Cognition and Rationality: 
Prolegomenon to socio-cognitive studies of Science

Christophe Heintz
Institut Jean Nicod
http://christophe.heintz.free.fr 

1. Setting the empirical stakes

I believe that many of the academic disputes related to rationalism and relativism arose from the multiple meanings that are given to the words ‘rational’ and ‘rationalism’. Lately, the word ‘cognitive’ has known the same fate. Both ‘rational’ and ‘cognitive’ are either used to qualify the production of the human mind and the innate, biological organisation of the mind/brain or to qualify a restricted portion of this production: that which answers some specific criteria – the one set by Rationality. In the second case, normativity is coming in. When one argues against empiricism, ‘rationality` is taken in the first sense. One insists on the fact that the mind has got its own material and processes that allow us to think.  But often, when one takes part to the relativism/rationalism devate, the two above meanings of rational are undistinguished. This lead to deadlocks both in philosophy and in scientific investigations of human behaviour, such as anthropology and science studies. In the later, the activity of scientists is studied independently from a cognitive and from a sociological point of view. But the ideologies that members of these two approaches often hold – being relativists and rationalists respectively - has greatly impeded interdisciplinary work. Yet, if one wants to study rational behaviour, I will argue, one needs to study both the cognitive and the social phenomena at work.

I propose that ‘cognition’ refers to all mental processes and that ‘cognitive’ qualifies any production of representations. ‘Rationality’, on the other hand, should refer to the set of norms that are set by a community in order to part good thinking from erroneous one. This leads to a third definition: ‘intelligence’ is the cognitive processes and abilities that allow one to answer the criteria of rationality, i.e. to anchor oneself in the intellectual norms of his community. 
Rationality is normative in the sense that it is constituted of social norms; whether a thought or a thought process is rational or not depends on whether the community approves it as valid. Indeed, while rational behaviour obviously implies cognitive processes, the adjective ‘rational’ is attributed to those cognitive processes whose output conforms to a social norm. This is why there can be errors: not all outputs conform to the norm. These social phenomena of approval or disapproval of thought processes are the only natural and directly observable facts that allow us to circumscribe what is rational thinking. Thus rationality is first and foremost a social construct and depends on the community where the social norms apply. 
The setting straightforwardly leads to relativism since it has for consequence that what is rational in a community is not necessarily so in another community. The relativist position thus described is an a priori relativism since it can be derived from the definition of ‘rationality’. It is also a methodological relativism (Sokal thus described the strong program of the school of Edinburgh), since it motivates a thorough analysis of the relations between cognition, intelligence and rationality, between mental phenomena and cultural norms (In the next sections, I will give some hints about what this analysis consist in). In any case, it must not be conflated with the assertion that ways to think differ from culture to culture. This relativist position does not lead to the position that the mind is a tabula rasa, which, after being framed by enculturation and socialisation, ends up to mirror or mimic the social norms. The impact of culture on ways to think is an empirical question that obviously requires a detailed and complex answer making the par of what is learned and what is innate. My own position is on the side of strong cognitivism, which asserts that the mind is constituted of many innate abilities, or modules, which account for most of our behaviour. For instance, the ability to anchor oneself in the norms of a community essentially involves the ability to represent the thoughts and desires of the others, i.e. the ability studied under the name of ‘theory of mind’ or ‘folk psychology’.
The distinction between Rationality, seen as a social object, and intelligence, seen as a cognitive object, raises the following question: What are the causal relationships between cognitive abilities and the social norms that constitute Rationality? Is there any morphism between the two objects? These are well-studied empirical questions involving, for instance, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or cultural universals, which may lead to an a posteriori kind of moderate rationalism, or (I would rather say) universalism: It is probable that the human cognitive apparatus constrains culture production in such a way that it leaves little place for variations in the social norms ruling on the validity of justifications. In other words, rationalities, which are by definition indexed to communities in space and time, may happen to be essentially similar. But even so, the explanation of this similarity may not be as straightforward as often assumed by the one who call themselves rationalists, as I will now attempt to show. The claim of this first section, however, is that the above distinctions and definitions allow clarifying the empirical investigation whose purpose is to disentangle the cognitive processes and the social norms at work in rational behaviour.

