Christopher Cherniak
Minimal agents
Minimal agents
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Cherniak's monograph *Minimal Rationality* states that perhaps the most fundamental psychological law is that humans are finite beings. Bounded\-resource models of the agent characterize human rationality as falling between nothing and perfection. The aperçu motivating the rationality critiques is conveyed by the realization that standard idealizations entail some deductive omniscience \- for instance, triviality of portions of the deductive sciences. Such ideal agent/logicians, if computational, would have to violate [Church's Theorem](/wiki/Church%27s_Theorem "Church's Theorem") on undecidability of first\-order logic. This insight in turn indicates that [NP\-completeness](/wiki/NP-completeness "NP-completeness") is of parallel interest: computational intractability of a cosmos\-consuming scale is a practical counterpart to traditional absolute uncomputability \- another layer of impossibility for the idealizations.
This is part of the philosophical significance of computational complexity.

This research program proceeds from a holistic rather than compartmentalized perspective, where in an inherent ambiguity philosophy and science are distinct but inextricably interconnected. For instance, the classical paradoxes of semantics (e.g., the [Liar Paradox](/wiki/Liar_Paradox "Liar Paradox")) and set theory (e.g., [Russell's Paradox](/wiki/Russell%27s_Paradox "Russell's Paradox")) can be reexamined not as inherently contradictory, but instead as signs of use of “quick and dirty heuristics” \- that is, speed\-reliability tradeoffs of correctness for feasibility. Three disparate fields thereby converge: (a) computational complexity theory, (b) empirical psychology of quick and dirty heuristics, (c) philosophical theory of bounded\-resource rationality. In this way, the [bounded rationality](/wiki/Bounded_rationality "Bounded rationality") models serve as a foundation of current “[behavioral economics](/wiki/Behavioral_economics "Behavioral economics")”.


What implications do the bounded rationality models have for policy-making?