How do ordinary people come to know or believe what they do? We
need an account of this process to help explain why people act as
they do. You might think I am acting irrationally--against my
interest or my purpose--until you realize that what you know and
what I know differ significantly. My actions, given my knowledge,
might make eminently good sense. Of course, this pushes our problem
back one stage to assess why someone knows or believes what they
do. That is the focus of this book. Russell Hardin supposes that
people are not usually going to act knowingly against their
interests or other purposes. To try to understand how they have
come to their knowledge or beliefs is therefore to be charitable in
assessing their rationality. Hardin insists on such a charitable
stance in the effort to understand others and their sometimes
objectively perverse actions.
Hardin presents an essentially economic account of what an
individual can come to know and then applies this account to many
areas of ordinary life: political participation, religious beliefs,
popular knowledge of science, liberalism, culture, extremism, moral
beliefs, and institutional knowledge. All of these can be
enlightened by the supposition that people are attempting
reasonable actions under the severe constraints of acquiring better
knowledge when they face demands that far outstretch their
possibilities.
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