This chapter explores the concept of rationality, examining the relationship between human beings and rationality through Brandom’s distinction between ‘sapients’ and ‘sentients’. Brandom treats rationality as a specifically human capacity. However, it is argued that if a non-human agent acquires sufficient discursive competence, it can also be regarded as a rational actor.Next, various senses of rationality are charted. On the one hand, rationality appears as inferential competence universally possessed by all genuinely discursive agents. On the other hand, it manifests as a variable form of social practice, shaped by material rather than formal features.The chapter concludes by proposing a conception of rationality as discursive rationality, composed of three core features: (1) a tight, dense, and explicit inferential structure; (2) a systematic coping mechanism with the non-linguistic world; and (3) openness to alternative inferential structures. This leads to a maxim for communal and discursive rationality: the more a community exhibits these three features, the more rational it is.

Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.