productive possibilities might be limited by differentials power. The present paper en...

Herbert Simon was the apostle of bounded rationality. He very often illustrated bounded rationality in the context of the theory of the firm, and was, of course, a major contributor to organizational theory. However, in spite of Simon s efforts, I argue that bounded rationality has been only incompletely absorbed in the economics of organization, is little used for substantive purposes, and mos...

Stalnaker provided an example of a perfect information game in which common knowledge of rationality does not yield backward induction. However, in his example, knowledge is treated as defeasible: players forfeit their knowledge of rationality at some vertices. This is not how ‘knowledge’ is understood in epistemology where, unlike belief, it is not subject to revision. In this respect, the Sta...

The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon’s work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, wh...

Is it rational to reduce criminal activities if punishments are increased? While intuition might suggest so, game theory concludes differently. From the game theoretical perspective, inspectors anticipate the effect of increased punishments on criminal behavior and reduce their inspection activities accordingly. This implies that higher punishments reduce inspections and do not affect crime rat...

Stalnaker provided an example of a perfect information game in which common knowledge of rationality does not yield backward induction. However, in his example, knowledge is treated as defeasible: players forfeit their knowledge of rationality at some vertices. This is not how ‘knowledge’ is understood in epistemology where, unlike belief, it is not subject to revision. In this respect, the Sta...