Prof. Kevin Matthew Dorst

Kevin Dorst is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He works at the border between philosophy and social science, focusing on rationality.

How rational are people in general? How about your political opponents? How about yourself? Many popular and social-scientific answers to these questions are unflattering. Yet most people think and act as if they are exceptions.

Dorst's work tries to square this circle. The case for irrationalism is built on the empirical fact that people predictably deviate from classical theories of rationality. His work is built on the normative fact that such theories are elegant and useful—but wrong. He develops and deploys better models of rationality to help refine the interpretation of the empirical results, and square them with our own experiences of (ir)rationality.