Gambles which induce the decision-maker to experience ambiguity about the relative likelihood of events often give rise to ambiguity-seeking and ambiguity-avoidance, which imply violation of additivity and Savage's axioms. The inability of the subjective Bayesian theory to account for these empirical regularities has determined a dichotomy between normative and descriptive views of subjective probability. This paper proposes a framework within which the two perspectives can be reconciled. First, a formal definition of ambiguity is given over a continuum ranging from ignorance (...) to risk, and including ambiguous contexts as subsets. Second, it is shown that the systems of inductive logic account for the effects of ambiguity. Then, Carnap's X-system is applied as a psychological model and compared to Einhorn and Hogarth's non-normative psychological model. Finally, the implications of this research to the modeling of subjective probability judgements are discussed. (shrink)

Moral and legal judgments sometimes depend on personal traits in this sense: the subject offers good reasons for her judgment, but if she had a different social or ideological background, her judgment would be different. If you would judge the constitutionality of restrictions on abortion differently if you were not a secular liberal, is your judgment really based on the arguments you find convincing, or do you find them so only because you are a secular liberal? I argue that (...) a judgment can be based on the considerations the subject claims as justification even when it depends on personal traits. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to (...) its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)

When we are touched by the beauty of something, we cannot help judging that the experienced feeling of pleasure ought to be shared by others. In Kantian terms, a pure judgement of taste requires or demands everyone else's assent. I examine some of the major intricacies of Kant's account and aim to correct some distorted views of it. I argue that the autonomy (or ‘heautonomy’) of the judgement of taste is not presupposed but made possible by the modal (...) requirement as such, i.e. by the ‘subjective necessity’ to be universally shared—a necessity that is not moral, as several commentators hold, but strictly epistemological. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

One of the fundamental questions in post-Fregean philosophy is how to account for the normativity involved in assertoric claims once the traditional subject-object view of thinking is rejected. One of the more productive lines of inquiry in the contemporary literature attributes normativity to second nature, which is presented as a sui generis space of reason giving and receiving distinct from the space of nature studied by the natural sciences. In this paper I suggest an alternative account by drawing from (...) Castoriadis’s philosophical interpretation of autopoiesis. For Castoriadis, the idea of second nature protects the modern conception of nature from undergoing the radical critique it requires, for it restricts normativity to the anthropic sphere. In contrast, he proposes an autopoietic account of the subject that grounds the capacity to know that one knows in the activity of the living being. Castoriadis demonstrates that the normativity of assertoric claims is not a vertical break from nature but rather a horizontal transformation of the biological capacity for self-referentiality. (shrink)

The dissertation offers a study of Kant's aesthetic theory as it is developed in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first half of his Critique of Judgment, which is widely acknowledged to be the founding text of modern philosophical aesthetics. I aim to show that this work elaborates an important and deeply interesting study of the nature and conditions of aesthetic judgment which---despite the recent resurgence of commentary and of secondary literature---has not yet been inherited. I give an account focused (...) on understanding Kant's idea that aesthetic judgment makes a claim to "subjective universality" and "exemplary necessity", the "twofold peculiarity" of aesthetic judgment that Kant himself presents as the main thematic guiding the course of the Critique. I argue for an interpretation of Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment which takes seriously his idea that its demand for the agreement of others takes the form of a presumption, in which the judge offers her judgment as exemplary of a "universal voice", apart from any independently or transcendentally assured authorization. (shrink)

After criticizing some recent writings typical of the different forms of ethical objectivism, that is, intuitionism, naturalism (including the ideal observation theory and supervenience), and rationalism, I gave my reasons for siding with ethical subjectivism. I hope to demonstrate that this alternative meta‐ethical theory does not consider moral judgements meaningless nor arbitrary, and that it is compatible with empiricism in science and with serious moral commitment. Objectivists, on the other hand, tend to take a parochial view of ethics, identifying morality (...) with a particular moral point of view, nowadays liberalism and the common good, while ignoring rival moral principles which are politically important. (shrink)

