When Rationality Fails

The moral hazard associated with health insurance is twofold that which occurs ex ante, which consists in failing to prevent health problems because he or she knows that he or she is protected in the event of falling ill, and expost moral hazard, which is what occurs when rational consumers consume quantities that are greater than the optimum once they fall ill, because the marginal cost for the co-insured patient is lower than the marginal cost of production. 

However finally, and perhaps more fundamentally, we should not forget that the rationality of science and of our contemporary culture is secured by its commitment to evidence. When we fail to present die evidence for scientific beliefs to children, and when we fail to give them the opportunity to consider and inspect the arguments on which those beliefs rest, science education becomes an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms and self defeating. For, as Horton (1971) so eloquently pointed out, it makes the epistemic basis of belief reside solely in the authority of the source and, as a means of education, is no better than that of the oral transmission of knowledge which was a feature of medieval life and of less-developed societies today. 

There is a second argument which presupposes that such explanations, whether causal or not, are supposed to rationalize. It relies on cases in which we want to explain something which seems to be a mistake from the point of view of the adequate scheme. Appealing to the resources of the adequate scheme in such cases would not just result in bad explanation it would produce no explanation at all. Imagine that our earlier hero calls out zebra when he sees a zebralope. Why does he do that Saying that his word zebra refers to zebras and does not refer to zebralopes just would not answer the question. It would fail to show that what is said is rational. 

In the previous chapter I described in some detail how reference is fixed. There are simple sentences associated with each word which are responsible for its reference. Once we know the truth conditions of these sentences, the reference of a word is given by disquotational schemas. The truth conditions of these sentences are identical with their justification conditions. In the final analysis, reference is fixed by justification conditions. However, some justification conditions are inadequate, they are not conducive to truth in other words, they fail as truth conditions. What these inadequate justification conditions determine is relative reference the sort of reference we attribute to users of inadequate conceptual schemes when we give rationalizing explanation of their behavior. As to adequate justification conditions, we cannot do better than to identify them with our current justification conditions. Our current justification conditions may turn out to be inadequate. But we must take what we have. 

The tabulation shows that the t-butyl system is a reasonable model for some equilibrating ions. It fails badly, however, when applied to the norbornyl compounds. The isopropyl system is a poor model for sec-butyl and cyclopentyl ions and is a very poor model for the norbornyl cation. The failure of the models to provide reasonable estimates of the shifts in the tertiary norbornyl cations which are undergoing either Wagner-Meerwein shifts or hydride migration makes it clear that the experimental shifts in the secondary system cannot be used as structural proofs. Rather they should be regarded as fascinating results to be rationalized in terms of the structure, whatever it may be. 

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