COVID-19 is compromising all aspects of society, with devastating impacts on health, political, social, economic and educational spheres. A premium is being placed on scientific research as the source of possible solutions, with a situational imperative to carry out investigations at an accelerated rate. There is a major challenge not to neglect ethical standards, in a context where doing so may mean the difference between life and death. In this paper we offer a rubric for considering the ethical challenges in (...) COVID-19 related research, in the form of an ethics toolkit for global research developed at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with more than 200 global researchers from around the world. This toolkit provides a framework to support confrontation of ethical conflicts through the integrated and iterative analysis of Place, People, Principles and Precedents, throughout the research journey. Two case analyses are offered to exemplify the utility of the toolkit as a flexible and dynamic tool to promote ethical research in the context of COVID-19. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage a pour enjeu de débattre du schéma théorique forgé par Alfred Schütz, promoteur de l'idée de sociologie phénoménologique (puisant son cadre analytique dans une lecture de la sociologie compréhensive weberienne, de la philosophie de la durée bergsonienne, et de la phénoménologie husserlienne). Les catégories princeps de la recherche sont dès lors celles de conscience, de temporalité et de signification. La structure phénoménologique de l'expérience sociale, l'essence de la compréhension intersubjective, les perspectives offertes par les tenants d'une sociologie (...) formiste en matière d'entendement de l'interaction, sont les thèmes majeurs de ce débat. Dans le cadre de cette lecture, Thierry Blin tente d'établir les principes d'une sociologie phénoménologique formiste ou structurale, permettant ainsi de fonder à nouveaux frais une sociologie de l'action. (shrink)

Le magicien qui croit à l'efficacité des rituels de pluie n'obéit pas à une autre logique que l'homme de science, explique Durkheim. Les croyances religieuses doivent s'analyser comme le produit de raisons, expliquent Tocqueville et Weber. Les percées scientifiques les plus spectaculaires des sciences sociales sont celles qui ont réussi à déplacer les frontières du rationnel : à démontrer que la croyance ou le comportement qu'un regard superficiel juge spontanément irrationnel s'explique comme l'effet de raisons subjectivement fortes et objectivement fondées. (...) Ce déplacement de l'irrationnel au rationnel est indispensable si l'on veut expliquer les changements dans les croyances, les normes, les valeurs et les institutions qu'on observe dans les sociétés contemporaines. (shrink)

Despite many points of divergence, social scientists and social theorists seem united by one primary concern: to identify what it is people are doing. The thought that this might count as not only a viable but centrally important concern is grounded in a scepticism about the ability of societies’ ordinary members to reliably correctly identify their own and others’ actions. In this scepticism, such social scientists and social theorists usually situate themselves in opposition to ethnomethodologists and Peter Winch. This scepticism (...) is grounded in a belief that ordinary or competent members of societies are unreliable authorities on the identity of their own and others’ actions because they are subject to systems of sociological refraction. The idea being that ordinary members of society are systematically misled as to the identity of their actions and those of their peers because they — or their perceptions of actions — are subject to the refractive properties of ideology, or folk theories of action, and so on. In this paper, I subject to analysis this core commitment of much social science and social theory. (shrink)

Skilled cooperative action means being able to understand the communicative situation and know how and when to respond appropriately for the purpose at hand. This skill is of the performance of knowledge in co-action and is a form of social intelligence for sustainable interaction. Social intelligence, here, denotes the ability of actors and agents to manage their relationships with each other. Within an environment we have people, tools, artefacts and technologies that we engage with. Let us consider all (...) of these as dynamic representations of knowledge. When this knowledge becomes enacted, i.e., when we understand how to use it to communicate effectively, such that it becomes invisible to us, it becomes knowledge in co-action. A challenge of social intelligence design is to create mediating interfaces that can become invisible to us, i.e., as an extension of ourselves. In this paper, we present a study of the way people use surfaces that afford graphical interaction, in collaborative design tasks, in order to inform the design of intelligent user interfaces. This is a descriptive study rather than a usability study, to explore how size, orientation and horizontal and vertical positioning, influences the functionality of the surface in a collaborative setting. (shrink)

In accordance with the established view that the new social movements since the late 1960s have always pursued an agenda of comprehensive societal change, the new wave of movement activism since the late 1990s has widely been interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a new global movement for a radically different society. A critique of the one-sided reliance in social movement research on traditional actor-centred approaches leads to a systems-centred conceptualization of late-modern society, and via the diagnosis of its (...) particular dilemmas, to the interpretation of contemporary social movements as a vital resource for the stabilization of the socioeconomic order of democratic consumer capitalism. As an addition to the existing social movement theories, the suggested approach contributes to a more complex understanding of non-conventional forms of political articulation and participation. (shrink)

Social action is central to social thought. This centrality reflects the overwhelming causal significance of action for social life, the centrality of action to any account of social phenomena, and the fact that conventions and normativity are features of human activity. This book provides philosophical analyses of fundamental categories of human social action, including cooperative action, conventional action, social norm governed action, and the actions of the occupants of organizational roles. A distinctive feature (...) of the book is that it applies these theories of social action categories to some important moral issues that arise in social contexts such as the collective responsibility for environmental pollution, humanitarian intervention, and dealing with the rights of minority groups. Avoiding both the excessively atomistic individualism of rational choice theorists and implausible collectivist assumptions, this important book will be widely read by philosophers of the social sciences, political scientists and sociologists. (shrink)

We all know what a voluntary action is - we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. Yet, performing and action and defining it are different matters. What counts as an action? When does it begin? Does the conscious desire to perform an action always precede the act? If not, is it really a voluntary action? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology, (...) and Social Science. This book brings together some to the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will. (shrink)

