A Conceptual History of the Emergence of Bounded Rationality

Abstract

That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra." -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass How to tell the history of the concept of "bounded rationality"? Historians have tended to understand concepts in two different ways In intellectual history, mentalistic or Platonist interpretations are prevalent, keeping to Arthur Lovejoy's (1936) precept of tracing concepts as implicit assumptions or mental habits through various disciplines and epochs. In this idealist form of conceptual history, particular expressions act as secondary manifestations of an underlying conceptual development. While this assumes an underlying continuity of intellectual history, a second strand of conceptual history, to which we will