> Greater predictive value, I suppose. If you
> know the frame that defines which variables are
> relevant and what their weights are in a particular
> situation, you have a better chance of predicting what
> conclusion an individual will reach. It is, of
> course, important to underscore that frames are
> institutionalized or "socially constructed" as
> sociologists would say, so you can predcit them by
> knowing the institutional setting in which the
> reasoning occurs.
You've misunderstood my question Woj. I wasn't asking why your idea of "rationality" is better than the neoclassical "rational choice" idea. I was asking what explanation your idea provides for theirs, i.e. how is their adoption of the idea "rational" in your sense? Keynes explains it as an expression of obsessional psychopathology, i.e. as significantly irrational in his sense.
It's not clear to me why the decision making procedures you describe are "rational". Among other things, they ignore the possibility that relations are "internal".
What connection does the idea have to Marx's in the the Eighteenth Brumaire?
Marx's idea of "rationality" derives from Hegel and includes the idea that "rationality" is only fully actualized at the "end" of history. The degree to which individuals are "rational" in stages of historical development prior to this is the product of their social relations (conceived, as in Whitehead, as "internal relations").
In the Brumaire, for instance, he represents the peasant supporters of Louis Bonaparte as significantly irrational. He claims Bonaparte was the "chosen of the peasantry," in particular of that French peasant whose circumstances were such that his self-consciousness "represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendee."
"Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851.
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self- sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
"Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants' belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: 'Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.' After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people. "But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of France, the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration and transportation of the peasants?
"Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants 'on account of demagogic agitation.'
"But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. — Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. — Ed.] " <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ ch07.htm>
Ted