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In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason.^{[citation needed]} It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action. However, the term "rationality" tends to be used differently in different disciplines, including specialized discussions of economics, sociology, psychology and political science. A rational decision is one that is not just reasoned, but is also optimal for achieving a goal or solving a problem.

Determining optimality for rational behavior requires a quantifiable formulation of the problem, and the making of several key assumptions. When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in how much information is available (e.g. complete or incomplete knowledge). Collectively, the formulation and background assumptions are the model within which rationality applies. Illustrating the relativity of rationality: if one accepts a model in which benefiting oneself is optimal, then rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish; whereas if one accepts a model in which benefiting the group is optimal, then purely selfish behavior is deemed irrational. It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated.

Theories of rationality[link]

The German sociologist Max Weber proposed an interpretation of social action that distinguished between four different idealized types of rationality. The first, which he called Zweckrational or purposive/instrumental rationality, is related to the expectations about the behavior of other human beings or objects in the environment. These expectations serve as means for a particular actor to attain ends, ends which Weber noted were "rationally pursued and calculated." The second type, Weber called Wertrational or value/belief-oriented. Here the action is undertaken for what one might call reasons intrinsic to the actor: some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other motive, independent of whether it will lead to success. The third type was affectual, determined by an actor's specific affect, feeling, or emotion – to which Weber himself said that this was a kind of rationality that was on the borderline of what he considered "meaningfully oriented." The fourth was traditional, determined by ingrained habituation. Weber emphasized that it was very unusual to find only one of these orientations: combinations were the norm. His usage also makes clear that he considered the first two as more significant than the others, and it is arguable that the third and fourth are subtypes of the first two.

The advantage in this interpretation is that it avoids a value-laden assessment, say, that certain kinds of beliefs are irrational. Instead, Weber suggests that a ground or motive can be given – for religious or affect reasons, for example — that may meet the criterion of explanation or justification even if it is not an explanation that fits the Zweckrational orientation of means and ends. The opposite is therefore also true: some means-ends explanations will not satisfy those whose grounds for action are 'Wertrational'.

Weber's constructions of rationality have been critiqued both from a Habermasian (1984) perspective (as devoid of social context and under-theorised in terms of social power)^[1] and also from a feminist perspective (Eagleton, 2003) whereby Weber's rationality constructs are viewed as imbued with masculine values and oriented toward the maintenance of male power.^[2] An alternative position on rationality (which includes both bounded rationality (Simons and Hawkins, 1949),^[3] as well as the affective and value-based arguments of Weber) can be found in the critique of Etzioni (1988),^[4] who reframes thought on decision-making to argue for a reversal of the position put forward by Weber. Etzioni illustrates how purposive/instrumental reasoning is subordinated by normative considerations (ideas on how people 'ought' to behave) and affective considerations (as a support system for the development of human relationships).

In the psychology of reasoning, psychologists and cognitive scientists have defended different positions on human rationality. One prominent view, due to Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne among others is that humans are rational in principle but they err in practice, that is, humans have the competence to be rational but their performance is limited by various factors ^[5]

Quality of rationality[link]

It is believed by some philosophers (notably A.C. Grayling) that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts or culturally specific, moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.

It is evident from modern cognitive science and neuroscience, studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference.

Theoretical and practical rationality[link]

Kant had distinguished theoretical from practical reason. Rationality theorist Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, although, according to him, reason and rationality are not the same: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy.^[6] Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform. Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other.^[7] Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs. Practical rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible. Practical rationality has also a formal component, that reduces to Bayesian decision theory, and a material component, rooted in human nature (lastly, in our genome).

Examples of Rationality Applied to Different Fields[link]

Individuals or organizations are called rational if they make optimal decisions in pursuit of their goals. It is in these terms that one speaks, for example, of a rational allocation of resources, or of a rational corporate strategy. For such "rationality", the decision maker's goals are taken as part of the model, and not made subject to criticism, ethical or otherwise.

Debates arise in these four fields about whether or not people or organizations are "really" rational, as well as whether it make sense to model them as such in formal models. Some have argued that a kind of bounded rationality makes more sense for such models.

Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior; the term homo economicus (economic man: the imaginary man being assumed in economic models who is logically consistent but amoral) was coined largely in honor of this view.

Artificial Intelligence[link]

Within artificial intelligence, a rational agent is one that maximizes its expected utility, given its current knowledge. Utility is the usefulness of the consequences of its actions. The utility function is arbitrarily defined by the designer, but should be a function of performance, which is the directly measurable consequences, such as winning or losing money. In order to make a safe agent that plays defensively, a nonlinear function of performance is often desired, so that the reward for winning is lower than the punishment for losing. An agent might be rational within its own problem area, but finding the rational decision for arbitrarily complex problems is not practically possible. The rationality of human thought is a key problem in the psychology of reasoning.^[8]

See also[link]

Thinking portal

References[link]

External links and references[link]

