Abstract
There are two prominent viewpoints regarding the nature of rationality and how it should be evaluated in situations of interest: the traditional axiomatic approach and the newer ecological rationality. An obstacle to comparing and evaluating these seemingly opposite approaches is that they employ different language and formalisms, ask different questions, and are at different stages of development. I adapt a formal framework known as SCOP to address this problem by providing a comprehensive common framework in which both approaches may be defined and compared. The main result is that the axiomatic and ecological approaches are in far greater agreement on fundamental issues than has been appreciated; this is supported by a pair of theorems to the effect that they will make accordant rationality judgements when forced to evaluate the same situation. I conclude that ecological rationality has some subtle advantages, but that we should move past the issues currently dominating the discussion of rationality.
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Notes
One could have other goals in studying decisions and inferences, but from a normative, philosophical perspective, and when our theories are theories of rationality for individual people and not just predictive devices, these are our primary purposes. A satisfactory theory, therefore, must fulfil these functions.
Note that these definitions do not translate literally into the formal framework; c.f. Sect. 3.
This data-driven modeling work plays a supporting role in the “ecological theory of concepts” that the authors now develop, according to which concepts “only occur as part of a web of meaning provided by both other concepts and by interrelated life activities” (Gabora et al. 2008). This is similar to ecological rationality in that both take something long understood as purely internal and argue that it is instead a relation between internal and external, specifically in that context plays a critical role. We can understand this as part of a trend towards naturalism (discussed by Philip Kitcher in Kitcher (1992)). The views are primarily distinguished by the fact that the ecological theory of concepts seeks a descriptive account of concepts specifically, while ecological rationality (for the purposes of this paper) is a normative account of what it means to perform well on a broad range of decision and inference tasks.
I will stay close to Aerts’ notation for convenience, but note that there are several changes.
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Rich, P. Comparing the axiomatic and ecological approaches to rationality: fundamental agreement theorems in SCOP. Synthese 195, 529–547 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0584-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0584-1