Rationality and Relevance Realization

Under radical uncertainty, relevance realization, which continuously solves the frame problem by deciding what to zero in on while intelligently ignoring what does not matter, is both the integration of the debate between axiomatic and ecological rationality and is central to the question of bounded rationality. The interdisciplinary rationality question seeks to understand optimal judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, with Herbert Simon’s scissors analogy highlighting how both internal cognitive constraints and the environment limit bounded rationality. Ecological rationality and the axiomatic approach differ in their statistical foundations, each emphasizing different errors of generalization in the bias-variance dilemma: the speed-accuracy and efficiency-robustness trade-offs. Relevance realization solves the frame problem and reconciles the conflict between the statistical requirements of the axiomatic and ecological traditions through the ongoing creation of well-posed small world idealizations—the enactivist "middle way" between realism and idealism. Relevance realization brings forth what is significant through opponent processing of multiple trade-offs amid the ill-posed and radical uncertainty of the natural world. This understanding is analogous to the problem of meaning in AI and relocates the importance of probability theory and the axioms of rationality into a sociocultural tool for insight in small worlds. Enactive and embodied rationality, the pragmatic turn in cognitive science, and precision-weighting in predictive processing further assert the validity of this non-propositional perspective on bounded cognition and rationality.