Questions tagged [rationality]
Rationality is the use of reason to find the truth based on facts and to decide how to act to achieve desired goals. Also use this tag for questions regarding any view or intellectual movement which holds rationality in high regard and accepts it as the only legitimate way to get to the truth.
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Questions Regarding Rational Egoism
I was reading this article and I have many questions :
https://iep.utm.edu/egoism/
What does Rand mean by the concept of "selfless selfishness"?
What exactly does rational mean in rational ...
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Is it ever rational or justified to believe in a claim X based on eyewitness accounts if X seems to contradict mainstream scientific theories? [duplicate]
Can the testimony of multiple credible witnesses challenge the conventional understanding of the laws of physics? If several trustworthy individuals report events that appear to contradict well-...
user66156
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Why is the Newcomb problem confusing?
[Note: After I made this post, the title and the post have been criticised as badly phrased and/or opinionated. I partially agreed with that and made some initial modifications. However, after others ...
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Defending Pereboom's deliberation-compatibilism from Widerker's objections, conceptualizing "agents" as Turing machines
I am trying to overcome David Widerker's objection to Derk Pereboom's account of rational deliberation. I include both Pereboom's account and Widerker's objection as a reminder/introduction at the end ...
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A contradiction in Feldman's rule for suspension of judgment?
In Reasonable Religious Disagreements, Feldman argues for the following.
(#) On issues where there is widespread disagreement between epistemic peers, the rational approach is to suspend judgment.
I ...
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Does suspending judgment require judgment?
In Reasonable Religious Disagreements, Feldman argues that much of the time when there is widespread disagreement over some issue, the rational approach is to suspend judgment. I have a question about ...
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What are some cases in which we can use reason but not logic?
I am curious whether there have been philosophers arguing that there are contexts in which we can use reason, but not logic. For example, some authors might say that logic cannot be used in the very ...
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Are two persons equally rational in choosing different dogmatic stopping points in their chains of justification as per the Münchhausen trilemma?
In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment
intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any
truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without ...
user66156
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Simple question really: If pi is an irrational number, what does that say about circles and our measurements?
If we accept that pi is an irrational number and then we continue our discussion that pi is just described/accepted as the ratio of the circumference and diameter of the circle.
My question now poses, ...
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Shortcomings in the following definition of "rationality"?
I'm going to try to engage with the following Encyclopedia Britannica article on "rationality".
Rationality, the use of knowledge to attain goals.
I have a bigger personal project to ...
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Are there certain plausible assumptions, such as block or physical determinism, that lead us to conclude that everything we do is equally rational?
It seems that with certain assumptions about reality, everything we can do is equally rational.
Max Tegmark's theory of the multiverse, often referred to as the "mathematical universe hypothesis&...
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How many dimensions does time have?
As phrased in the title, How many dimensions does time have?
If one considers time by itself (in isolation from other putative phenomena such as space or spacetime), what can be said about the ...
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Do people who "withhold judgement" also have a burden of proof?
I will illustrate my question with several examples involving 3 individuals: A, B, C.
Example 1: The shape of the Earth
A defends the claim that the Earth is round.
B defends the claim that the Earth ...
user66156
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Is atheism a proposition?
Theism proposes the existence of God. Atheism makes no proposition, it is simply the absence of a belief in God. Theism is the proposition. Atheism is the negation. The negation is not a proposition. ...
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Who wrote this uncited quote?
The following uncited quotation appears in The Early Modern European Catachism by Joshua Gibbs. He includes many quotes from philosophy and literature but does not cite any of his sources. Would ...
