Ebook: Explanation and Experiment in Social Psychological Science: Realism and the Social Constitution of Action

This book is about explanation and experiment in a science of human action. It aims to provide a philosophy of social psychological science that both embodies sound principles of scientific reasoning and is sensitive to the social psychological dimensions of human action. The guiding principle of this book is the belief that the logical forms of causal explanation and experimental evaluation can be ef­ fectively employed in the scientific analysis of meaningful human action. According to most accounts, social psychological science has been in a more or less constant state of crisis for the past decades, having been subject to a host of criticisms on moral, political, methodological, and philosophical grounds. Many of these critiques have been directed against the still dominant conception of social psychological enquiry as a causal and objective scientific discipline that is closely analogous to (if not to be identified as a branch ot) the natural sciences. Thus, many of the most vigorous debates have concerned the nature of explanation and the utility of experimentation in a social psychological discipline.

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The book is about explanation and experiment in social psychological science. It argues that traditional empiricist accounts and hermeneutical critiques are fundamentally misconceived. The main purpose of the book is to demonstrate the possibility and potential of a causal and experimental science of meaningful human action. The most important feature of the work is the innovative integration of a realist philosophy of science and a social constitutionist philosophy of human action. This challenging new perspective preserves the objectivity of action identification and explanation while remaining sensitive to the social, relational and representational dimensions of human action. It argues that traditional problems concerning the generalizability of experimental results are misconceived. Instead it focuses upon the critical issue concerning the identity of experimentally produced behaviors. The volume should appeal to those practitioners of social psychological science who recognize the conceptual poverty of traditional empiricism, but who are disinclined to abandon the discipline to the relativist extremes of social constructionism. It should also appeal to all those human scientists and philosophers concerned with the potential of a scientific analysis of meaningful human action.