Three Paradigms of Rational Agency

Abstract

The development of a model is always at the service of a set of purposes or goals. These goals either help to guide us or compel us in making choices regarding the level of detail or complexity to be represented within the model. Economic models, for example, regularly ignore the particularities of actual individuals or governments or corporations in favor of representing the variety of economic agents in terms of sets of more-or-less easily represented behaviors governed by an idealized form of rationality. Weather forecasting models often deal with fairly large ‘packets’ of air uniformly assigning them characteristics such as temperature and humidity even though in actuality these conditions might vary widely. It follows rather straightforwardly from this observation that in order to make intelligent choices about what details to retain and what details to omit in a model we ought to have a more complete understanding of what we are trying to model than is given by or in the model alone.