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Self-determination supposes to act knowingly. It supposes more precisely that the individuals carry out their will with the help of their reason, understood as cognitive and reflexive capacity: they should be able to represent the means to succeed, but also to judge the relevance of these means. Yet, such reflective capacity seems to have been neglected by social sciences, as if it were the privilege of academics rather than in everyone's power. Thus we propose a model of reflexion, which is composed of four moments considered necessary: the detachment, the qualification, the quantification and the abstraction. Fichte's works have provided inspiration for this model, and we have applied it to Simmel's work on the pathologies linked to the usage of money. Indeed, since acting knowingly is a performance, there are possibilities of failures. This model helps to draws out the different forms of failure. Finally, we argue that reflexion is a blind spot for the cognitive paradigm and we discuss the consequences of our model for the dispute on explanation and understanding.