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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong
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Denotatively: in your two hypothetical worlds, one of the statements may be false but all three are presenting essentially the same information, which is "I think the sky is blue". You're unlikely to say "I think the sky is blue but the sky is green", or "it is rational to believe the sky is blue but I think the sky is green".
Connotatively: I do think there's a connotative difference between the statements. "I think the sky is blue" assigns less probability to a blue sky than "the sky is blue" does; and "it is rational to believe X" could mean something like "I ought to disbelieve in ghosts, but I'll still run screaming from a supposedly-haunted building", or "it is rational (for children) to believe in God (because they don't have any other explanation for religion)", or "the current best hypothesis is that the Higgs boson exists, but we've got an LHC to run before we can collect actual data".
I shall concede that the sentence, "It's rational for X to believe Y, but really Z" can sometimes make sense - it says that you have different evidence from X. In most cases, though, this will underestimate the power of rationality and ask too little of X. (The last time I can remember saying anything like this was in a strictly fictional context, Chapter 20.)
Isn't that exactly the question we often ask juries to consider in, for example, liability lawsuits? "It was rational for the defendant to assume (or conclude under the circumstances) X, but in fact not-X, because of Y or because they got really unlucky, and therefore we find them not liable."
I will happily concede that juries do a poor job accounting for hindsight bias, and hold defendants to low standards of rationality, but it seems to me that the usual question is something like "even though not-X, was it rational to believe X?"
Whether "reasonable" and "rational" really mean the same thing in this case is open, but I submit that it is the same question as whether juries hold defendants to reasonable standards of rationality.