SERIES: Imaginable > possible > reasonable > rational(ism), logical > tautologic

SERIES: Imaginable > possible > reasonable > rational(ism), logical > tautological.

Very common in english, which is a very technical language (analytic), we tend to pick terms that convey higher authority (persuasive ability) than our arguments support.

So technically speaking most of the time we use ‘rational’ we mean reasonable, and when we use the term rational we mean argumentatively sound, and when we mean logical, we mean (very) internally consistent.

So technically speaking when we use ‘rational choice’ we mean ‘reasonable choice’. The problem is ‘rational choice’ is embedded in the literature. We really don’t have a term for between reasonable (we can understand it), reasonable given the actor’s unseen incentives and values, and rational meaning argumentatively sound.

Sometimes for clarity I’ll use reasonable vs rational choice, vs rational.