The explanation of social action
By: John Levi Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 396
ISBN-13: 9780199773312
Subjects: Social action; Philosophy; Sociology; Social sciences
Description: "The Explanation of Social Action lays out a sustained critique of this understanding, pointing out that the root of the problem is an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing--first person responses and third person ones. John Levi Martin illustrates how this tendency is epitomized in attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. He shows how this causality has little to do with the real world, but instead involves the creation of imaginary worlds, stemming from an intellectual history whereby social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors and accepted fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies, due to an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and the adoption of practices in the intensely hierarchic setting of forced incarceral institutions for the insane. Martin moves on to highlight other traditions that do not assume that the cognitive schemes of actors are fundamentally arbitrary. These traditions in turn suggest that the analytic problems that now arise require attention to the nature of judgment, implying the need for an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Why questions? What explanations?; title: Causality and persons; title: Authority and experience; title: The grid of perception; title: Action in and on a world; title: A social aesthetics; title: Valence and habit; title: Fields and games; title: Explanations explained.