Rationality's image problem

Most of Rationality is given over to ideas from game theory and behavioural economics

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

Author: Steven Pinker

Publisher: Allen Lane Viking

Price: Rs 899

Pages: 412

For someone who so frequently and serenely proclaims that he’s right, Steven Pinker can get curiously defensive. In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Mr Pinker writes as if he’s part of an embattled minority, valiantly making the case that “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals” is so underappreciated these days that the reading public needs a new book (by Mr Pinker) “to lay out rational arguments for rationality itself.”

Mr Pinker doesn’t believe he has