Developed further, the paradox constitutes a major challenge to the possibility of pure instrumental rationality.

Jürgen Habermas has critiqued the concept of pure instrumental rationality as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes something akin to ideology itself.

In instrumental rationality, social agents make an instrumental use of knowledge: they propose certain goals and aim to achieve them in an objective world.

Following industrialization, advanced industrial society leads to a basic shift in values, de-emphasizing instrumental rationality.

In other words, instrumental rationality has nothing to say about either the source or the rationality of the agents' goals.

A problem of Western thought, Gordon argues, is that it has yoked reason to instrumental rationality and created an antiblack notion of reason's geographical landscape.

All of this amounts to a sustained attack on the heartless, impersonal character of the "industrial system" and its sorry ethic of instrumental rationality.

The latter is an expression of instrumental rationality.

Thus, we find in economics many expressions of instrumental rationality.

In this tradition, "instrumental rationality" is often simply called "instrumentation".