Bounded Thinking

Intellectual Virtues for Limited Agents
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-965853-4
Verlag: OUP UK

Buch, Englisch, 188 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 375 g

Bounded Thinking offers a new account of the virtues of limitation management: intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many problems that we can easily describe. Adam Morton argues that we do give one another guidance on managing our limitations, but that this has to be in terms of virtues and not of rules, and in terms of success--knowledge and accomplishment--rather than rationality. He establishes a taxonomy of intellectual virtues, which includes 'paradoxical virtues' that sound like vices, such as the virtue of ignoring evidence and the virtue of not thinking too hard. There are also virtues of not planning ahead, in that some forms of such planning require present knowledge of one's future knowledge that is arguably impossible. A person's best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution to solving them but on the most likely route to success given the profile of intellectual virtues that the person has and lacks. Morton illustrates his argument with discussions of several paradoxes and conundra. He closes the book with a discussion of intelligence and rationality, and argues that both have very limited usefulness in the evaluation of who will make progress on which problems.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Morton, Adam

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Datenanalyse, Datenverarbeitung
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Erkenntnistheorie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophische Logik, Argumentationstheorie

Über Autor(innen)

Adam Morton is the author of six books ranging over all areas in philosophy. He has been Professor of Philosophy at Bristol and Canada Research Chair at Alberta, and now teaches at the University of British Columbia. Morton's work has focused on how we understand one another's behaviour in everyday life, with an emphasis on the role that mutual intelligibility plays in cooperative activity.