The Role and Limitations of Rationalizing Explanation in the Social Sciences
| Autor: | David Henderson |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1989 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 19:267-287 |
| ISSN: | 1911-0820 0045-5091 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00455091.1989.10716480 |
| Popis: | In this paper, I examine a model of social scientific explanation that has come to be quite popular among philosophers: the rationalizing explanation model. Accounts of the social and psychological sciences assigning a prominent role to rationalizing explanation have been developed by an impressive range of writers, including Donald Davidson, Alvin Goldman, I. C. Jarvie, Stephen Turner, Hilary Putnam, and Jon Elster.1 Several writers advance rationalizing explanation as the exclusive sort of explanation for the social sciences, insisting that other forms of appropriate social scientific explanation ultimately reduce to such explanations, perhaps complemented by attention to complex unintended consequences of rational actions. I believe that rationalizing explanation is indeed proper, but that the exclusivity claim is quite wrong. After reviewing in section I the basic rationalizing explanation model, I focus in section II on I. C. Jarvie's influential argument for the exclusivity claim, discussing certain cases in which rationalizing explanation seems unable to provide explanations for what social scien |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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