• What is rationality?
• Reason and Rationality, by Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, Luc Faucher on the broad field of reason and rationality from descriptive, normative, and evaluative points of view
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Historicist Theories of Rationality
• Legal Reasoning After Post-Modern Critiques of Reason, by Peter Suber
• Spohn, W. (2002). The Many Facets of the Theory of Rationality. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 2: 247–262.
• Lucy Suchman (2007). Human-machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action. Cambridge University Press.
• Cristina Bicchieri (1993). Rationality and Coordination, New York: Cambridge University Press
• Cristina Bicchieri (2007). “Rationality and Indeterminacy”, in D. Ross and H. Kinkaid (eds.) The Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, The Oxford Reference Library of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, vol. 6, n.2.
• Anand, P (1993). Foundations of Rational Choice Under Risk, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1; Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Mosterín, Jesús (2008). Lo mejor posible: Racionalidad y acción humana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 318 pp. ISBN 978-84-206-8206-8.
• Nozick, Robert (1993). The Nature of Rationality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Eagleton, M. (ed) (2003) A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
• Simons, H. and Hawkins, D. (1949), “Some Conditions in Macro-Economic Stability”, Econometrica, 1949.
• Johnson-Laird, P.N. & Byrne, R.M.J. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
• Garcés M. (2009) Emotional Theory of Rationality, "Entertainment = Emotion" workshop, C.C Benasque, Spain – [1]

Daniel Kahneman
Born	(1934-03-05) March 5, 1934 (age 78) Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine
Residence	United States
Nationality	United States, Israel
Fields	Psychology, economics
Institutions	Princeton University 1993– University of California, Berkeley 1986–93 University of British Columbia 1978–86 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 1972–73 Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1961–77
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley Ph.D, 1961 Hebrew University B.A., 1954
Doctoral advisor	Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
Known for	Cognitive biases Behavioral economics Prospect theory
Notable awards	APA Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2002) APS Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1982)

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎) (born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[1]. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller.

Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.^[2]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, where his mother was visiting relatives. He spent his childhood years in Paris, France, where his parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1920s.

Kahneman and his family were in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. His father was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews, but was released after six weeks due to the intervention of his employer. The family was on the run for the remainder of the war, and survived intact except for the death of Kahneman's father of diabetes in 1944. Daniel Kahnemann and his family then moved to the British Mandatory Palestine in 1948, just prior to Israel's independence (Kahneman, 2003).

Kahneman has written of his experience in Nazi-occupied France, explaining in part why he entered the field of psychology:

It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting (Kahneman, 2003, p. 417).

Education and military service[link]

Kahneman received his B. Sc. with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954. After earning his undergraduate degree, he served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces. One of his responsibilities was to evaluate candidates for officer's training school, and to develop tests and measures for this purpose. In 1958, he went to the United States to study for his Ph.D. degree in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career[link]

Cognitive psychology[link]

Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1966.

His early work focused on visual perception and attention. For example, his first publication in the prestigious journal Science was entitled "Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory" (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966). During this period, Kahneman was a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan (1965–66) and the Applied Psychological Research Unit in Cambridge (1968/1969, summers). He was a fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University in 1966/1967.

Judgment and decision-making[link]

This period marks the beginning of Kahneman's lengthy collaboration with Amos Tversky. Together, Kahneman and Tversky published a series of seminal articles in the general field of judgment and decision-making, culminating in the publication of their prospect theory in 1979 (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory, and it is generally regarded as a given that Tversky would also have received the prize had he still been alive (he died in 1996).

In his Nobel biography, Kahneman states that his collaboration with Tversky began after Kahneman had invited Tversky to give a guest lecture to one of Kahneman's seminars at Hebrew University in 1968 or 1969. Their first jointly-authored paper, "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers," was published in 1971 (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). They published seven articles in peer-reviewed journals in the years 1971–1979. Aside from "Prospect Theory," the most important of these articles was "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), which was published in the prestigious journal Science and introduced the notion of anchoring.

Kahneman left Hebrew University in 1978 to take a position at the University of British Columbia. This move had little or no immediate effect on his collaborations with Tversky, for Tversky moved on to Stanford University that same year.

Behavioral economics[link]

Kahneman and Tversky were both fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in the academic year 1977–1978. A young economist named Richard Thaler was a visiting professor at the Stanford branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research during that same year. According to Kahneman, "[Thaler and I] soon became friends, and have ever since had a considerable influence on each other's thinking" (Kahneman, 2003, p. 437). Building on Prospect theory and Kahneman and Tversky's body of work, Thaler published "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice" in 1980, a paper which Kahneman has called "the founding text in behavioral economics" (Kahneman, 2003, p. 438).

Kahneman and Tversky both became heavily involved in the development of this new approach to economic theory, and their involvement in this movement had the effect of reducing the intensity and exclusivity of their earlier period of joint collaboration. Although they would continue to publish together until the end of Tversky's life, their years of near-exclusive collaboration were coming to an end.

The period when Kahneman published almost exclusively with Tversky began to wind down in 1983, when Kahneman published two papers with Anne Treisman, his wife since 1978.

