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rationality

UK/ˌraʃəˈnalɪti/US/ˌraʃəˈnalɪti/
nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,920 of 15,258leans written

Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason. Bounded rationality, question his rationality, the rationality of the decision.

Economics assumed perfect rationality for a century and has spent the last fifty years discovering that people do not have it. Bounded rationality is the corrected idea: people reason as well as their time and information allow.

Definitions of rationality

  1. 1nounrationalityThe quality of being guided by reason.C1

    “In the heat of the argument, all rationality went out of the window.”

rationality is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin rationalitas comes from ratio, reason or reckoning.

  1. Latin

    rationalitas — rationality, reasonableness

  2. French

    rationalité

  3. English, today

    rationality

From rational + ity, from French rationalité, from Latin rationalitas (“rationality, reasonableness”), from Latin rationalis (“reasonable”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

rationality in the wild

  • There are many discussions about the essential features shared by all forms, or accounts, of rationality.

    Rationality

  • An important rival to this approach are coherence-based accounts, which define rationality as internal coherence among the agent's mental states.

    Rationality

  • Communicative rationality or communicative reason is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication.

    Communicative rationality

  • According to the theory of communicative rationality, the potential for certain kinds of reason is inherent in communication itself.

    Communicative rationality

  • Audi has expanded his theory of justification to non-doxastic states, e.g. desires and intentions, by developing a comprehensive account of rationality.

    Robert Audi

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.