Essay about irrationality

I opened this essay with the observation that delusions appear to be paradigmatic instances of irrationality: they strike us as canonical examples of beliefs that violate the norms of epistemic rationality. We have seen that vindicating this observation has proven to be rather more challenging than we might have anticipated.

J. Elster, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 In this case, too, irrationality arises at all three levels. The problems are of two kinds. ‘Cold’ problems are caused by cognitive malfunctioning without any motivational bias. ‘Hot’ problems arise through such bias.

We borrow the concept of ecological rationality from Gerd Gigerenzer, who conceptualizes the brain as an adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics, intending “to capture how real minds make decisions under constraints of limited time and knowledge,” hence fast and frugal (see Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999, p. 5).

G. Gigerenzer, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 Nonrational theories are not theories of irrationality. Rather, they dispense with unrealistic assumptions, like omniscience and optimization, in so-called rational theories.