Hedonic psychology[link]

In the nineties, Kahneman's research focus began to gradually shift in emphasis towards the field of "hedonic psychology." This subfield is closely related to the positive psychology movement, which was steadily gaining in popularity at the time. According to Kahneman and colleagues,

"Hedonic psychology...is the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment." (Kahneman, Diener & Schwarz, 1999, p. ix)

It is difficult to determine precisely when Kahneman's research began to focus on hedonics, although it likely stemmed from his work on the economic notion of utility. After publishing multiple articles and chapters in all but one of the years spanning the period 1979–1986 (for a total of 23 published works in 8 years), Kahneman published exactly one chapter during the years 1987–1989. After this hiatus, articles on utility and the psychology of utility began to appear (e.g. Kahneman & Snell, 1990; Kahneman & Thaler, 1991; Kahneman & Varey, 1991). In 1992, Varey and Kahneman introduced the method of evaluating moments and episodes as a way to capture "experiences extended across time." While Kahneman continued to study decision-making (e.g. Kahneman, 1992, 1994; Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993), hedonic psychology was the focus of an increasing number of publications (e.g. Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993; Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelemeier, 1993; Kahneman, Wakker & Sarin, 1997; Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996), culminating in a volume co-edited with Ed Diener and Norbert Schwarz, two of the most established and esteemed scholars of affect and well-being (Kahneman, Diener & Schwarz, 1999).

Together with David Schkade, Kahneman developed the notion of the focusing illusion (Kahneman & Schkade, 1998; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz & Stone, 2006) to explain in part the mistakes people make when estimating the effects of different scenarios on their future happiness (also known as affective forecasting, which has been studied extensively by Daniel Gilbert). The "illusion" occurs when people consider the impact of one specific factor on their overall happiness, they tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that would in most cases have a greater impact. A good example is provided by Kahneman and Schkade's 1998 paper "Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction." In that paper, students in the Midwest and in California reported similar levels of life satisfaction, but the Midwesterners thought their Californian peers would be happier. The only distinguishing information the Midwestern students had when making these judgments was the fact that their hypothetical peers lived in California. Thus, they "focused" on this distinction, thereby overestimating the effect of the weather in California on its residents' satisfaction with life.

Teaching[link]

Kahneman is currently a senior scholar and faculty member emeritus at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a fellow at Hebrew University and a Gallup Senior Scientist.^[3]

Personal life[link]

Daniel Kahneman is married to Anne Treisman, fellow professor of psychology at Princeton University.^[2]

Honors and awards[link]

• In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, despite being a research psychologist, for his work in Prospect theory. Kahneman states he has never taken a single economics course – that everything that he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from their collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.

• Kahneman, co-recipient with Amos Tversky, earned the 2003 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.

• In 2005, he was voted the 101st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.^[4]

• In 2007, he was presented with the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.^[5]

• On November 6, 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the department of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In his acceptance speech Kahneman said, "when you live long enough, you see the impossible become reality." He was referring to the fact that he would never have expected to be honored as an economist when he started his studies into what would become Behavioral Economics.^[6]

• In 2011, he made the Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.^[7]

• On November 9, 2011, he was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To see his lecture, click the link below. ^[8]

• His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow was the winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Current Interest.^[9]

Notable contributions[link]

Publications[link]

Note: This is only a partial list of Kahneman's publications, which are very numerous. Publications were selected for their importance (as indexed by citation counts) and/or representativeness.

• Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. (1971). "Belief in the law of small numbers". Psychological Bulletin 76 (2): 105–110. DOI:10.1037/h0031322. 
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1972). "Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness". Cognitive Psychology 3 (3): 430–454. DOI:10.1016/0010-0285(72)90016-3. 
• Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1973). "On the psychology of prediction". Psychological Review 80 (4): 237–251. DOI:10.1037/h0034747. 
• Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. (1973). "Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability". Cognitive Psychology 5 (2): 207–232. DOI:10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9. 
• Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. (1974). "Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases". Science 185 (4157): 1124–1131. DOI:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124. PMID 17835457. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/185/4157/1124?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Judgment+Under+Uncertainty%3A+Heuristics+and+Biases&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT. 
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk". Econometrica 47 (2): 263–291. DOI:10.2307/1914185. JSTOR 1914185. 
• Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. (1981). "The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice". Science 211 (4481): 453–458. DOI:10.1126/science.7455683. PMID 7455683. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/211/4481/453?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=The+framing+of+decisions+and+the+psychology+of+choice&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT. 
• Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1984). "Choices, values and frames". American Psychologist 39 (4): 341–350. DOI:10.1037/0003-066X.39.4.341. 
• Kahneman, D.; Miller, D.T. (1986). "Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives". Psychological Review 93 (2): 136–153. DOI:10.1037/0033-295X.93.2.136. 
• Kahneman, D.; Knetsch, J.L.; Thaler, R.H. (1990). "Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem". Journal of Political Economy 98 (6): 1325–1348. DOI:10.1086/261737. 
• Fredrickson, B. L.; Kahneman, D. (1993). "Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1): 45–55. DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45. PMID 8355141. 
• Kahneman, D.; Lovallo, D. (1993). "Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk-taking". Management Science 39: 17–31. DOI:10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17. 
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1996). "On the reality of cognitive illusions". Psychological Review 103 (3): 582–591. DOI:10.1037/0033-295X.103.3.582. PMID 8759048. 
• Schkade, D. A.; Kahneman, D. (1998). "Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction". Psychological Science 9 (5): 340–346. DOI:10.1111/1467-9280.00066. 
• Kahneman, D., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). (1999). Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (2000). Choices, values and frames. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2003). "A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality". American Psychologist 58 (9): 697–720. DOI:10.1037/0003-066X.58.9.697. PMID 14584987. 
• Kahneman, D.; Krueger, A.; Schkade, D.; Schwarz, N.; Stone, A. (2006). "Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion". Science 312 (5782): 1908–10. DOI:10.1126/science.1129688. PMID 16809528. http://www.morgenkommichspaeterrein.de/ressources/download/125krueger.pdf. 
• Thinking, Fast and Slow (ISBN 978-0374275631) publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 25, 2011). Reviewed by Freeman Dyson in New York Review of Books, 22-Dec-2011, pages 40-44.

