In a broad sense one may say that the sources of reason and rationality in any civilization are to be found in its religion, philosophy, and law. These spheres of discourse and inquiry, before the emergence of autonomous science, interact to produce various amalgams of rational discourse based on the idioms, metaphors, and vocabulary of their domains. In some civilizations, such as classical Greece, philosophy was undoubtedly the queen of intellectual life. This has prompted many observers to note that wherever Greek thought prevailed it shaped images of man and his capacities in the most rational of directions, and this influence has been felt even down to the present day.

The strictly religious sources of rationality, however, as Max Weber so acutely saw, are scarcely to be overlooked. For once images of the proper aims of the religious life have been conjured up, they establish, to use Clifford Geertz's formulation, “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” In the Western world these religious images created an unprecedented faith in reason and the rational ordering of the natural world. This rationalist metaphysic has continued to undergird the scientific worldview ever since the Greeks.

In addition to the strictly religious order of things, one needs to consider the legal conceptions that in many ways have become the operative mechanisms whereby the more narrowly religious moods and motivations have become ensconced in an institutional order. For it would be unduly restrictive to overlook the independent influence that legal canons and methods of procedures, indeed, the legal mind, have had on the construction of authoritative modes of reason and rationality in the daily practice of dispute resolution.

Historians of science, on the other hand, have sought more narrowly to find the sources of scientific rationality in the arts and crafts, that is, in the prevailing technology of artisanry. Even Max Weber took this path at various points in his thinking. Weber insisted that it was from the Renaissance arts that “the method of experiment” arose.