Apparently my use of the phrase "pseudo-rational explanations" has irked and upset one of my players. As Inego Montoya says to Vizzini, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I first started using the phrase when I was writing the Multiverser rules. It addresses a problem inherent in fantasy and science fiction. That problem is that explanations and solutions have to "make sense", but they are nearly always based on indefensible premises.
For example, our maxim for magic states that "magic is controlled by the expectations of the user". This means that anyone performing a magic ritual who does not believe in magic will not get the magical result; he will get his own expected result, which is that nothing will happen. It also means that it makes sense that the more a spell caster does to focus his own mind on his own expectations, the stronger his chance of success at magic will be. Thus ritual is critical to magic.
All of that makes perfect sense--except the part where magic is controlled by the expectations of the user. That part we made up out of whole cloth. We made it up because it feels rational and gives us most of the results we want--it makes ritual important, it puts all magic-users on a level playing field, it allows any kind of ritual elements to have significance within the game world, and it makes it clear why you have to believe in magic to use magic. But there are a lot of people on this board who can tell you that the premise is faulty. There are plenty of fictional scenarios where someone who did not believe in magic "accidentally" triggered it. Multiverser has to use some pretty fancy work-arounds to make such stories possible.
Thus the way magic works in Multiverser is a "pseudo-rational" explanation. It is logically consistent given acceptance of a completely indefensible premise.
There are a lot of other examples of this in Multiverser. Most of the high-tech stuff is built on pseudo-rational explanations--using sub-universe generation to exceed light speed, relying on quantum non-locality for instantaneous interstellar communications, bending space, creating wormholes, traveling through hyperspace. A lot of the detail in magic works this way, such as gates through the border supernatural to other universes. You'll find it in psionics--psionic devices function because their molecules are aligned in a psionically-sensitive or active array similar in principle to the way molecules are aligned in magnets. Even some of the high-bias bod skills, like non-corporeality and actual morphing and body linking symbionts. All it means is that certain premises which are completely indefensible have to be accepted in order for certain ideas logically to work in play, and so everything is rational except those premises.
It does not mean, as someone seems to think, that I'm blowing smoke in your face, trying to get you to accept something as so that isn't really logical. It means that it is really logical given that we accept the basic premises of the game world. These things are possible because these assumptions are made, and if we make these assumptions these are the logical conclusions from it. It does not mean that those things would therefore be possible in the real world, only that we've accepted them as possible and offered a logical explanation for why they work.
--M. J. Young