Bibliography[link]

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow, Allen Lane 2011
• Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. In T. Frangsmyr (Ed.), Les Prix Nobel 2002 [Nobel Prizes 2002]. Stockholm, Sweden: Almquist & Wiksell International. Note that this chapter has two sections: the first is an autobiography (with a eulogy for Amos Tversky), and the second is a transcript of his Nobel lecture, which is what the title refers to. The autobiographical portion has been republished as: Kahneman, D. (2007). Daniel Kahneman. In G. Lindzey & W.M. Runyan (Eds.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Volume IX (pp. 155–197). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. It is also available on the Nobel Prize website.
• Kahneman, D.; Beatty, J. (1966). "Pupil diameter and load on memory". Science 154 (3756): 1583–1585. DOI:10.1126/science.154.3756.1583. PMID 5924930. 
• Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1973). "On the psychology of prediction". Psychological Review 80 (4): 237–251. DOI:10.1037/h0034747. 
• Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk". Econometrica 47: 313–327. 
• Professor Paul Bloom, Yale University 2008, Yale Open Course, Introduction to Psychology, Lecture 10 Transcript

Interviews with Kahneman[link]

• 'Can We Trust Our Intuitions?' in Alex Voorhoeve Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-921537-9 (Discusses Kahneman's views about the reliability of moral intuitions [case judgments] and the relevance of his work for the search for 'reflective equilibrium' in moral philosophy.)

Radio Interviews

• All in the Mind, ABC, Australia (2003)
• All in the Mind, BBC, Great Britain (2011)

On-line Interviews

• Thinking about Thinking - An Interview with Daniel Kahneman (2011) [1]

See also[link]

Psychology portal

• List of economists
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• Optimism bias
• Planning fallacy
• Amos Tversky

References[link]

External links[link]

• Daniel Kahneman official website
  • Daniel Kahneman CV
• Maps of Bounded Rationality 2002 lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
• Works by or about Daniel Kahneman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Lecture on "The riddle of experience vs. memory" at TED, February 2010
• Teller exploits fast thinking
• Talcott Parsons Prize Ceremony and Address: Two Systems of the Mind

"Lakoff" and "Professor Lakoff" redirect here. For the sociolinguist, see Robin Lakoff.

George Lakoff
Professor George Lakoff
Born	(1941-05-24) May 24, 1941 (age 71) Bayonne, New Jersey
Residence	Berkeley, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Cognitive linguistics Cognitive science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Indiana University MIT
Known for	Conceptual metaphor theory Embodied cognition
Spouse	Robin Lakoff (divorced)
Website
georgelakoff.com

George P. Lakoff ( /ˈleɪkɒf/, born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind", which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. He was the founder of the now defunct progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute.^[1][2]

Reappraisal of metaphor[link]

Lakoff began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. In an interview he stated:

During that period, I was attempting to unify Chomsky's transformational grammar with formal logic. I had helped work out a lot of the early details of Chomsky's theory of grammar. Noam claimed then — and still does, so far as I can tell — that syntax is independent of meaning, context, background knowledge, memory, cognitive processing, communicative intent, and every aspect of the body...In working through the details of his early theory, I found quite a few cases where semantics, context, and other such factors entered into rules governing the syntactic occurrences of phrases and morphemes. I came up with the beginnings of an alternative theory in 1963 and, along with wonderful collaborators like "Haj" Ross and Jim McCawley, developed it through the sixties.^[3]

Lakoff's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who has given examples from within his work where he talks about the relationship between his semantics and syntax. Chomsky goes further and claims that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing" (the work in question being Chomsky's).^[4] His differences with Chomsky contributed to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".

Lakoff's original thesis on conceptual metaphor was expressed in his book with Mark Johnson entitled Metaphors We Live By in 1980.

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction, and indeed are central to the development of thought. He says, "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Non-metaphorical thought is for Lakoff only possible when we talk about purely physical reality. For Lakoff the greater the level of abstraction the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons. One reason is that some metaphors become 'dead' and we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".

For instance, in intellectual debate the underlying metaphor is usually that argument is war (later revised as "argument is struggle"):

• He won the argument.
• Your claims are indefensible.
• He shot down all my arguments.
• His criticisms were right on target.
• If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.

For Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. The application of one domain of knowledge to another domain of knowledge offers new perceptions and understandings.

Lakoff's theory has applications throughout all academic disciplines and much of human social interaction. Lakoff has explored some of the implications of the embodied mind thesis in a number of books, most written with coauthors.

Embodied mind[link]

When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details".

Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment. First, using evidence^[which?] from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also qualia), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.

Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor.)

Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.

"We are neural beings," Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."^[5]

Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?

Many scientists share the belief that there are problems with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method of empirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says, in "The Embodied Mind", that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.

