Rationality As A Meta-Analytical Capacity of the Human Mind: From the Social Sciences to Gödel

Abstract

In contrast to dominant approaches to human reason involving essentially a logical and instrumental conception of rationality easily modeled by artificial intelligence mechanisms, I argue that the specific capacities of the human mind are meta-analytic in nature, understood as irreducible to the analytic or the logical, or else the computational. Firstly, the assumption of a meta-analytical level of rationality is derived from key insights developed in various branches of the social sciences. This meta-analytical level is then inferred from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. On these bases, and with the help of psychological approaches to consciousness, I argue that human rationality may be characterized as the capacity to make meaningful use of signs.

Methodological Individualism as Holism of the Parts: From Epistemology to Ontology

“…In particular, human beings make use of an articulated language thanks to the recursive capacities of their thought, which underlies their faculties of abstraction and reasoning. This human capacity does not imply any normative conception of rationality, and it is not essentially of a logical or instrumental nature; rather it is a general capacity for understanding, that is, attributing meaning (Bulle 2022). The driving role of meaning in human reason is involved in the idea that motivations, or "good reasons" 13 (abstractly reconstructed by the observer), explain actions.…”