This book is directed to the scholar that wants to learn, critically, how scientists conceive rationality, which is human decision-making. To understand how models of decisions are made in the present by economists, being those heavy on mathematics and statistics, how different ideologies affected the abstraction of choice needs to be explored. There are very detailed references here about philosophers, religious ideas, and a history of scientific methodology around the conception of individuals and their decisions. Most of the ideology we have today is rooted in previous religious discussions, where the purpose was to attach the individual to an institution. The lack of pragmatism on the individual’s conception, a short-sighted responsibility, and a myopic temporal framework is part of the heritage of the institutional style, and the period of the Enlightenment only enforced those same medieval ideals. The book then questions the traditional classifications of decisions, and offers a new taxonomy, making clear that most of the discussion is around the mathematization of science. It makes a tractable development of mathematics and statistics around the concept of rationality, and concludes that the very complex modelling only portrays a very narrow perspective of humans. It ends up reviewing the most common critiques to the neoclassical setting, arguing that those exercises only scratch the surface of the present concept of human decision we have today.