Lakoff is, with coauthors Mark Johnson and Rafael E. Núñez, one of the primary proponents of the embodied mind thesis. Lakoff discussed these themes in his 2001 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, published as The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding.^[6] Others who have written about the embodied mind include philosopher Andy Clark (See his Being There), philosopher and neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and his student Evan Thompson (See Varela, Thompson & Rosch's "The Embodied Mind"), roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, Rolf Pfeifer and Tom Ziemke, the physicist David Bohm (see his Thought As A System), Ray Gibbs (see his "Embodiment and Cognitive Science"), John Grinder and Richard Bandler in their neuro-linguistic programming, and Julian Jaynes. All of these writers can be traced back to earlier philosophical writings, most notably in the phenomenological tradition, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. The basic thesis of "embodied mind" is also traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition, notably John Dewey in such works as Art As Experience.

Mathematics[link]

According to Lakoff, even mathematics is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus "any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is." By this, he is saying that there is nothing outside of the thought structures we derive from our embodied minds that we can use to "prove" that mathematics is somehow beyond biology. Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than "meat".

Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors. (Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings.) Their book has yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics, although the book can be read as making strong claims about how that philosophy should proceed. The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.

Lakoff has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe. Early in 2001 Lakoff told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell." This is because the structures of scientific knowledge are not "out there" but rather in our brains, based on the details of our anatomy. Therefore, we cannot "tell" that mathematics is "out there" without relying on conceptual metaphors rooted in our biology. This claim bothers those who believe that there really is a way we could "tell". The falsifiability of this claim is perhaps the central problem in the cognitive science of mathematics, a field that attempts to establish a foundation ontology based on the human cognitive and scientific process.

Political significance and involvement[link]

Lakoff's application of cognitive linguistics to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led him into territory normally considered basic to political science.

Lakoff has publicly expressed both ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process, and some of his particular political views. He almost always discusses the latter in terms of the former.

Moral Politics (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.^[2]

Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through metaphors of the family. Conservatives would subscribe more strongly and more often to a model that he calls the "strict father model" and has a family structured around a strong, dominant "father" (government), and assumes that the "children" (citizens) need to be disciplined to be made into responsible "adults" (morality, self-financing). Once the "children" are "adults", though, the "father" should not interfere with their lives: the government should stay out of the business of those in society who have proved their responsibility. In contrast, Lakoff argues that liberals place more support in a model of the family, which he calls the "nurturant parent model", based on "nurturant values", where both "mothers" and "fathers" work to keep the essentially good "children" away from "corrupting influences" (pollution, social injustice, poverty, etc.). Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other.^[7]

Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor. Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms like partial birth abortion and tax relief because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. Tax relief for example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something someone would want "relief" from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it. Liberals must support linguistic think tanks in the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.^[8]

Lakoff has distributed some much briefer political analyses via the Internet. One article distributed this way is "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf", in which Lakoff argues that the particular conceptual metaphors used by the first Bush administration to justify American involvement in the Gulf ended up either obscuring reality, or putting a spin on the facts that was accommodating to the administration's case for military action.

Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in Moral Politics. Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message from Moral Politics. In 2008, Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.

One of his political works, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Disagreement with Steven Pinker[link]

In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review ^[9] of Lakoff's book Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea. Pinker's review was published in The New Republic. Pinker argued that Lakoff's propositions are unsupported and his prescriptions a recipe for electoral failure. He wrote that Lakoff was condescending and deplored Lakoff's "shameless caricaturing of beliefs" and his "faith in the power of euphemism". Pinker portrayed Lakoff's arguments as "cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality". Lakoff wrote a rebuttal to the review ^[10] stating that his position on many matters is the exact reverse of what Pinker attributes to him. Lakoff explicitly rejected, for example, the cognitive relativism and faith in euphemism described above, arguing in favor of a deeper understanding of rationality that discards the modal logic conceptualization of rational thought in favor of the better supported frame interpretation.^[10]

Works[link]

• 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.
• 1989 with Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46812-9.
• 1996. Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46805-1.
  • 2001 Edition. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46771-9.
• 1999 (with Mark Johnson). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
• 2000 (with Rafael Núñez). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2.
• 2003 (1980) with Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. 2003 edition contains an 'Afterword'. ISBN 978-0-226-46800-6.
• 2004. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1-931498-71-5.
• 2005, "A Cognitive Scientist Looks at Daubert", American Journal of Public Health. 95, no. 1: S114.
• 2006. Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15828-6.
• 2008. The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. Viking Adult. ISBN 978-0-670-01927-4.

Videos[link]

• How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff DVD format. OCLC 315514475
• C-Span program online, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain

See also[link]

• Code word (figure of speech)
• Cognitive linguistics
• Cognitive science of mathematics
• Conceptual metaphor
• Embodied philosophy
• Framing (social sciences)
• Invariance principle
• Language and thought
• Metaphor
• Metonymy

References[link]

1. ^ "George Lakoff". Rockridge Institute. http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff. Retrieved 2007-06-13. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
3. ^ John Brockman (03/09/99), Edge.org, "Philosophy In The Flesh" A Talk With George Lakoff [1]
4. ^ The New York Review of Books, Chomsky Replies, 1973 20;12
5. ^ http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html
6. ^ ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003. Summary at giffordlectures.org by Brannon Hancock.
7. ^ Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 143–176. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
8. ^ Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 415–418. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
9. ^ "Block that Metaphor!", New Republic.
10. ^ ^{a b} "When cognitive science enters politics", rockridgeinstitute.org, 12 October 2006.

