Overview

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.

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9780199773312

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Reviews

<br> John Levi Martin's The Explanation of Social Action is the most important book on both the history and systematics of contemporary social theory, as well as the nature, limits, and prospects of an explanatory social science to be published in recent times. Martin's account is controversial, wide-ranging and simply riveting, and without a doubt revolutionary. Not just any 'theory' book, it's a must-read for all practicing social scientists, regardless of theoretical stripe and approach, whether qualitative, quantitative, historical or ethnographic. Anybody interested in transcending the impasses and dualisms standing in the way of a more thorough understanding of the sources of human action, motivation, and cognition-and thus improve his or her practice as a social scientist-will do well to delve into these pages. --Omar Lizardo, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame<p><br> If you thought you knew what makes a good social science explanation of conduct, this qu

Author Information

John Levi Martin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Social Structures, which was awarded the 2010 Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association.

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