Epistemic Cultures: Forms of Reason in Science

Rationality is a conspicuous yet neglected phenomenon. It has received much attention from philosophers and some social scientists, who have treated rationality as the hallmark of science, of economic action, or of modernity in general. Yet with all this attention, rationality has been conspicuously taken for granted, and its taken-for-grantedness has licensed a neglect of the practical activity of rational action. In other words, rationality has been a resource rather than a topic of analysis. To be sure, some fields have long been preoccupied with specifying the rules of rationality which are capable of unifying-or reconstructinghuman endeavors within a domain of activity; but they have done so at the cost of neglecting to seek to understand the actual practice of these activities. For example, philosophers of science have relegated the vast territories of the "real" behavior of scientists to a marginal existence, in exchange for the doubtful benefits of the rational reconstruction of scientific theory choice. Economic theorists appear perennially involved in searching for "indisputable" definitions of rational choice which can serve as algorithmic devices in economic modeling, but they leave unexamined essential empirical aspects of real business-firm and market operations.! In a paraphrase of Hegel, Bruno Ingrao has recently described the content of economic theory as a "representation of rationality as it is in its eternal essence, before the creation of nature and of a finite mind" (1989, 120). As the many controversies over the content and definition of scientific and economic reason suggest, rationality is an interesting topic of investigation. But must this investigation be limited, as often in economic theory, to the mental and computational specification of rational calculation and constrained optimization as required by formal models to