Further reading[link]

• Harris, Randy Allen (1995). The Linguistics Wars. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X. (Focuses on the disputes Lakoff and others have had with Chomsky.)
• Haser, Verena (2005). Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Topics in English Linguistics), Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018283-5 (A critical look at the ideas behind embodiment and conceptual metaphor.)
• Kelleher, William J. (2005). Progressive Logic: Framing A Unified Field Theory of Values For Progressives. La CaCañada Flintridge, CA: The Empathic Science Institute. ISBN 0-9773717-1-9.
• McGlone, M. S. (2001). "Concepts as Metaphors" in Sam Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford Psychology Series 36. Oxford University Press, 90–107. ISBN 0-19-511109-5.
• O'Reilly, Bill (2006). Culture Warrior. New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-2092-9. (Calls Lakoff the guiding philosopher behind the "secular progressive movement".)
• Renkema, Jan (2004). Introduction to Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1-58811-529-1.
• Rettig, Hillary (2006). The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 1-59056-090-6. (Documents strong parallels between Lakoff's nurturant parent model of progressive thought and psychologist Abraham Maslow's model of the self-actualized individual. Also discusses framing in the context of marketing and sales with the aim of bolstering progressive activists' persuasive skills.)
• Richardt, Susanne (2005). Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine and Computing. European University Studies: Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 413. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-7381-2.
• Soros, George (2006). The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror. ISBN 1-58648-359-5. (discusses Lakoff in regard to the application of his theories on the work of Frank Luntz and with respect to his own theory about perception and reality)
• Winter, Steven L. (2003). A Clearing in the Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-90222-6. (Applies Lakoff's work in cognitive science and metaphor to the field of law and legal reasoning.)
• Dean, John W. (2006), Conservatives without Conscience, Viking Penguin ISBN 0-670-03774-5.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Lakoff

• georgelakoff.com
• University of California, Berkeley department of Linguistics page on George Lakoff
• Edge bio of Lakoff
• "Metaphor and War" (1991)
• "Metaphor and War, Again" (2003)
• "Thinking of Jackasses: the grand delusions of the Democratic Party", a critical review by Marc Cooper in Atlantic Monthly
• "The Extended Mind" Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• "Empathy is the New Black" Radio interview with Dr. George Lakoff on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini an Freddie O'Connell
• "The Political Mind" a talk by George Lakoff recorded June 28, 2008 in Sacramento, CA
• George Lakoff Proposes Ballot Measure to End 2/3 Rule in State Legislature - video report by Democracy Now!
• Biography and summary of Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, 2001) by Brannon Hancock

Gerd Gigerenzer (born September 3, 1947, Wallersdorf) is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making, especially in medicine. A critic of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, he argues that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability calculus.^[1]

With Daniel Goldstein he first theorized the recognition heuristic.

He has written several books on the subject of heuristics and decision making, including Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (1999), and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (2001) with Reinhard Selten. His two books for a lay audience, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (2002, published in the U.S. as Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You), and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007), have been translated into 18 languages. "Rationality for Mortals", his most recent book, investigates decisions under limited time and information. He has trained U.S. Federal Judges, German physicians, and top managers in decision making and understanding risks and uncertainties.

Gigerenzer is currently director at Max Planck Institute for Human Development and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. He is also the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Berlin, Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia, and Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He is married to Lorraine Daston, director at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and has one daughter, Thalia Gigerenzer.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Resume
• Books
• Edge.org bio
• Article: Simple tools for understanding risks: from innumeracy to insight
• Harding Center for Risk Literacy
• Gerd Gigerenzer in the German National Library catalogue (German)

George Will
George Will attending a Nationals-Cardinals baseball game, Labor Day 2006
Born	George Frederick Will (1941-05-04) May 4, 1941 (age 71) Champaign, Illinois, U.S.
Residence	Washington, D.C.
Citizenship	USA
Education	Trinity College (B.A., 1962)[1] University of Oxford  (B.A., M.A. (Oxon) Princeton University  (M.A., PhD (1968)
Alma mater	Trinity College
Occupation	Columnist, journalist, author
Employer	ABC News, Newsweek, Washington Post
Spouse	Madeleine Will (divorced 1989); Mari Maseng (current)
Children	Victoria, Geoffrey, and Jonathan (first marriage); David (second marriage)
Parents	Frederick L. Will and Louise Hendrickson Will

George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics. By the mid 1980s the Wall Street Journal reported he was "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1975).^[2]

Education and early career[link]

Will was born in Champaign, Illinois, the son of Frederick L. Will and Louise Hendrickson Will.^[3] His father was a professor of philosophy, specializing in epistemology, at the University of Illinois.

Will graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A., Religion, 1962).^[1] He subsequently studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (B.A., M.A.), and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society.

From 1970 to 1972, he served on the staff of Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO). Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998.

Career in journalism[link]

Will served as an editor for National Review from 1972 to 1978. He joined the Washington Post Writers Group in 1974, writing a syndicated twice-weekly column, which became widely circulated among newspapers across the country. In 1976, he became a contributing editor for Newsweek, writing a biweekly backpage column. As of 2011, Will still writes both columns.

