"James Madison wrote, 'Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.' The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one. Wit…
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. The authors illumin…
McRaney reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them. But sometimes those stories aren't true.
The Greek myths are characteristically fabulous; they are full of monsters, metamorphoses, and the supernatural. However, they could be told in other ways as well. This volume charts ancient dissatisfaction with the excesses of myth, and the various attempts to cut these stories…
"On a traditional conception of the human mind, reasoning can be rational or irrational, but perception cannot. Perception is simply a source of new information, and cannot be assessed for rationality or justification. Susanna Siegel argues that this conception is wrong. Drawing…
There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when bel…
In everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain ; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80% ; the…
In everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain ; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80% ; the…
"Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political, and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to …
Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of what it is for states of mind and processes of thought to count as rational. Whether you are thinking rationally depends purely on what is going on in your mind, but rational thinking is a means to the goal of getting things right in you…
In "Learning from our mistakes : epistemology for the real world", William J. Talbott provides a new framework for understanding the history of Western epistemology and uses it to propose a new way of understanding rational belief that can be applied to pressing social and polit…