In recent years it has become increasingly common in the United States and in the United Kingdom for newspapers and other media to expose problematic aspects of the private lives of political figures; or, since the facts may already be in the public domain, to draw wider attention to them and to make them the subject of commentary. These “problematic aspects” may include past or continuing physical or psychological illness, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse or dependence, financial difficulties, (...) family conflict, infidelity, or certain sexual proclivities of both the political figures themselves and of their family members or intimates. In the United States, the most prominent cases are probably those of President Bill Clinton in relation to a series of alleged extramarital affairs leading up to the scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and of President John F. Kennedy, also in relation to marital infidelities. The latter exposure was, of course retrospective, as were revelations of similar matters concerning other presidents and holders of high office. Up until the mid-1960s, while it was sometimes known to the press that politicians had “problems” in their private lives, it was rare for these to be made public. Sometimes it might be reported, or more likely hinted, that a figure had a “complex” or “difficult” personal life, and the public was left to infer whatever it might from this . The recent culture of exposure results from a combination of factors, including changed attitudes toward public discussion of sexual conduct, changed standards of sexual behavior, recognition of the scale of Cold War espionage and of its practice of blackmail, a general decline in social deference, a threat to the print media posed by the growth of television, and the rise of satirical entertainment. All of these elements were present in the case that marked the establishment of the culture of exposure in the U.K.: the ‘Profumo scandal’ of 1963. For those unaware of this episode, it may be sufficient to say that it involved the then-secretary of state for war, members of the British aristocracy, a Soviet naval attaché, and a number of “society” call girls, and that it contributed to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and the subsequent fall from power of the Conservative Party. In the United States, the culture of exposure developed somewhat later and took shape in the period of the Watergate scandal, which damaged the American public's perception of the governing classes just as the Profumo scandal had in Britain. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 1162-1175, December 2021.

In Stig Hjarvard’s characterization, mediatization studies move beyond the positivist origins of the social sciences, as they must in order to avoid the fundamental contradiction between original commitments to classical determinism vis-à-vis human agency as acknowledged within mediatization studies. In order to sustain and enhance Hjarvard’s vision of the coherence between human agency and mediatization studies as a species of social science, I first sharpen these theoretical tensions by developing a robust account of human freedom as informed by Kant and (...) virtue ethics. I then adopt precise understandings of complementarity and epistemological pluralism as initially developed in Quantum Mechanics and subsequently by Karen Barad and Judith Simon as frameworks that can coherently conjoin contemporary social science with strong accounts of human freedom. The resulting coherency—or entanglement—between ethics and science implies new ethical responsibilities for social scientists as ‘virtuous agents’. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the role of conscience in the justification of human rights. I argue that in both the western tradition of natural rights and the non-western traditions, human rights are justified, in part, because of their appeal to conscience, and not simply because they issue from a divine source or are based on reason. In contrast, contemporary justifications of human rights primarily look for an objective foundation or simply assert the pragmatic importance of human rights as (...) their justification. While there are distinct advantages to this way of arguing, there are also problems, which I will discuss. As an alternative, I outline Arendt's understanding of conscience as the ability to be with and think with one's self as a secular alternative to both a non-secular version of conscience, and the denial of conscience implicit in contemporary theories. Her view of political judgment helps us to understand how conscience can be understood as subjective but not arbitrary. This paper brings Arendt's insights on conscience and judgment to bear on contemporary discourses of human rights. (shrink)

I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective act necessary for both “mere presentation” and (...) judgment. In Begriffshrift, Frege alludes to a significant logical role for the subjective act of judgment, and in later work, traces of this logical role remain in the intensional notions of grasping a thought and judging as acknowledging its truth. But Frege’s anti-psychologism blocks interpreting these subjective notions in term of synthesis. Although similar in certain ways to Frege and equally anti-psychologistic, Husserl’s theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations maintains a role for subjective syntheses for presentations and judgments, and goes beyond Kant in allowing for a kind of objectivity at the level of non-judgment presentations. These two great anti-psychologists at the dawn of the parallel heydays of linguistic and phenomenological analysis are thus differentiated by the fates they assign to the act of synthesis. (shrink)

Fourteen contributions from international academics examine the themes of judgment, imagination, and politics in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant. In the introduction, Beiner and Nedelsky (both political science, U. of Toronto) discuss the problem of political judgment and the recognition of subjectivity. Other topics include the challenges of diversity to the law, the public use of reason, and Arendt's lectures on Kant. c. Book News Inc.

This book offers a concise survey of basic probability theory from a thoroughly subjective point of view whereby probability is a mode of judgment. Written by one of the greatest figures in the field of probability theory, the book is both a summation and synthesis of a lifetime of wrestling with these problems and issues. After an introduction to basic probability theory, there are chapters on scientific hypothesis-testing, on changing your mind in response to generally uncertain observations, on expectations of (...) the values of random variables, on de Finetti's dissolution of the so-called problem of induction, and on decision theory. (shrink)

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition (...) is one of the main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I undertake an in-depth examination of an oft mentioned but rarely expounded upon state: suspended judgment. While traditional epistemology is sometimes characterized as presenting a “yes or no” picture of its central attitudes, in fact many of these epistemologists want to say that there is a third option: subjects can also suspend judgment. Discussions of suspension are mostly brief and have been less than clear on a number of issues, in particular whether this third option should (...) be thought of as an attitude or not. In this paper I argue that suspended judgment is (or at least involves) a genuine attitude. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9753-y Authors Jane Friedman, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3UJ UK Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Climate change adaptation is largely a local matter, and adaptation planning can benefit from local climate change projections. Such projections are typically generated by accepting climate model outputs in a relatively uncritical way. We argue, based on the IPCC’s treatment of model outputs from the CMIP5 ensemble, that this approach is unwarranted and that subjective expert judgment should play a central role in the provision of local climate change projections intended to support decision-making.

Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues (...) for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief. (shrink)

We only regard a system or a process as being “scientific” if it displays the three predominant characteristics of the natural sciences: predictability, repeatability and quantifiability. This by definition precludes intuition, subjective judgement, tacit knowledge, heuristics, dreams, etc. in other words, those attributes which are peculiarly human. Furthermore, this is resulting in a shift from judgment to calculation giving rise, in some cases, to an abject dependency on the machine and an inability to disagree with the outcome or even (...) question it. To tolerate such a situation could be seen as an abdication of professional responsibility. In complex technological and scientific environments, it is sometimes said that those who make best use of computers already know what the answer is (in ball park terms) before the calculation. (shrink)

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

This book is the first to introduce readers to contemporary philosophical works on moral judge- ment stemming from France, Germany and the Anglo-American world — many of which remain untranslated. By integrating Kantian and Aristotelian reflections on this subject, the author combines historiography and critical reflection to offer a rich picture of what it means to make good moral decisions. -/- As both Kantians and Aristotelians argue, moral judgements are ultimately grounded in the normativity of practical identities. Thus, it (...) is by identifying the obligations tied to the multiple dimensions of our identities (e.g., friend, teacher, romantic partner, citizen) that we can ultimately understand how we ought to act. Yet, Aristotle and Kant also remind us that doing so requires the acquisition of moral virtues which allow us to better discern practical reasons in concrete situations. (shrink)

This article considers Hannah Arendt's posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, lectures delivered at the New School for Social Research in the fall semester of 1970. By taking Arendt's highly provocative reading of Kant as a point of departure, the essay probes Arendt's own theory of judgment. Arendt frequently draws distinctions that prove untenable. If the faculty of judgment, in Arendt's words, has to do with one's “ability to make distinctions,” and yet her own distinctions continually falter, and that (...) in a text about judgment, then it seems that she thwarts her own discourse. More specifically, she complicates her assertions by staging something that she, in Kantian terms, describes as “enlarged thought”; she explores the subject of judgment from different perspectives and allows for perspectival plurality, thereby “wooing,” as it were, our consent. In so doing, Arendt, in thoroughly Kantian fashion, establishes judgment as a performative category that defies being taught and instead remains a matter of practice. (shrink)

Like any science marked by high uncertainty, climate science is characterized by a widespread use of expert judgment. In this paper, we first show that, in climate science, expert judgment is used to overcome uncertainty, thus playing a crucial role in the domain and even at times supplanting models. One is left to wonder to what extent it is legitimate to assign expert judgment such a status as an epistemic superiority in the climate context, especially as the production of expert (...) judgment is particularly opaque. To begin answering this question, we highlight the key components of expert judgment. We then argue that the justification for the status and use of expert judgment depends on the competence and the individual subjective features of the expert producing the judgment since expert judgment involves not only the expert's theoretical knowledge and tacit knowledge, but also their intuition and values. This goes against the objective ideal in science and the criteria from social epistemology which largely attempt to remove subjectivity from expertise. (shrink)

Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues (...) for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns.Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Critical realist thought has theorised convincingly that epistemic relativism is constellationally embedded in ontological realism which in turn necessitates judgemental rationality. In social science, judgemental rationality involves acting upon plausible decisions about competing points of view. However, the tools for doing this are, as yet, under-articulated. This paper addresses this absence by articulating triangulation and depth-reflexivity as two tools for doing judgemental rationality in empirical research. It draws on the experiences of a diverse team working on an international comparative (...) research project on conversion to Islam in prisons. It demonstrates how epistemic and relational gaps between researchers and research subjects can be bridged by mobilising the ‘laminated’ properties and personal attributes of a diverse research team that factors in attributes that are absent as well as those present. The biographical experiences of the team are analyzed in a variety of intersecting dimensions: faith, ethnicity/ethno-culture, gender, class and professionality. (shrink)

The book contains a unique epistemological position that deserves serious consideration by specialists in the subject."--Bruce Aune, University of Massachusetts.