2. Relating intelligence and rationality

Two causal relations between cognition and rationality deserve investigation: first, how do individuals produce, together, criteria of rationality, second, how do individuals manage to adapt to their cultural settings and answer the intellectual norms of rationality.

2.1. The path from the biology of the brain to intellectual norms

Cognitive scientists have shown that the mind/brain is endowed with an innate highly complex organisation. Information processes are studied at the level of neuro-biology and brain imaging, where the biology of the brain is investigated for providing cues on how we think; and at the level of thought, where the management and transformation of representations are studied by cognitive psychologists. The theories developed all agree on the fact that the mind has a highly complex structure involving memory management and specialised abilities. Our own problem is to understand the impact of the cognitive processes, thus described by cognitive scientists, onto the social norms that constitute ‘rationalities’. As I said above, there cannot be a straightforward identification of some cognitive abilities to rationality, since rationality is defined as a set of social phenomena: the approvals and disapprovals of thought processes. Yet although proponent of rationalism recognise the normative nature of rationality, they often identify rational behaviour with the proper functioning of some cognitive abilities (e.g. Macnamara, 1986). This identification raises two problems: (1) who can assert what is the proper functioning of a cognitive ability? Can it be the psychologist? The positive answer to this latter question – psychologism – has been strongly criticised: what is rational cannot be determined by empirical psychological investigations (for a review, see Kusch, 1995). We therefore need to go back to our first observation that rationality is made out of the normative behaviours of members of a community on ‘ways to think’; (2) Reducing social norms to cognitive abilities cannot be done without a thorough description of the causal chain that allow cognitive abilities to be ‘reflected’ or ‘implemented’ in social norms.
It is this second problem, which in fact is a challenge, that needs to be addressed. The relation is one that is well known to some cognitive anthropologists: from cognitive processes to cultural production (see: Sperber, 1996).
	
Graph 1 represents a possible analysis of the relation from cognition to rationalities.

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Historical & environmental contingencies	Processed by	Categorizations of what is and what is not rational	
In Contemporary Europe	
Cognitive
abilities	A	
In the Hutu tribe		B	

.
.
.		.
.
.	

Qualified
Rationality by the relativist

Qualified
Rationality by the rationalist

With A, B, C, etc. being distinct one from another
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Graph 1

According to the graph, categorisations of what is and what is not rational (what I have called rationalities) depend only on our cognitive abilities and the situation to which these abilities are confronted. Thus, apparently irrational beliefs can be seen as perfectly rational when one provides a sufficient analysis of the context in which these beliefs have been formed. It is just a question of input. This analysis, known as the intellectualist position, has been defended by some philosophers and social scientists, such as Horton and Lukes. The intellectualists presented themselves as rationalists, and indeed, as shown in the graph, the reduction from social normativity (categorisation of rational behaviour) to cognitive abilities is pretty straightforward. As a consequence, the difference between the rationalist and the relativist position that I defined in this paper, is just a terminological question. But in fact, graph 1 (and the intellectualist position) oversimplifies the causal chain that produces the norms of rationality. To see this, one just need to return to the social phenomena that motivated the notion of rationality: people judge, negotiate and reward ways to think – eventually, a thought process will be qualified as rational or irrational by the community. All these social interactions - submitting a paper to a journal, arguing over political questions, attempting to demonstrate that one product is better than an other, in brief, trying to convince others with one’s reasoning – have a direct causal effect on the constitution of the norms of rationality. They are the micro-phenomena out of which representations and behaviour stabilise and thus constitute norms. Graph 2 represents these causal relations in the oval labelled ‘social interactions’. 

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Historical & environmental contingencies	Processed by	Categorizations of what is and what is not rational	
In Contemporary Europe	
Social Interactions

Cognitive
abilities	A	
In the Hutu tribe		B	

.
.
.		.
.
.	

