1# Library to Find Best eBook for Read
Author : Jon Elster
Release : 2015-07-30
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 186/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Explaining Social Behavior by : Jon Elster
Download or read book Explaining Social Behavior written by Jon Elster. This book was released on 2015-07-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A substantially revised edition of Jon Elster's critically acclaimed book exploring the nature of social behavior and the social sciences.
Author : Jon Elster
Release : 2015-07-28
Genre : Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 564/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Explaining Social Behavior by : Jon Elster
Download or read book Explaining Social Behavior written by Jon Elster. This book was released on 2015-07-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of his critically acclaimed book, Jon Elster examines the nature of social behavior, proposing choice as the central concept of the social sciences. Extensively revised throughout, the book offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms, drawing on many case studies and experiments to explore the nature of explanation in the social sciences; an analysis of the mental states - beliefs, desires, and emotions - that are precursors to action; a systematic comparison of rational-choice models of behavior with alternative accounts, and a review of mechanisms of social interaction ranging from strategic behavior to collective decision making. A wholly new chapter includes an exploration of classical moralists and Proust in charting mental mechanisms operating 'behind the back' of the agent, and a new conclusion points to the pitfalls and fallacies in current ways of doing social science, proposing guidelines for more modest and more robust procedures.
Author : Fred Dretske
Release : 1991-02-05
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 612/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Explaining Behavior by : Fred Dretske
Download or read book Explaining Behavior written by Fred Dretske. This book was released on 1991-02-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do human beings move? In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior. Biological science investigates what makes our bodies move in the way they do. Psychology is interested in why persons—agents with reasons—move in the way they do. Dretske attempts to reconcile these different points of view by showing how reasons operate in a world of causes. He reveals in detail how the character of our inner states—what we believe, desire, and intend—determines what we do.
Author : John Levi Martin
Release : 2011-06-01
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 440/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Explanation of Social Action by : John Levi Martin
Download or read book The Explanation of Social Action written by John Levi Martin. This book was released on 2011-06-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Christina Lee
Release : 2013-06-17
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 705/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Alternatives to Cognition by : Christina Lee
Download or read book Alternatives to Cognition written by Christina Lee. This book was released on 2013-06-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, Christina Lee takes a consciously critical approach to the apparently unchallenged principle that conscious thought is the cause of all human behavior. Without becoming polemical or destructive, she reconsiders a wide range of issues in mainstream American and European social psychology. Suitable for an international audience, the book deals with issues in mainstream American and European social psychology. It assumes some familiarity with contemporary social and applied psychology, and would be appropriate as a text or supplementary reading for senior undergraduate and postgraduate courses in social psychology and psychological theory, although it is also written with an academic research audience in mind. While it is written largely for psychologists, it would also be of interest to academics from other social-science disciplines with a general interest in explanations of individual social behavior.
