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EXPLANATION OF SOCIAL ACTION IBD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
08 / 2011
9780199773312
Inglés

Sinopsis

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.

PVP
123,74