Abstract
A variant of the concept of rtionality, called emergent rationality, is presented adopting and extending the notion of emergence as it appears in recent literature. There are various cases of seemingly rational behavior, both in nature and in the social sphere, where the attribute 'rational' cannot be so easily dismissed as nothing but a superficial anthropomorphism.
Emergent rationality is conceived as a phenomenon based on the interaction of two or more different causal domains, in one of which a nontrivial selection process is realized that, in another domain, yields some sort of effectively 'rational' behavior.
