Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Adam Morton (University of British Columbia)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.00cm
, Height: 1.70cm
, Length: 22.10cm
Weight: 0.364kg
ISBN: 9780199658534
ISBN 10: 0199658536
Pages: 188
Publication Date: 08 November 2012
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
a fun read D. Keaton, CHOICE Adam Morton's excellent book is concerned with intellectual virtues for limited agents. That is, it is concerned with what sorts of virtues of this sort there are and how to encourage these virtues in ourselves and others ... His discussion is often quite original, and there are insights on every page. Gilbert Harman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Adam Morton's excellent book is concerned with intellectual virtues for limited agents. That is, it is concerned with what sorts of virtues of this sort there are and how to encourage these virtues in ourselves and others . . . His discussion is often quite original, and there are insights on every page. * Gilbert Harman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews * a fun read * D. Keaton, CHOICE *
Author Information
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.
