ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolution of the two approaches to economic rationality, and considers some implications of advances in cognitive science for them. The discipline of economics originated in two related problems connected to the concept of economic rationality that briefly claimed the attention of the ancient Greeks. Strong rationality assumes a perfect cognitive capacity to perceive relations between means and ends, and to correctly calculate subjective value in terms of self-interest; weak rationality possesses less foresight, and reflects a smaller range of perceptible alternatives. The two types of economic rationality–one computational, one contextual–have long been a source of fruitful tension in economic thought. In the twentieth century the strong concept came close to obliterating the weak through the “mathematization” of the discourse of professional economics. In keeping with axiomatic methodology, the mathematical economists defined utility as an ordering of economic outcomes characterized by the set-theoretic properties of equivalence, transitivity and completeness.
