The principle of rationality (or rationality principle) was coined by Karl R. Popper in his Harvard Lecture of 1963, and published in his book ''Myth of Framework''. It is related to what he called the 'logic of the situation' in an ''Economica'' article of 1944/1945, published later in his book ''The Poverty of Historicism''. According to Popper's

rationality Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ab ...

principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. It is an idealized conception of human behavior which he used to drive his model of situational analysis.

Cognitive scientist Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and D ...

elaborated on the principle in his account of

knowledge level modeling Knowledge level modeling is the process of theorizing over observations about a world and, to some extent, explaining the behavior of an agent as it interacts with its environment. Crucial to the understanding of knowledge level modeling are Allen ...

Popper

Popper called for social science to be grounded in what he called ''situational analysis'' or '' situational logic''. This requires building models of social situations which include individual actors and their relationship to social institutions, e.g. markets, legal codes, bureaucracies, etc. These models attribute certain aims and information to the actors. This forms the 'logic of the situation', the result of reconstructing meticulously all circumstances of an historical event. The 'principle of rationality' is the assumption that people are instrumental in trying to reach their goals, and this is what drives the model. Popper believed that this model could be continuously refined to approach the objective truth. Popper called his principle of rationality ''nearly empty'' (a technical term meaning without empirical content) and ''strictly speaking false'', but nonetheless ''tremendously useful''. These remarks earned him a lot of criticism because seemingly he had swerved from his famous ''

Logic of Scientific Discovery ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' is a 1959 book about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled ''Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnisth ...

''. Among the many philosophers having discussed Popper's principle of rationality from the 1960s up to now are

Noretta Koertge Noretta Koertge is an American philosopher of science noted for her work on Karl Popper and scientific rationality. Career She worked since 1981 as a Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University and is ...

, R. Nadeau, Viktor J. Vanberg,

Hans Albert Hans Albert (; 8 February 1921 24 October 2023) was a German philosopher. He was professor of social sciences at the University of Mannheim from 1963, and remained at the university until 1989. His fields of research were social sciences and g ...

, E. Matzner, Ian C. Jarvie, Mark A. Notturno, John Wettersten, Ian C. Böhm.

Newell

In the context of

knowledge-based systems A knowledge-based system (KBS) is a computer program that reasons and uses a knowledge base to solve complex problems. Knowledge-based systems were the focus of early artificial intelligence researchers in the 1980s. The term can refer to a b ...

, Newell (in 1982) proposed the following principle of rationality: "If an agent has knowledge that one of its actions will lead to one of its goals, then the agent will select that action."

. ''The knowledge level.'' Artificial Intelligence, 18:87-127, 1982. This principle is employed by agents at the

knowledge level In artificial intelligence, knowledge-based agents draw on a pool of logical sentences to infer conclusions about the world. At the knowledge level, we only need to specify what the agent knows and what its goals are; a logical abstraction separate ...

to move closer to a desired goal. An important philosophical difference between Newell and Popper is that Newell argued that the knowledge level is real in the sense that it exists in nature and is not made up. This allowed Newell to treat the rationality principle as a way of understanding nature and avoid the problems Popper ran into by treating knowledge as non physical and therefore non empirical.

References

{{Reflist Artificial intelligence

Popper

Newell

See also

References