racionalni

Racionalni is an adjective used in several South Slavic languages to denote what pertains to reason or logic. In Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Slovenian it agrees with gender and number, with masculine singular form racionalni, feminine racionalna, and neuter racionalno. The term is common in everyday language as well as in academic and technical discourse when describing reasoning, decision-making, or explanations guided by logic rather than emotion.

Etymology traces racionalni to the Latin rationalis, meaning “concerned with reason,” passing into Slavic languages through various intermediaries such as Old French rationnel and related routes. The form shows parallelism with the English word rational and with similar terms in other European languages.

In philosophy and science, racionalni appears in phrases like rational process, rational decision, and rational argumentation, referring to methods or conclusions grounded in evidence and logic. In mathematics and number theory, racionalni broj denotes a rational number, defined as any number that can be expressed as a ratio p/q of integers with q nonzero. This mathematical usage is common in educational texts and curricula in the relevant languages.

In ordinary and scholarly usage, the term is contrasted with irrational or non-rational concepts, describing ideas, behaviors, or quantities that do not adhere to rational criteria. The notion of racionalnost, or rationality, is a central topic across disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science, and ethics, where the emphasis is on reasoning and justificatory grounds.