The explanation of social action / John Levi Martin.

The explanation of social action / John Levi Martin.

9780199773312 hardcover alkaline paper
0199773319 hardcover alkaline paper

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2011]

©2011

English

xiii, 396 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

HM585 .M3458 2011

303.48/4

"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.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 351-386) and index.

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