What about social value?

Abstract

We focus on three aspects of the articles of Reyna, of Perry, Stupnisky, Daniels and Haynes, and of Murdock, Beauchamp and Hinton. The first aspect is the logic of causal chain, a logic that we differentiate from a more deterministic approach. The second one is the mode of corrective action (attribution retraining) that is planned for students, whether cheaters or lower achievers. We differentiate this mode of action from the one that is based on the idea of normative awareness (or “clear-sightedness”): normative awareness does not imply that the speaker believes in what he says. Finally, we discuss the concept of social value (of a person) which seems to underlie the empirical results but which does not appear in the authors’ formulations. But this concept stems from a “sociologizing” meta-theory that these authors probably do not share and which makes the norm of enternality theory difficult to integrate within Weiner’s attribution theory.