Rationality Requires Meaning: How Agents Construct Relevant Worlds

A powerful reframing of rationality emerges once the "View from Nowhere" is abandoned. Information is always perspectival and relational: an agent embedded in an open-ended environment cannot separate questions of truth from questions of relevance, because the very act of selecting which information to seek already encodes a value judgment. The two classical pillars of rationality — epistemic (what is true?) and practical (what should I do?) — collapse into a unified question: what information is meaningful to this agent, in this context, for this purpose? Meaning, on this account, is not an affective overlay on cognition but its constitutive structure.

The concept of "generative rationality" captures this shift. Rather than treating value and significance as objective properties waiting to be discovered, generative rationality holds that they are actively brought forth through an agent's history, knowledge, and first-person situatedness. The Sherlock Holmes case — where the meaningful datum was the dog that did not bark — illustrates the point precisely: no stimulus-response architecture can account for the detection of a salient absence. The agent must construct an interpretive frame within which the absence becomes informative. This is the process of "realizing relevance," converting an intractable open world into a tractable small world that is not pregiven but enacted.

The implications extend across domains. The efficient market hypothesis presumes that opportunities are equally visible to all rational agents, but generative rationality reveals that what counts as an opportunity depends on the meaning-making capacity of the observer. Entrepreneurial discovery, scientific insight, and ethical perception all exhibit this structure: different agents, differently situated, will perceive genuinely different possibility spaces.