Les sciences cognitives ne sont pas des sciences humaines

• Main Author: Albert Ogien
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française 2011-10-01
• Series: Sociologies
• Subjects: cognitive; conceptual; epistemism; social naturalism; reductionism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/3635
• ISSN: 1992-2655

This article examines the limits of the social naturalism proposed by Laurence Kauffman and Laurent Cordonier in this journal by criticizing their plea concerning knowledge integration of cognitive sciences as well as humanities and social sciences. This critic relies upon the rebuttal of the three ideas backed by the authors: 1) the scientific description of cognitive elementary mechanisms gives a causal explanation of social conducts that must substitute itself to the ones of humanities and social sciences; 2) the use of naturalism allows a forgery of preconceived ideas the they continue to maintain; 3) the naturalization of the mind program doesn’t imply forms of reductionism. This triple critic allows a rejection of their appeal in favor of an integrated model of human conduct by putting forward a statement: since we do not know how to fill the gap that divides detailed descriptions of the working brain from the explanations of the individuals’ conducts and the ways in which they coordinate these personal conducts and the public ones, humanities and social sciences have little to gain from the cognitive sciences’ side in order to improve their analyses of action. It is because their work is located either at a subhuman level of molecular functioning or at a superhuman level of evolution; and only humanities and social sciences place their analyses simply at a human level by using humans as they live together as a measure of everything that concerns them. What they cannot do on a naturalist mode.