The growing body of whistleblowing literature includes many studies that have attempted to identify the individual level antecedents of whistleblowing behavior. However, cross-cultural differences in perceptions of the ethicality of whistleblowing affect the judgment of whistleblowing intention. This study ascertains how Chinese managers/professionals decide to blow the whistle in terms of their locus of control and subjective judgment regarding the intention of whistleblowing. Hypotheses that are derived from these speculations are tested with data on Chinese managers and professionals. Statistical analysis (...) largely supports the hypotheses, which suggests that an individual''s locus of control does moderate the relationship between ethical judgment and whistleblowing. (shrink)

When we judge something to be beautiful, do we identify an inherent feature of the object, or only our subjective response to it? This paper argues that, for Kant, pure aesthetic judgment occupies a middle ground. Such judgments are based upon affective responses to our own cognitive faculties. Thus, pure aesthetic judgment is subjective insofar as it concerns our feeling ourselves to be engaged in a certain task; it is objective insofar as the task we are engaged in is cognition (...) of an object, and the faculties that we are feeling to be at work are the cognitive faculties of the understanding and the imagination. This paper locates this interpretation in the text of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in the third Critique and uses it to make sense of many otherwise opaque features of Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD-b) often exaggerate their abilities. Are those errors in judgment limited to domains in which patients under-perform, or do FTD-b patients overestimate their abilities in other domains? Is overconfidence in FTD-b patients domain-specific or domain-general? To address this question, we asked patients at early stages of FTD-b to judge their performance in two domains (attention, perception) in which they exhibit relatively spared abilities. In both domains, FTD-b patients overestimated their performance relative (...) to patients with Dementia of Alzheimer Type (DAT) and healthy elderly subjects. Results are consistent with a domaingeneral deficit in metacognitive judgment. We discuss these findings in relation to “regression to the mean” accounts of overconfidence and the role of emotions in metacognitive judgments. (shrink)

This thesis is the first major study of censorship of and in English Canadian literature. While there are several reasons scholars have focused on censorship in Europe and the United States, it is the ascendancy in quality and quantity of Canadian writing leading to its further use in institutions where censorship takes place---such as schools and libraries---that necessitates a study of censorship in Canadian literature now. This rise in censorship has prompted Canadian authors increasingly to write about the subject. (...) In this thesis I study censorship issues raised both explicitly md implicitly by Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Beatrice Culleton and Marlene Nourbese Philip. All of these writers have been subjected to censorship attacks and have responded to these attacks and grappled with the philosophical implications of censorship in their fiction and non-fiction. My investigation of censorship in these texts sheds new light on the works of literature themselves, but the literary texts also suggest a new way of looking at censorship. Each of my chapters offers arguments challenging the traditional Enlightenment model of censorship as an oppressive government practice against its citizens, a definition resulting in the mistaken views that censorship has been largely eradicated in the West and that, when it does surface, it is to be condemned on principle. This view can be contrasted with a "constructivist" model of censorship as the delegitimation of expression by social forces. My findings support a definition which draws on both models wherein censorship is the exclusion of some discourse as the result of a judgment by an authoritative agent based on some ideological predisposition. The key word in this definition is "judgment" which, when recognized as the primary activity in censorship, must change the way we approach censorship controversies. For if censorship is the exercise of judgment, and judgment is enmeshed in the fabric of human endeavour, then censorship is inevitable in our society. Since censorship is inevitable, I conclude, we should stop arguing about whether censorship itself is a desirable practice and begin to find ways to make censorship practices more reasonable or more "just.". (shrink)

This book by leading international scholars in the fields of history, philosophy and politics restores the subject to a place at the very centre of political theory and practice.

This paper deals with forms of communication aiming at a better informed public or publics. The main idea is that democratic societies are dependent on toleration of a plurality of publics, and simultaneously there is a need for communication between the different publics. The ethos underlying this assumption is that democracy requires a transcendence of subjective conditions in order for the public(s) to gain legitimacy and recognition of opinions. Validity of opinions presupposes a public aspect that is available through communication. (...) More specifically, the validity in question is obtained through its claim on universality – i.e. the transcendence of purely private subjective conditions. This kind of validity is found in reflective judgment or enlarged thinking, as displayed in Kant’s third critique. In the last part of the paper it is discussed how new information technologies and the internet may contribute positively to facilitate modes of communication that are associated with the particularity at work in reflective thinking. Storytelling technologies and virtual realities are of particular interest in envisaging how this might work. (shrink)

Intuitive predictions and judgements under uncertainty are often mediated by judgemental heuristics that sometimes lead to biases. Our micro-developmental study suggests that a presumption of rationality is justified for adult subjects, in so far as their systematic judgemental biases appear to be due to a specific executive-inhibition failure in working memory, and not necessarily to a lack of understanding of the fundamental principles of probability. This hypothesis was tested using an experimental procedure in which 60 adult subjects were trained to (...) inhibit the classical conjunction bias on a frequency judgement task derived from Tversky and Kahneman's work. Pre- and post-test performance was assessed via a probability judgement task. The data indicated a training effect, suggesting that subjects traditionally labelled as "irrational" with respect to the classical rules of inductive reasoning are in fact "inefficient inhibitors". These findings are discussed in terms of a polymorphous view of rationality. (shrink)