Rationality. A Global Survey

This study surveys how people across historical periods and linguistic-cultural traditions have described and practiced rational judgment and action. It follows the genealogy of reason and rationality from Greek and Latin traditions while comparing East Asian, South Asian, Islamic, African, Central Asian, Southeast Asian, Oceanic, and Indigenous American materials. The inquiry tracks terms, translations, usages, objects of judgment, criteria, and the activities through which judgment is carried out. The comparison suggests that rationality becomes more intelligible when perception, search, comparison, generation, evaluation, selection, action, observation, revision, and regulation are examined together. People do more than choose among given alternatives: they discover questions, generate alternatives and hypotheses, devise classifications and representations, and revise problems and criteria. These activities may be distributed across persons, groups, institutions, artifacts, and human-technology systems. The article reconstructs the survey process, presents its provisional synthesis, and identifies areas requiring further verificatio