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Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199773440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally. This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory.
Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199773440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally. This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory.
Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199773319
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
Why questions? What explanations? -- Causality and persons -- Authority and experience -- The grid of perception -- Action in and on a world -- A social aesthetics -- Valence and habit -- Fields and games -- Explanations explained.
Author: Colin Campbell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521646369
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Myth of Social Action, first published in 1996, is a powerful critique of the sociology of the time and a call to reject the prevailing orthodoxy. Arguing that sociological theory had lost its way, Colin Campbell mounts a case for a new 'dynamic interpretivism' a perspective on human conduct which is more inkeeping with the spirit of traditional Weberian action theory. Discussing and dismissing one by one the main arguments of those who reject individualistic action theory, he demonstrates that this has been wrongly rejected in favour of the interactional, social situationalist approach now dominating sociological thought.
Author: Peter L. Berger
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453215468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.
Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674792913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
From weaker to stronger rhetoric : literature - Laboratories - From weak points to strongholds : machines - Insiders out - From short to longer networks : tribunals of reason - Centres of calculation.
Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Social Structures is a book that examines how structural forms spontaneously arise from social relationships. Offering major insights into the building blocks of social life, it identifies which locally emergent structures have the capacity to grow into larger ones and shows how structural tendencies associated with smaller structures shape and constrain patterns of larger structures. The book then investigates the role such structures have played in the emergence of the modern nation-state. Bringing together the latest findings in sociology, anthropology, political science, and history, John Levi Martin traces how sets of interpersonal relationships become ordered in different ways to form structures. He looks at a range of social structures, from smaller ones like families and street gangs to larger ones such as communes and, ultimately, nation-states. He finds that the relationships best suited to forming larger structures are those that thrive in conditions of inequality; that are incomplete and as sparse as possible, and thereby avoid the problem of completion in which interacting members are required to establish too many relationships; and that abhor transitivity rather than assuming it. Social Structures argues that these "patronage" relationships, which often serve as means of loose coordination in the absence of strong states, are nevertheless the scaffolding of the social structures most distinctive to the modern state, namely the command army and the political party.
Author: Isaac Reed
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317256239
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Culture is increasingly important to American social science, but in what way? This book addresses the core issues of the sociology of culture-questions about the social role of meaning, along with those about the methods sociologists use to study culture and society-in a manner that makes clear their relevance to sociology as a whole. Part I consists of essays by leading cultural sociologists on how the turn to culture has changed the sociological study of organizations, economic action, and television, and concludes with Georgina Born's methodological statement on the sociology of art and cultural production. Part II contains a highly original, and at times heated, debate between Richard Biernacki and John H. Evans on the appropriateness of abstract and quantifiable coding schemes for the sociological study of culture. Ranging from the philosophy of science to the concrete, practical problems of interpreting masses of cultural data, the debate raises the controversy over the interpretation of culture and the explanation of social action to a new level of sophistication.
Author: Per-Olof H. Wikström
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139460218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Integration of disciplines, theories and research orientations has assumed a central role in criminological discourse yet it remains difficult to identify any concrete discoveries or significant breakthroughs for which integration has been responsible. Concentrating on three key concepts: context, mechanisms, and development, this volume aims to advance integrated scientific knowledge on crime causation by bringing together different scholarly approaches. Through an analysis of the roles of behavioural contexts and individual differences in crime causation, The Explanation of Crime seeks to provide a unified and focused approach to the integration of knowledge. Chapter topics range from individual genetics to family environments and from ecological behaviour settings to the macro-level context of communities and social systems. This is a comprehensive treatment of the problem of crime causation that will appeal to graduate students and researchers in criminology and be of great interest to policy-makers and practitioners in crime policy and prevention.
Author: Gunnar Schumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429000650
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Is the appropriate form of human action explanation causal or rather teleological? While this is a central question in analytic philosophy of action, it also has implications for questions about the differences between methods of explanation in the sciences on the one hand and in the humanities and the social sciences on the other. Additionally, this question bears on the problem of the appropriate form of explanations of past human actions, and therefore it is prominently discussed by analytic philosophers of historiography. This volume brings together causalists and anti-causalists to address enduring philosophical questions at the heart of this debate, as well as their implications for the practice of historiography. Part I considers the quarrel between causalism and anti-causalism in recent developments in the philosophy of action. Part II presents papers by causalists and anti-causalists that are more narrowly focused on the philosophy of historiography.
Author: R. Tuomela
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400963173
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
It is somewhat surprising to find out how little serious theorizing there is in philosophy (and in social psychology as well as sociology) on the nature of social actions or joint act. hons in the sense of actions performed together by several agents. Actions performed by single agents have been extensively discussed both in philosophy and in psycho~ogy. There is, ac cordingly, a booming field called action theory in philosophy but it has so far strongly concentrated on actions performed by single agents only. We of course should not forget game theory, a discipline that systematically studies the strategic interac tion between several rational agents. Yet this important theory, besides being restricted to strongly rational acting, fails to study properly several central problems related to the concep tual nature of social action. Thus, it does not adequately clarify and classify the various types of joint action (except perhaps from the point of view of the agents' utilities). This book presents a systematic theory of social action. Because of its reliance on so-called purposive causation and generation it is called the purposive-causal theory. This work also discusses several problems related to the topic of social action, for instance that of how to create from this perspective the most central concepts needed by social psychology and soci ology. While quite a lot of ground is covered in the book, many important questions have been left unanswered and many others unasked as well.
