In the philosophical theory of communicative action, rationality refers to interpersonal communication rather than to a knowing subject. Thus, a social view of rationality is suggested. The theory differentiates between two kinds of rationality, the emancipative communicative and the strategic or instrumental reasoning. Using experimental designs in an fMRI setting, recent studies explored similar questions of reasoning in the social world and linked them with a neural network including prefrontal and parietal brain regions. Here, we employed an fMRI approach to highlight brain areas associated with strategic and communicative reasoning according to the theory of communicative action. Participants were asked to assess different social scenarios with respect to communicative or strategic rationality. We found a network of brain areas including temporal pole, precuneus, and STS more activated when participants performed communicative reasoning compared with strategic thinking and a cont)