Science Of Human Action Research Articles

Certeza e Incerteza

O presente texto expõe a concepção misesiana sobre as diferenças entre os métodos das ciências naturais e as ciências da ação humana, ou praxiologia. Rejeita o empirismo aplicado as estas últimas na medida em que a complexidade dos fenômenos humanos resulta na inexistência de constantes a partir das quais leis empíricas e previsões exatas poderiam ser obtidas. Critica a demanda por previsões exatas que desconsideram a impossibilidade de erradicar a incerteza inerente à esfera da ação. O texto rejeita, em seguida, a relevância do critério de demarcação popperiano aplicado à praxiologia, reafirmando que as leis de natureza praxiológica são apriorísticas, derivadas dedutivamente a partir do reconhecimento da natureza da mente humana.

A Praxeological Approach to Intentional Action

Abstract The concept of Intentional Action is at the core of Praxeology, as developed by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Under this unique approach, defined as the science of human action and designed to study the field of the social sciences, Mises create “action axiom”: the contention that every acting man more satisfactory state of affairs for a Austrian scholar is able to derive the fundament human action; such as value, scale of value, scarcity, abundance, profit, loss, uncertainty and causality, among others. This paper intends to present the praxeological perspective on intentional action and its epistemologic implications; it also attempts to answer objections to this thesis.

A Tarefa e o Escopa da Ciência da Ação Humana - Parte IV:

The author examines the objectives and the appropriate method for developing research in the field of the social sciences, discussing the origin of these sciences and covering, with particular attention, the fields of economics and sociology. Elaborating a critical stance against both historicism and empiricism, the author argues in favor of a universal science – praxeology, or the science of human action.

Insecurity and the sociology of deviance: Jock Young against Talcott Parsons and the long shadow of C. Wright Mills – a comparative appreciation

In The Criminological Imagination, Jock Young praises Charles Mills for his sociological imagination and refutes Talcott Parsons as an abstract theorist. This article focuses on a key concept of contemporary criminology and in the work of Parsons, the concept of insecurity and its relationship with deviance. Three facts have to be kept in mind: (1) Parsons’ work is based in methodology in which conceptual schemes and empirical facts are distinguished. (2) Modern society is pluralised and differentiated and so are the sciences of human action. (3) Since the 1930s, Parsons conceptualised the co-existence of pluralised and differentiated democracy in America and monolithic and totalitarian dictatorship in Germany. It shall be shown how Young’s understanding of insecurity as cause of crime and criminalisation converges with Parsons’ ideas and how some of Young’s psychological assumptions have an equivalent in Parsons’ uses of psychoanalysis. Finally, Young and Parsons address the problem of emotion and expressive action, the pleasures of deviance as well as the origins of punitive reaction formations.

Od Misese k Schutzovi. Otázka apriorismu v ekonomii

The study analyzes Mises's approach to the question of apriorism in a broader methodological context. It shows that it is not inevitable to advocate the aprioristic character of economics (resp. science of human action), as Mises does, to maintain the subjectivist-individualist methodology and the effort to adequately grasp the general laws of human action from its perspective. The present redefinition of apriorism is developed on the basis of thoughts of Barry Smith and Alfred Schutz. It suggests abandoning the apodictic character of apriori (which is untenable) and move closer to a broadly defined empiricism. The methodological insights developed in the paper are finally used to contribute to the debate between the behavioral economists and the proponents of rational choice theory.

Gordon Tullock’s Contribution to spontaneous order studies

The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Order at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation was established to reward and encourage scholarship pushing the boundaries of economic methodology beyond the realm of the market economy.1 The intellectual impetus for the project comes from a remark that Ludwig von Mises often made in his classes in the 1950s and 1960s. Praxeology, Mises argued, was a general science of human action. Mises insisted that while economics was the best developed branch of praxeology, it did not exhaust the discipline. Outside of the market context, the general science of human action also applied, but too few scholars were working on those topics. The same methodological individualism and invisible-hand reasoning that, according to Mises, were the hallmark of the economic analysis of market phenomena could be deployed to explain politics and law, human sexual relations and family structures, war and revolution, religion and ideology, etc. In order to encourage a new generation of scholars to work along these Misesian lines of inquiry outside the strict confines of the analysis of market processes, the Fund established both research awards for scholars (junior and senior level) and also a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Lifetime Achievement Awards were established to reward trailblazers in the development of the discipline of praxeology beyond economics, and to encourage assessment by the younger generation of the continuing relevance of the contributions to contemporary scholarship. The first recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award were Eleanor and Vincent Ostrom, and a symposium on their work was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57(2) June 2005. In 2006, Gordon Tullock was selected as the second recipient of this Lifetime Achievement Award. In the spring of 2007, a conference was held at the GMU School of Law to honor Gordon and his contributions to spontaneous order studies. Bill Dennis and Charles

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.

Scientific psychology and hermeneutical psychology: Causal explanation and the meaning of human action

About 20 years ago it was fashionable to recognise that explanations of hu? man action in terms of agent's reasons, purposes, values etc. were of a dif? ferent logical order from causal explanations. Nowadays the fashion seems to be to recognise that they are bona fide examples of causal explanation. The debate about 'reasons and causes' has been around for centuries, at least since Kant and probably since Aristotle, although it has perhaps generated more confusion than illumination. It has alternatively been dis? missed as a purely verbal dispute, or treated as the most fundamental ques? tion of the philosophy of the human sciences. The present contribution to this debate is offered because most of the discussions of this question (at least since Kant) are vitiated by the presup? position of an inadequate philosophy of science. It is also offered because the question is not of mere philosophical interest: it has rather profound implications for the practise of social psychological sciences. Indeed the confusions of this debate have had a very definite and detrimental impact upon the practise of scientific social psychology. The issue is of course too large to encompass in the scope of a single ar? ticle. In the present article I hope to show that none of the arguments which purport to demonstrate that explanations of human action are non-causal in fact establish this, although they do illustrate important truths about the subject matter of psychological and social sciences. In a future article (Greenwood, 1986) I hope to explicate the sense(s) in which explanations of human action are causal. In these articles the primary concern is with a putative science of social psychology, insofar as this may be held to be closely co-ordinated with a science of human action: the implications apply

SOCIOCYBERNETICS AS THE SCIENCE OF SELF‐STEERING HUMAN ACTION

The nature of sociocybernetics as a foundational science of human action, and some of the basic results in this line of research, and their consequences as to the governability, planning and control of social systems are discussed.