Specific topics include the languages of propositional and predicate logic and their interpretations, rationality arguments for the probability axioms, Nash equilibrium and dominance reasoning, and the meaning of statistical significance tests.
In this respect, they actually responded to extrinsic motivation consistently with a selfish-rationality argument.
Since the early 70's, however, a large body of empirical research undertaken by social and cognitive psychologists shows that in many social contexts external rewards, typically monetary ones, affect behavior in a direction opposite to that predicted by a standard selfish-rationality argument.
But that's been a loser argument, because the policy is not about rationality, and it's not about to be displaced by rational argument.
Investigates how ideas of definition, reason, argument and proof, rationality/irrationality, number, quality and quantity, truth, and even the idea of an idea were shaped by the interplay of philosophic and mathematical inquiry.
By rationality, by argument, by all kinds of Hegelian methods: "If the reverse were true," "What would be different," etc., etc., etc.
So to take one of the biggest belief choices of all, we do not choose to believe in God or not, but we can choose how much we attend to inconvenient facts, distorting self-motivations, and the rationality of arguments.
Let us grant Pascal's conclusion for the sake of the argument: rationality requires you to wager for God.
(For further discussion of rationality and the argument for Anomalous Monism see Yalowitz 1997 and Latham 1999).
Professor Nutt and his colleagues know you cannot base credible messages to young people on those classifications, but I fear the government's deaf ear to the council's attempts to inject rationality into the arguments on drugs may have forced their capitulation.
It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.