Will was widely praised by liberals for condemning the corruption of the Nixon presidency. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "distinguished commentary on a variety of topics" in 1977. Often combining factual reporting with conservative commentary, Will's columns are known for their erudite vocabulary, allusions to political philosophers, and frequent references to baseball.^[4]

Will has also written two best-selling books on the game of baseball, three books on political philosophy, and has published eleven compilations of his columns for the Washington Post and Newsweek and of various book reviews and lectures.

His column is syndicated to 450 newspapers.^[5]

Will is also a news analyst for ABC since the early 1980s and was a founding member on the panel of ABC's This Week with David Brinkley in 1981, now titled This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Will was also a regular panelist on television's Agronsky & Company from 1977 through 1984 and on NBC's Meet the Press in the middle and late 1970s.

Political views[link]

Foreign policy and national security[link]

Will has proposed that the United States withdraw all troops from Afghanistan^[6] and defended Barack Obama's response to the uprisings after the 2009 elections in Iran.^[7] He also criticized the Bush administration for engaging in warrantless surveillance^[8] and supported trials for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. On immigration, Will supports tighter border security and a "path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants.^[9]

Social issues[link]

Will has argued that the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision caused a "truncation of democratic debate about abortion policy".^[10] On crime, Will is opposed to the death penalty,^[11] but thinks that higher incarceration rates make the populace safer.^[12] Additionally, Will is generally skeptical of affirmative action programs.^[13] Will also supports drug prohibition, but believes that treatment is a more effective means of preventing the sale and use of drugs than law enforcement.^[14]

Economic issues[link]

Will supports low taxes, as he thinks that they stimulate economic growth and are more morally fair.^[15] He was also opposed to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama's stimulus plans.^[16] Other positions of Will's include supporting the abolishment of the minimum wage,^[17] and the creation of voluntary personal retirement accounts to help the government save money on Social Security.^[18]

Criticism of Republican politicians[link]

Despite his identification with conservative politics Will has been willing to criticize fellow Republicans.

Will opposed President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court and was among the first to do so.

Even though Will had been hawkish in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he eventually expressed reservations about Bush administration Iraq policies, eventually openly criticizing what he perceived to be an unrealistically optimistic set of political scenarios. In March 2006, in a column written in the aftermath of the apparently sectarian bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Baghdad, Will challenged the Bush administration—and U.S. government representatives in Iraq—to be more honest about the difficulties the United States faced in rebuilding and maintaining order within Iraq, comparing the White House's rhetoric unfavorably to that of Winston Churchill during the early years of World War II. The optimistic assessments delivered by the Bush administration were described by Will as the "rhetoric of unreality."^[19] He criticized the Bush Iraq policy, and broader White House and congressional foreign and domestic policy making, in his keynote address for the Cato Institute's 2006 Milton Friedman Prize dinner.^[20]

Will was also a harsh and early critic of both Sarah Palin and John McCain's 2008 election campaign. He criticized Palin's understanding of the role of the Vice President and her qualifications for that role.^[21]

In late 2011 as the 2012 Republican Party presidential primaries approached Will became known as one of front runner Newt Gingrich's harshest critics.^[22]

Controversy[link]

1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign[link]

Will's detractors complain about instances when Will has blurred the line between independent journalist and political advocate. Will helped Ronald Reagan prepare for his 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter. Immediately after the debate, Will—not yet a member of the ABC News staff—appeared on ABC's Nightline. He was introduced by host Ted Koppel, who said "It's my understanding that you met for some time yesterday with Governor Reagan," and that Will "never made any secret of his affection" for the Republican candidate. Will did not explicitly disclose that he had assisted Reagan's debate preparation, or been present during it. He went on to praise Reagan, saying his "game plan worked well. I don't think he was very surprised."^[23]

In 2004 and again in 2005, Carter accused Will of giving the Reagan campaign a top-secret briefing book stolen from Carter's office before the 1980 debate.^[24] In a 2005 syndicated column, Will called his role in Reagan's debate preparation "inappropriate" but denied any role in stealing the briefing book.^[25] In response to Will's column, Carter wrote a letter to the Washington Post retracting his accusations. Carter apologized to Will for "any incorrect statement that I have ever made about his role in the use of my briefing book.... I have never thought Mr. Will took my book, that the outcome of the debate was damaging to my campaign or that Mr. Will apologized to me."^[26]

2003 Association with Conrad Black[link]

Will was criticized for his dealings with Canadian-born British financier Conrad Black.^[27] Will served on an informal board of advisors to Hollinger International, a newspaper company controlled by Black. The board met once a year and Will received an annual payment of $25,000. The board was disbanded in 2001. In March 2003, Will wrote a syndicated column which praised a speech by Black and did not disclose their previous business relationship.^[28]

2008 Offshore drilling by China[link]

In a Washington Post column on June 5, 2008, Will stated that "Drilling is underway 60 miles (97 km) off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are". This statement was incorrect. It was later quoted and subsequently withdrawn by Dick Cheney after Congressional Democrats, backed by energy experts, pointed out the error. House Leader John Boehner also cited the incorrect statement: "Right at this moment some 60 miles (97 km) or less off the coast of Key West, Fla., China has the green light to drill for oil."^[29][30][31]

In a June 17, 2008 column, George Will issued a correction: "In a previous column, I stated that China, in partnership with Cuba, is drilling for oil 60 miles (97 km) from the Florida coast. While Cuba has partnered with Chinese companies to drill in the Florida Straits, no Chinese company has been involved in Cuba's oil exploration that close to the United States."

