The cornerstone of his theory of divine exemplarism is the conviction that there is a close parallelism between human artificers as producers of artifacts and God as a creator only in this way, according to Paul, can the main goal of every theory of divine ideas (that is, the explanation of the rationality of creation as a free act of God) be achieved.
Although the account of rationality within economics differs in some ways from the folk psychology people tacitly invoke in everyday explanations of actions, many of the same questions carry over (Rosenberg 1976, ch. 5; 1980, Hausman 2011).
(See below The computational account of rationality).
The Bayesian framework promises to provide an explanation of the epistemic rationality of common patterns of scientific inference, including many of those that have garnered special attention from traditional historicists like the tendency of scientists to reject "less central" auxiliary hypotheses before "core theories" in the face of recalcitrant evidence.
In Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Nature Of Rationality (1993), and his last book, Invariances: The Structure Of The Objective World (2001), he made major contributions in epistemology, rational choice theory, philosophy of mind, and ethics.
For the utilitarian may simply hold that the best explanation for the rationality of a given person incurring some cost for herself in order to avoid some greater cost for herself is the unrestricted rationality of minimizing net costs (or maximizing net benefits).
Hempel's commitment to rigorous explications of the nature of cognitive significance, of scientific explanation, and of scientific rationality would become the hallmark of his research, which exerted great influence on professional philosophers, especially during the middle decades of the 20th Century.
His studies of induction, explanation, and rationality in science exerted a profound influence upon more than a generation of philosophers of science, many of whom became leaders of the discipline in their own right.
Reason explanations are satisfying both because they show that an action is a realization of rationality and also because such explanations are instances of generalizations.
Nozick went on to publish important works that ranged over metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and axiology Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1993), Socratic Puzzles (1997), and Invariances (2001).
Notions of rationality and emotionality also serve as explanations in the contemporary neuroscientific literature on the psychological processes underlying moral decisions (henceforth: moral cognition).
