Rational-Choice Explanation: The Limits to Grounding

Abstract

Much of Professor Elster’s recent work has been devoted to an exploration of the nature and limits of rationality. He has convincingly argued that specifically human behavior, both individual and collective, cannot be satisfactorily explained either in terms of pure (physical) causality or in functional terms. The most typical cases of human behavior require, for their understanding, a special kind of explanation, “intentional explanation.” In his contribution to this volume, Elster proposes an analysis both of this genus and of its most important species, namely “rational-choice explanation.” In so doing, he also pursues another strand of his earlier work, namely the criticism of models of rationality that are exclusively based on the notion of optimality. He has proposed instead a notion of “satisficing” as a better foundation for a general account of rationality. Though this notion is not employed in the paper under discussion, the criticism of optimality here summarized unmistakenly points toward it.