SPP 1516: New Frameworks of Rationality

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Rationality is a key concept in psychology and philosophy. A divide and conquer approach between psychology and philosophy, however, has prevented both disciplines from taking into account one another's progress. Philosophy's mission has been to characterise what it means to be rational, and to put forth general principles, theories and axioms defining rationality. In contrast, psychology's mission has been to empirically investigate to what extent people's cognition and behaviour conform to those norms of rationality, and if deviations occur, explain why they occur. The consequence of this division of labour was that psychologists focussed on the analysis of how and why people deviate from specific normative theories of rationality, but barred themselves from making genuine contributions to the understanding of the nature of human rationality. A similar neglect of the other discipline has also dominated in philosophy. However, in the last decade, theoretical philosophy has experienced a renaissance of the 'cognitive turn', which provides a good basis for collaboration between psychology and philosophy. An important link between the two disciplines is that several research groups have started to question the opposition between the rational and the psychological. These researchers have shown that people are generally remarkably successful in achieving goals, given the cognitive and the external constraints imposed by the environment. When measured in terms of these achievements, people most of the time are indeed rational. According to this view, the divergence between normative theories of rationality and people's everyday cognition might be not a sign of human irrationality, but the consequence of using narrow normative theories of rationality. The goal of the Priority Programme is to establish a new discourse between psychologists and philosophers on the nature of human rationality. The assumption is that the lack of interaction between descriptive and normative theories of rationality is anachronistic and new concepts of rationality would challenge the conjecture of human beings as intrinsically 'irrational' or 'illogical'. Thus, the key question is 'What is rational?' rather than 'Are we rational?'. The Priority Programme will explore the value of recent normative theories of rationality for modelling human thinking and decision making. In parallel, it will explore, which empirical findings from psychology can contribute to the revision of old and the development of new normative theories of rationality. Such a discourse between psychology and philosophy, so we believe, will foster durable bridges between the two disciplines and promote a deeper understanding of the nature of human rationality.