Meta-rationality: Outline

This is the Table of Contents for Part Four of my meta-rationality book. Part Four is the part that is actually about meta-rationality!

Parts One through Three are background that will be helpful, but maybe not absolutely necessary, for reading Part Four. You might want to start reading the book at the beginning, instead of here.

I am publishing draft sections of Part Four as newsletter posts. This page outlines the whole Part; the sections I’ve posted drafts of are underlined and linked.

• Prerequisites, review, and caveats

• Meta-rational practice: an overview

  • When to get meta-rational

  • Meta-rational norms

  • Penicillin: a case study

  • Meta-rational processes, operations, and methods

  • Opportunities for meta-rational improvement

  • Meta-rational maxims

  • Sorcery: fluid competence

• Making meta-rationality available

  • How meta-rationality is invisible

  • Why meta-rationality is invisible

  • Learning inscrutable sorcery

  • Rational reconstruction

  • Getting credit for meta-rational work

• Meta-rationality illustrated: software architecting

• Meta-rational epistemology

  • Meta-rational judgement

  • Knowledge and understanding

  • Varieties of truth

  • Coping, deciding, and transmuting

  • Aspects of meta-rational activity

• Locating a proto-Problem

• Getting an ontology and creating Problems

• Evaluating and selecting rational systems

• Combining multiple systems

• Creating rational systems

• Limiting rationality to its limits

• Engineering circumrational supports

• System maintenance

• Reflection on purposes

• Case study: reinventing copier repair

• Developing meta-rationality

• A research agenda

• Glossary