Rationality

Full Title or Meme

As a basis for decision process Rationality has been assumed to be essentially. Unfortunately, rationality can be extrinsic, based on external knowledge obtained inductively from the exiting ecosystems, or intrinsic, based on a person's internal value system. The mixture of these two modes of thought in one person make rational decisions dependent on circumstances and not deterministic.

Context

BACK TO THE PRE-SOCRATICS By KARL R. POPPER

BACK TO METHUSELAH was a progressive program, compared with Back to Thales what Shaw offered us was an improved expectation of life—something that was in the air, at any rate when he wrote. I have nothing to offer you, I am afraid, that is in the air to-day; for what I want to return to is the simple straightforward rationality of the Pre-Socratics. The simplicity and boldness of their questions is part of it, but more important still is the critical attitude which, as I shall try to show, was first developed in the Ionian School.

The questions which the Pre-Socratics tried to answer were primarily cosmological questions, but they also dealt with questions of the theory of knowledge. It is my belief that philosophy must return to cosmology and to a simple theory of knowledge. There is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested: the problem of understanding the world in which we live, including ourselves, who are part of that world, and our knowledge of it. All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy as well as of science lies solely in their bold attempt to add to our knowledge of the world, and to the theory of our knowledge of the world. I am interested in Wittgenstein, for example, not because of his linguistic philosophy, but because his Tractatus was a cosmological treatise, and because his theory of knowledge was closely linked with his cosmology. For me, philosophy as well as science lose all attraction when they give up that pursuit—when they become specialists.