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Can I read The Explanation of Social Action on EtoBox?
The Explanation of Social Action by John Levi Martin is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is The Explanation of Social Action about?
__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 hi
Who reads The Explanation of Social Action?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- John Levi Martin
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press inc
- Published
- 2011
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780199773442
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- Philosophy, Science, Sociology