Social Aspects of Rationality

This chapter considers how social communities arise which are committed to a specific way of understanding or investigating our world, and how they transmit their ideas and values. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘epistemic communities’, and how they are able to communicate with each other, despite their different understandings of what it means to be ‘reasonable’. The concept of tradition—meaning a settled understanding of how the world is to be understood and explored—is considered, particularly in relation to the challenge this poses to the idea that reason is something that is historically and culturally invariant.