What is "rationalize"

Usage examples of "rationalize".

I contemplated food phobias, the more I became convinced that people who habitually avoid certifiably delicious foods are at least as troubled as people who avoid sex, or take no pleasure from it, except that the latter will probably seek psychiatric help, while food phobics rationalize their problem in the name of genetic inheritance, allergy, vegetarianism, matters of taste, nutrition, food safety, obesity, or a sensitive nature.

The remainder, the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bounding lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi.

So, they procrastinate by finding something fun to do and, then, rationalize their behavior.

Seeing, then, that even sense impressions not only can but must be rationalized in irreconcilably different ways, according to the class of object with which they are supposed to be connected, we need not be troubled or surprised by the contradictions which we find in the rationalization of less uniform psychological experiences.

Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automatonor equally, an animal.

American imperialism was not a rationalized, planned effort, but a fortuitous agglomeration resulting from an imperialistic instinct at work against weak opposition, and with a background of luck.

In relation to these predestined victims sadistic behavior was right and proper, so much so that it could be publicly avowed and rationalized in terms of current scientific theories.

With copious energy and with better population control, standards of living rose, the food supply improved, the distribution of resources was rationalized and, in general, an era of prosperity and contentment was in bloom.

And it would be no more accurate to imagine that general grammar became philology, natural history biology, and the analysis of wealth political economy, because all these modes of knowledge corrected their methods, came closer to their objects, rationalized their concepts, selected better models of formalization - in short, because they freed themselves from their prehistories through a sort of auto-analysis achieved by reason itself.

Industry, which had wiped out its debts in the inflation, borrowed billions to retool and to rationalize its productive processes.

Someone would eventually open this box, some investigator would eventually cotton to the knowledge that it existed and get some court order and scour it for clues, and so I rationalized that the initial scourer might as well be me.

And no one can doubt that the transcultural nature of the experiments -- the tendency to globalize and rationalize human interaction without a proper foundation within the depths of the human being, without a true meeting of persons across the superficially breached cultural barriers -- has contributed to the massive regional disasters that have afflicted former colonies in recent decades.

Future History to him, the author gets slowly potted while silently trying-and failing-to come up with a story idea that would rationalize all the unexamined and often mutually contradictory assumptions behind that future history.

You could, often should, hate humans, Stauffer rationalized, but Woos, after all, are only animals.

Other regional shopping centers also rationalized and romanticized shopping, making the experience easy, efficient, comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing.