NATURAL RATIONALITY
– PHIL 474/673 –
WINTER 2007
Reading Package
Benoit Hardy-Vallée
Department
of Philosophy, University of Waterloo
Course ID: 010434
Office: HH-329
Office hours: Friday 1:00-3:00; and by appointment
Office phone: (519) 888-4567 x32778
E-mail address: benoithv@gmail.com
Web page http://decisis.net and http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/people/vallee.html
Course page: http://phi673uw.wordpress.com
Class hours: 9:30 – 11:30
Course location: HH-357
Readings (pdf files)
can also be downloaded as a single .zip archive here
1- Organizational meeting – January 4
• January 4, 10:00am, HH-357. Time and location of future
meetings will be decided. (no readings)
2- Historical and philosophical roots of natural rationality, I – January 11
• Adam Smith (1759) The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Part I, Section I (chap. I-V), Section II (chap. III-V).
→ 1-page essay
3- Historical and philosophical roots of natural rationality, II – January 18
• Bentham, J. (1781). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, Chapters I-IV, followed by Utilitarianism, (J.S. Mills, 1863) Chapter 2.
→ 1-page essay
4- The formalization of rationality – January 25
• Hollis, M., & Sugden, R. (1993). Rationality in action. Mind, 102, 1-35.
→ 1-page essay
5- Rationality and behavioral economics – February 1
• Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58(9), 697-720.
→ 1-page essay
6- Ecological rationality – February 8
•Todd, P. M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2003). Bounding rationality to the worldà. Journal of Economic Psychology, 24(2), 143-165.
→ 1-page essay
7- Evolution and economic rationality – February 15
• Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Better than rational: Evolutionary psychology and the invisible hand. The American Economic Review, 84(2), 327-332.
• Richard Samuels & Stephen Stich, Rationality and Psychology, in Alfred Mele & Piers Rawling, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Rationality. Oxford Reference Library. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2004. Pp. 279-300
→ 1-page essay
- Reading week
8- Embodiment and economic rationality – March 1
• Clark, Andy (1996) Economic Reason: The Interplay of Individual Learning and External Structure, in J. Drobak and J. Nye (eds) The Frontiers Of The New Institutional Economics (Academic Press: San Diego, CA 1996) p. 269-290
→ 1-page essay
→ Research project
9- Neuroeconomics and rationality – March 8
• Sanfey, A. G., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2006). Neuroeconomics: Cross-currents in research on decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(3), 108-116.
• Payzan, E., Bourgeois-Gironde, S. (2005) Epistemological Foundations for
Neuroeconomics. Preprint.
→ 1-page essay
10- Neuroeconomics and irrationality – March 15
• Berridge, K. C. (2003). Irrational pursuits: Hyper-incentives from a visceral brain. In I. Brocas & J. Carrillo (Eds.), The psychology of economic decisions (pp. 17-40). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Churchland, P. M. (2006). Into the brain: Where philosophy should go from here. Topoi, V25(1), 29-32.
→ 1-page essay
→ Conference abstract
11- Neuroeconomics, emotions, and rationality – March 22
• Naqvi, N., Shiv, B., & Bechara, A. (2006). The role of emotion in decision-making: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5), 260-264.
• Elster, J. (1994). Rationality, emotions, and social norms. Synthese, 98(1), 21-49.
→ 1-page essay
12- Student conference: Natural Rationality – March 29
→ Oral presentation
→ Final essay (April 10)
