Association for Rational Psychology

The Association for Rational Psychology seeks to foster research and communication on Rational Psychology, the branch of mathematics that aims to find the best concepts with which to characterize psychological organizations for agents. The Association distributes information about rational psychology, and maintains materials on rational psychology in the Archive for Rational Psychology.

Rational psychology is a part of mathematics, and is concerned with mathematical and conceptual analysis of psychological notions. It is not the study of rationality in the sense of economics and decision theory. The aim is instead to find the most apt ways of understanding all agents, whether rational or irrational. For more detail, see the manifesto ``What is Rational Psychology? Toward a modern mental philosophy''.

While the name Rational Psychology was used by William James and others in earlier times, mainly as a synonym for philosophical psychology before the advent of modern mathematical logic, Jon Doyle reintroduced the term in 1982 as the psychological correspondent of the field of Rational Mechanics, the field of Isaac Newton, Clifford Truesdell, and others, seeking to apply the perspective so successful in modern mechanics to the understanding of psychology and economics.