Abstract
The social sciences focus on the effect of man’s actions. Whether these regard immigration, employment, financial markets, technological innovation or political elections, any phenomenon that is the aggregate outcome of individual behaviour involving choice and human action is studied by a particular branch of the social sciences.
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- 1.
In the second part of the volume I will introduce the current debate on duality of mind and ecological rationality. According to this debate most of mental activity is not intentional, but unaware and in the same time adaptive and rational as a good solution to the environmental decisional problem (Gigerenzer 2007).
- 2.
As we will see in the second part of the volume, bounded rationality thesis represented by the metaphor of two blades of the scissors (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer and Selten 2001a) conceives rationality as the fitting of the environmental complexity represented by the structure of the problem and inferential ability of the problem solver. Therefore the rationality of a solution or of a decision is also assessed in relation to a problem that is contextually based.
- 3.
This goal is not only pursued by the epistemological current known as scientific realism. Even the supporters of a conventionalist position on the reality of scientific laws, namely the lack of correspondence between the linguistic assertion called law and the world, might have a realistic position in terms of the entities to which the law applies (Hacking, 1983). For example, it is possible to support a Humean conception on the conventionality of causal laws and at the same time to support the epistemological reality of the entities to which the law applies. Even if it is asserted, for example, that the law of gases refers to the regularity of relations between real entities like the pressure and temperature of gas, it is still possible to deny its epistemological reality as a causal law.
- 4.
Social event is considered as a linguistic fiction with pragmatic utility for the discussion but without any real content.
- 5.
Therefore this EI can be considered an explanatory reduction of a social event to the laws and facts of individuals.
- 6.
While the main task of logic is to define the consistency (or inconsistency) of ideas (sentences) and the definition of inference in the erothetic logic the definition of questions and rules have to ascertain whether a sentence can be conceived as an answer to a given question.
- 7.
A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.
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Viale, R. (2012). Psychologism and Antipsychologism. In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24743-9_2
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