Can Cognitive Explanations Be Eliminated?

The purpose of article is to analyze the arguments of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar aimed at eliminating `superfluous' cognitive explanations from discussion of scientific activity. They proposed to a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of scientific activity and promised to reassess explanation in terms of cognition after this period of time if some aspects of scientific inquiry would not be accounted by sociological explanations. Intensive laboratory studies of scientific practice indicated that scientific thinking is not based on mental processes alone but relies on external tools and instruments. On the basis of these kinds of observations, they rejected all cognitive explanations of scientific inquiry. By building on sociocultural theories of cognition, the present study makes the case that the use of conceptual tools significantly transforms cognitive processes. It is concluded that the failure to appreciate cognitive explanations reflects a far too narrow and non-social concept of cognition: Even after the ten-year moratorium there appears to be many good reasons to reassess the proposal of eliminating cognitive explanations altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]