I see what you’re saying, but science presupposes rational norms — evidence, coherence, warranted judgment — in order to function at all. So if the scientific picture of cognition ends up dissolving those very norms into “just” causal processes, it saws off the branch it’s sitting on. The account undermines the authority of the account.
The resolution, I think, is recognizing that the causal story and the normative story operate at different levels. Neural processing, predictive modeling, etc. — thats the machinery. But the question of whether a judgment is warranted, whether the evidence is sufficient, whether an insight actually grasps the relevant intelligibility — those are normative questions that can’t be cashed out in purely causal terms without remainder. You can explain why someone made a judgment causally, but you can’t explain whether they were right to make it that way.
So the appearance of science undermining rationality is really just the consequence of conflating those two levels of description. The science of perception is fine; the philosophical mistake is thinking that the causal account is the epistemic account. More on this below.
These are fair questions. I wouldn’t say science “aimed at” accounting for rationality and missed. It’s more that the methods of empirical science are designed to track correlations, regularities, causal mechanisms — and they do that brilliantly. Cognitive psychology absolutely studies reasoning in the sense of studying what people do when they reason: the heuristics, the biases, the neural substrates, the developmental trajectories. Thats genuinely illuminating and nobody should dismiss it.
But there’s a difference between studying the process of reasoning empirically and adjudicating whether a particular bit of reasoning is valid. The psychologist can tell you that subjects reliably commit the conjunction fallacy under certain conditions. What she can’t tell you as a psychologist is that the conjunction fallacy is a fallacy — that requires a normative standard (probability theory, logic) that isn’t itself an empirical finding. She relies on it, of course. But it enters her work as a presupposition, not as a result.
So it’s not that anyone is blind to anything, and its not that there’s a hidden fracture in rationality itself. It’s that empirical method, by design, abstracts from the normative dimension even while depending on it. The tension only shows up when someone tries to claim that the empirical account is the whole account — that there’s nothing left over once you’ve described the causal machinery. That’s where the overreach happens, and honestly I think most working scientists don’t make that claim. It’s more of a philosophical temptation.
I think the divide is diagnosable. It comes from a particular move that gets made — often implicitly — where someone goes from “empirical method is extremely successful” to “empirical method exhausts what counts as knowing.” Once that move is made, anything that can’t be captured in terms of efficient causation and quantifiable regularity starts to look like spooky metaphysics. Normativity, meaning, truth as something more than predictive success — all of it gets treated as either reducible or eliminable.
But the thing is, that move isn’t itself a scientific finding. Its a philosophical commitment about the scope of knowledge, and it’s one that arguably can’t be stated without performatively relying on the very normative concepts it tries to reduce. The scientist who says “we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence” is already operating with a normative “ought” that no brain scan or regression model delivers.
So the gap isn’t really between science and philosophy. It’s between two philosophical positions about what knowledge is — one of which happens to dress itself up in a lab coat. And the reason it looks unbridgeable from the naturalist side is that, if you’ve already decided that causal-empirical explanation is the only game in town, then anyone pointing to a normative remainder is going to seem like they’re gesturing at ghosts. But thats a consequence of the starting assumption, not evidence for it.