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Philosophical | A Logic Blog | Can Başkent

Can Başkent

Philosophical

Paradoxical Rational

The idea of an irrational action, belief, intention, inference, or emotion is paradoxical. For the irrational is not merely the non-rational, which lies outside the ambit of the rational; irrationality is a failure within the house of reason.



From Donald Davidson, "Problems of Rationality", p. 169, Oxford University Press.

Irrational Economics

The dominant economic paradigm, neoclassical economics, became ascendant in part because it offered a theory of behavior that could be teased out in elegant formulation. Yet it rests on assumptions that are patently ridiculous: that individuals are rational and utility-maximizing (which has become a slippery notion as to be meaningless), that buyers and sellers have perfect information, that there are no transaction costs, that capital flows freely. (Econned, Yves Smity, p. 20)



I’ve been reading ECONned for a while already, and I started to realize more and more that irrationality and inconsistency play much more important roles in our lives and in politics than it is thought. The reason is not as intuitive as it looks. The mathematical and logical formalization of human behavior, both at individual and social levels, are far from being formalized. Sure, you can point at some attempts, some not-so-intertesting and some heavily-mathematical-so-nonsensical endeavors, but, still my point prevails.

I maintain, and it is part of my research program, that inconsistent games - with some influence from behavioral economics, cognitive science, and more importantly from paraconsistent logics - do provide that. A blog post is no place to go into such details, yet, some pointers may help.

The idea is simple: game theory and its cousins attempt at formalizing human behavior and interactive and rational decisions. Yet, they analyze the phenomenon in such a vacuum - a vacuum that people even make fun of ruthlessly, and unfortunately rightfully. The crazy observation is the fact that the game theory has a huge yet unfounded assumption about human rationality and game play, but very few people loudly points it out. Behavioral economics, for pretty much the same reasons, is also pushed into its own borders so that it can be tamed; game theory, on the other hand, is unjustly praised just because it is mathematically solid - to some extent.

This bigotry of traditional, conservative and old-school game theorists and economists seem to forget a very fundamental principle of Renaissance ideal of scientific discourse, and I believe, now it is time to remind them. The only meaningful way of achieving this is to present a solid and philosophically and mathematically justified theory that can both explain the classical and neoclassical and non-classical phenomena.

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