The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon's
work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The
paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to
question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, which is accepted even by bounded
rationality theorists. We discuss three topics in succession: (1) rationally defensible cyclical choices, (2) therevealed preference theory of optimization, and (3) the infinite regress of optimization. We conclude that (1) and
(2) provide evidence only for the weak thesis that rationality does not imply optimization. But (3) is seen to
deliver a significant argument for the strong thesis that optimization does not imply rationality
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