Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by David Thorstad who presents his new book  Inquiry Under Bounds (OUP 2024).  Herbert Simon held that human cognition is shaped by a pair of scissors. The blades of the scissors are our internal and external bounds. Internally, we are bounded by our limited cognitive abilities and the costs of exercising them. We cannot execute arbitrarily complex cognitive operations, and the operations we do execute compete with others for scarce resources.  Externally, we are bounded by our environment. The environment determines the cognitive problems we are likely to face and the results that cognitive strategies will have when applied to those problems.  The study of bounded rationality asks what rationality requires of agents who are both internally and externally bounded.   Simon also held that the fundamental turn in the study of bounded rationality is the turn from substantive to procedural rationality. Many of our most important cognitive bounds...

Today's post is by  David Thorstad  on his recent paper “ Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)? ” published in 2023 in  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research .  David Thorstad Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. Critics argue that theories of bounded rationality are too context-sensitive, conventionalist, or reliant on ordinary language. My aim in this paper is to make sure that bounded rationality gets the rap sheet it deserves. The first order of business is to lay out an approach to bounded rationality inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. I explain and defend this theory more fully in my book, Inquiry under Bounds , under contract with Oxford University Press. My approach has five core commitments. First, bounds matter. Paradigmatic bounds such as limited cognitive abilities and the cost of computation bear on how it is rational for us to cognize.  Second, rationality is procedural , moving up...

This post is by Enrico Petracca (University of Bologna), who recently published a paper entitled ‘A cognition paradigm clash: Simon, situated cognition and theinterpretation of bounded rationality’ in the Journal of Economic Methodology. Enrico is involved in a project called ‘ embodied rationality ’, and pursued with his colleague Antonio Mastrogiorgio (University of Chieti-Pescara). The project aims to integrate the notion of embodied cognition within the framework of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality has been a hard-to-digest notion in economics and the other social sciences since its introduction by Herbert A. Simon in the middle of the last century. How could ‘rationality’ be ‘bounded’? And – as a typically related concern – would this imply that social sciences should abandon any normative horizon, giving the way to an unappealable ‘irrationality’?

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...