As mentioned in the previous posts, the next couple of posts will be on more socially orientated approaches to human action paper and discuss how these critiques have led to more a socially orientated approach on how one may investigate the phenomenon of human action. Again, this section will be in multiple posts for two reasons: firstly, it’s a lot to dissect, and secondly, I’m quite fond of these theories. Thus, in this post, a thesis that human action is something which is essentially social, and that there is something fundamentally misconceived about the romanticised notion of the person being in total control of their own destiny, shall be critically discussed.
Supporters of this socially-orientated view argue that there is a difference between what they call ‘mere’ behaviour and human action .Consider the following example: the age-tested philosophical question of the difference between raising one’s arm, and one’s arm raising. One’s arm raising is merely a complex physiological process in the body, which would be useless information to anyone wanting to understand why they raised their arm. This view maintains that the agent of the action, the individual who raised their arm, did the action because of intent – his or her beliefs, reasons, and causes for the action. Using the example of raising an arm: if the man was raising his arm to get someone’s attention, such as a waitress in a restaurant, you would want to know why he did it, the reason, or intent, behind his action.
Therefore, one could say, under the perspective of this approach, what is identified as an action is usually a physical movement, at least at first. However, it is confirmed as an action because intent can be attached to it, which seems ‘natural’ to those observing the physical movement of the individual performing an action.
To illustrate this point further, looking yet again at the example of the winking man: if the man had a nervous tic that caused his body to produce a physical movement which seems very much like a blink, but only in one eye, and he explained his situation to the woman who thought he was winking at her, if she believes his reason behind the physical behaviour which can be interpreted as a wink, then she would no longer believe that his physical behaviour, the tic in his eye, was a wink at all. However, if the man did not inform her of his lack of control of his eye-lids opening and closing in his one eye, she could rightly interpret the behaviour as a wink, and the man winked at her intentionally. The point that the researchers are attempting to make through illustrating this example is that the description of the man’s actual eyelids closing and opening does not enable one to determine the intent (if there even was any) of his actions; therefore, we cannot determine why he did them. As authors have stated: “the judgment you make will depend on whether or not the behaviour is considered to be ‘purposeful’ in the sense that it may be understood with reference to intentional rather than psychological causes”.
Furthermore, this socially orientated approach to investigating human action also holds the view that actions cannot be coherently and accurately identified just based on the sensory observation of physical movement, nor can human actions be distinguished from one another by mere bodily movements. Take, for example, the simple instance of signing your name. There are many slight variations in the way that you sign your name every time you do it, but the action still accomplishes the same task, regardless of the variations. No matter how different your next signature will be from your last, or your next one, it still accomplishes the goal of signing your name. Equally so, any one specific physical behaviour may be consistent with many different and possibly contradictory actions. “Human bodies are in a constant state of flux”.
As a result, the important point about the man explaining his nervous tic to the woman who thought he was winking at her, was from his description of his actions that named either the purpose or belief that was behind the action itself. However, the reason the woman understood the man’s description of the reasons for his actions was because what he said was intelligible.
The next post shall continue on why intelligibility is so important when attempting to understand human action, as well as concluding why the social perspective is crucial to understanding human activity.
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