2009 Global Sea Ice Level[link]

In a Washington Post column which expressed doubt over the effects of global warming, Will stated that: "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."^[32] This and several other claims attracted the attention of environmentalists, such as British author and activist George Monbiot.^[33] Asked to respond, the website of Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois states that: "We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979."^[34] Will responded in a column that he accurately reported the Center's information and the challenge was mistaken.^[35] This drew a second response from George Monbiot, who insisted Will had not accurately reported the Center's information.^[36] The debate continued in several forums, including a subsequent op-ed by Chris Mooney published in The Washington Post challenging Will's assertions.^[37]

Personal[link]

Family[link]

Will has three children—Victoria, Geoffrey, and Jonathan—with his first wife, Madeleine;^[38] Jon was born in 1972 with Down syndrome, which Will has written about in his column on occasion.^[39][40][41]In 1989, he was divorced from Madeleine after 22 years of marriage.^[42]

In 1991, Will married Mari Maseng. They have one child, a son named David, born in 1992, and live in the Washington D.C. area. Maseng is a political consultant and speechwriter who was in charge of communications for the Rick Perry 2012 presidential campaign. She earlier worked on Michele Bachmann's 2012 presidential campaign, and offered her services to the Mitt Romney 2012 campaign.^[43][44] She previously worked for Reagan as a presidential speechwriter, deputy director of transportation, and Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. She also was a former communications director for Robert Dole.

Interests[link]

Will is a fan of baseball, and has written extensively on the game, including his best-selling book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. He was one of many interview subjects for Baseball, Ken Burns's PBS documentary series. He serves as a member of Major League Baseball's special committee on on-field matters. He is a Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears fan.^[45][46]

Will revealed in a Colbert Report interview that he is an agnostic.^[47]

Awards[link]

In addition to more than 16 honorary degrees:

• 1977 – Pulitzer Prize for Commentary
• 1978 – Headliner Award for consistently outstanding feature columns
• 1979 – Finalist for National Magazine Award in essays and criticism
• 1980 – Silurian Award for editorial writing
• 1991 – Silurian Award for editorial writing
• 1991 – First Place in Interpretive Columns: Clarion Awards from Women in Communications
• 1991 – Cronkite Award, Arizona State University
• 1992 – Madison Medal Award, Princeton University
• 1993 – William Allen White Award, William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas
• 2003 – Walter B. Wriston Lecture Award, The Manhattan Institute
• 2005 – Bradley Prize, The Bradley Foundation (http://www.bradleyfdn.org/cm-prizes.asp?ID=2005BradleyPrizeWinners)
• 2006 – Champion of Liberty Award, Goldwater Institute (http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_can_we_make_iraq.html)

Works[link]

• The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts. Harper & Row, 1978.
• The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions. Simon & Schuster, 1982.
• Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. Simon & Schuster, 1983.
• The Morning After: American Success and Excesses, 1981–1986. Free Press, 1986.
• The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
• Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. Macmillan, 1990.
• Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home. Free Press, 1990.
• Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy. 1992.
• The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture and Other News, 1990–1994. Viking, 1994.
• The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric: 1994–1997. Scribner, 1997.
• Bunts: Pete Rose, Curt Flood, Camden Yards and Other Reflections on Baseball. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
• With a Happy Eye But...: America and the World, 1997–2002. Free Press, 2002.
• One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation. Crown Publishing Group, 2008.

See also[link]

• Conservatism in the United States

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Alterman, Eric. Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (1999) pp 87–105 online edition
• Hoeveler, Jr. J. David Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (1991), chapter on Will.
• Solomon, Norman (March 8, 2001). "Triumph of (George) Will: When Media Might Makes Right". Media Beat. http://www.fair.org/media-beat/010308.html. 
• Will, George F. (August 10, 2005). "Briefing Book Baloney". Washington Post: p. A23. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081001796.html.  (Will's column rebutting briefing book allegation)
• President Jimmy Carter. Interview with Terry Gross (October 21, 2004). "President Carter Tries Hand at Fiction". Fresh Air. WHYY. http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=10-21-2004&view=storyview. (Carter alleges Will's role in briefing book theft, about 28:30 into the interview)
• "George F. Will Biography". Washington Post. February 24, 1998. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/opinions/will.htm. Retrieved August 31, 2008. 
• "George F. Will Biography". The Washington Post. 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/biographies/george-f-will.html. Retrieved August 31, 2008. 
• "George F. Will – Contributing Editor and Columnist". Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/id/33194. Retrieved August 31, 2008. ^{[dead link]}
• Carter Letter

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: George Will

• Column archives at The Daily Beast
• Column archives at Newsweek
• Column archives at The Washington Post
• Column archives at Jewish World Review, October 1999 to August 2006
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Will on Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, October 18, 1992.
  • In Depth interview with Will, November 3, 2002
• Works by or about George Will in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• George Will collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• George Will at the Notable Names Database
• Profile at the Washington Post Writers Group