Qualified
Rationality by the relativist

Qualified
Rationality by the rationalist

With A, B, C, etc. being distinct one from another
--------------------------------
Graph 2.

Taking the primary normative aspect of rationality into account leads us to consider the social interactions at work in the making of these norms. The reduction – from cultural norms to cognitive abilities – is no more straightforward. On the contrary, anthropologists, sociologists and historians of science have pointed out many socio-historical processes at the origin of judgements of rationality.
My bet is that a partial reduction is possible: cognition constrain cultural production in such a way that norms of rationality do not vary drastically across time and space. While there are some works attempting to discover universal cultural traits and the cognitive origin of the trait (e.g. Berlin and Kay, 1967, on colour), the same method of work is needed with norms of rationaliy.

2.2. How individuals can be rational

If rationality is simply described as the essence of human nature, then the fact that people do act in accordance with norms of rationality is certainly not surprising. What needs to be explained, on the contrary, is the existence of error. Against this long philosophical tradition, the framework henceforth described requires empirical investigation of the facts that allow people to be rational. For the relativist of the old tradition in cognitive anthropology, the explanation is given by the impact of the social norms on cognitive processes. People conform to the norms because they have been enculturated, i.e. their ways to think have been framed by their culture such that they conform its norms.
But since the mind is not a tabula rasa the above explanation cannot be the whole story. Here are some suggestions about the rest of it:
-Naïve psychology, the cognitive ability to attribute beliefs, intentions and desires to others, is an important means individuals employ for anchoring themselves in a specific culture. Because individuals know how the others want them to think, they will conform to it in order to achieve their own goals.
- It is not surprising that people can conform to the norm they produce for themselves. But then one must advance the hypothesis that there exist a kind of morphism between cognititive processes and social norms …, which is the hypothesis to which I arrived in the previous section.

3. Scientific knowledge production as a rational activity

My aim, in this section, is to point out the relevance of the above questions for the study of scientific knowledge production. While there are numerous studies in the sociology of science and some theories about scientific cognition, there are little, if any, studies that account for both cognitive and social factors of scientific knowledge production. Apart from the fact that genuine interdisciplinary studies are difficult, a reason why there are so few integrated studies can be found in the opposition between relativists and rationalists. Sociologists of science are usually relativists and those studying scientific cognition largely rationalists… and they won’t talk to each other. Latour and Woolgar called for a 10 years moratorium of cognitive studies of science, which is somewhat equivalent to the assertion: “cognitivists, please, keep quite for a while, and you’ll see that we’ll solve all the problems”. On the other side of the camp, one can read Carruthers, Stich and Siegal who provide a ‘very short recent history’ of the philosophy of science in those terms: “Our story so far [up to Kuhn] has mostly been one of good news – with philosophy of science in the last century, like science itself, arguably progressing and/or getting somewhat closer to the truth. But one out-growth of the historical turn in philosophy of science was a form of social constructivism and relativism about science” (my emphasis).
	Beyond these disputes, it seems pretty obvious that the scientific enterprise involve both scientists’ brains and a great amount of social interactions. But this obvious fact is occulted when one gets to qualify scientific practice as a rational practice. As such, this qualification is tautological: scientific and mathematical practices have always been used as exemplars of rational behaviour. But because of the sacrosanct term ‘rational’, its multiple connotations and its associated disputes, the tautology unduly divides science studies.
	I think on the contrary that one should aim at understanding the causal interactions between cognitive abilities and social interactions at work in scientific practice. Science is a highly normative practice that obviously strongly draws upon cognitive abilities. On the one hand doing science requires obeying the rules set by the community of scientists. What counts as science is the fruit of the collective decision of scientists. On the other hand, doing science thoroughly involves our intellectual competencies, our feeling of certainty, our intuitions, and thus our individual capacities. Scientific production is thus conjointly constrained by social norms and cognitive competencies…. as any rational behaviour. 

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