This is the third volume of the new series Social, Political, & Legal Philosophy and it deals with the relationship between Law and The Philosophy of Action. In this volume a number of legal issues are illuminated by resource to the analysis of mental concepts. Issues in Criminal Law, Contract Law, Acceptance of Legal Systems, and the nature of Legal Norms are some of the main issues dealt in the papers that constitute the volume. Conceptual analysis is used and (...) new overtures are made into current findings in the Cognitive Sciences. All of this results in illuminating accounts that throw new light on traditional fundamental legal issues. This volume is a precursor in the powerful theorizing of the Cognitive Sciences that is being brought to bear in the Philosophy of Mind and in the theory of Law, and this theorizing will increase in the coming years. (shrink)

The pull to coordinate with other individuals is fundamental, serving as the basis for our social connectedness to others. Discussed is a dynamical and ecological perspective to joint action, an approach that embeds the individual’s mind in a body and the body in a niche, a physical and social environment. Research on uninstructed coordination of simple incidental rhythmic movement, along with research on goal‐directed, embodied cooperation, is reviewed. Finally, recent research is discussed that extends the coordination and cooperation studies, (...) examining how synchronizing with another, and how emergent social units of perceiving and acting are reflected in people’s feelings of connection to others. (shrink)

According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joint activity requires participants to have intentions-in-action (in John Searle’s (1983) sense) that violate this constraint. (...) I argue that the exclusivity constraint should not be accepted as an unconditional constraint on the contents of intentions-in-action: one may intend to perform a basic action that belongs both to oneself and to another agent. Based on the phenomenology of tool use, I first argue that intentions-in-action of one’s basic actions may be technologically extended, meaning that their contents are not restricted to concern the agent’s bodily movements. In analogy with this, I then argue that the phenomenology of some skillful joint activities supports the idea that one’s basic intentions-in-action may be socially extended, in violation of the widely accepted exclusivity constraint. Tollefsen’s account is specifically constructed to account for the joint activities of infants and toddlers who lack the capacity to think of others as planning agents and grasp their plan-like intentions (a capacity required by Michael Bratman’s (1992, 1993, 2009a, b) influential account of joint activity). At the end of the paper, I raise some doubts regarding the extent to which infants and toddlers have socially extended intentions-in-action. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a growth of single-issue campaigns in western democracies and a proliferation of groups attempting to exert political influence and achieve social change. In this context, it is important to consider why individuals do or don't get involved in collective action, for example in the trade union movement and the women's movement. Social psychologists have an important contribution to make in addressing this question. The social psychological approach directly concerns the relationship between the individual (...) and society and a number of theories have been developed in the field, particularly by contemporary European researchers. Yet, surprisingly, there has never been, until now, a concerted attempt to bring these various strands of research together in a coherent, detailed presentation of the social psychological approach to collective action. The authors of _The Social Psychology of Collective Action _review and integrate a number of theories developed in this field as well as presenting their own original research and data. The research discussed in the book ranges over a number of different contexts, with a particular focus on women's groups organizing around issues of gender. Questions addressed include: why do women get involved in women's groups? What part is played by experiences of discrimination in the family and in the workplace? What are the benefits of group involvement? How are feminist activists perceived by others who choose not to get involved? Findings from questionnaires and interviews are integrated with contemporary social psychological theory, especially social identity theory. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We (...) induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

Il y a comme un hiatus entre le titre et le sous-titre de ce livre. Le titre, Aux origines de l'action sociale, annonce une intention modeste ; en effet l'ouvrage, composé de touches successives, ne se présente pas comme une synthèse historique organisée. Par contre le sous-titre indique un projet précis et construit, un projet d'histoire : L'invention des services sociaux aux chemins de fer. Dans le texte tout se passe comme si les auteurs n'avaient pas voulu (pas (...) su?) choisir entre... (shrink)

My aim is to understand at least some of the non-instrumental reasons we can have for action in a way that can provide a satisfying non-egoist account of 'social actions' - actions undertaken for the sake of others. I do this in part by presenting, in terms of a discussion of the rationality of emotions, an account of what it is for something to have import to an agent . I then extend this account to include our caring about (...) others as agents, in part by revealing the way in which one's emotional and desiderative responsiveness to another agent one cares about must be sensitive to her cares, so that one comes to share her cares. The upshot is substantial revision in our understanding of agency, both in terms of our understanding of the role emotions play in our agency and in terms of a careful extension of the scope of practical rationality to include what I call a 'rationality of import'. (shrink)

This monograph addresses the worlds of social science theory and artificial intelligence AI. The book examines the interaction of individual cognitive factors and social influence on human action and discusses the implications for developments in artificial intelligence.; This book is intended for graduate and research level artificial intelligence and social science theory including sociology, economics, psychology.

Social inclusion/exclusion involves just/unjust social relations and social structures enabling or constraining opportunities for participation and health. In this paper, social inclusion/exclusion is explored as a dialectic. Three discourses – discourses on recognition, capabilities, and equality and citizenship – are identified within Canadian literature. Each discourse highlights a different view of the injustices leading to social exclusion and the conditions supporting inclusion and social justice. An Integrated Framework for Social Justice that incorporates the three discourses is developed and used to (...) critique the dominant focus on distributive justice within foundational Canadian nursing documents. We propose a broader conceptualization of social (in)justice that includes both relational and structural dimensions. Opportunities for multilevel interventions to promote social justice are identified. This framework is congruent with nursing's moral imperative to promote health equity and with the multiple roles played by nurses to promote social justice in everyday practice. (shrink)

New studies tell how human action is causing planetary degradation and how changes to our diets and financial behaviours could lead to significant benefits. But how many of us adjust our behaviour in response to such information? This book explores people’s reactions to Optimal Rational Positions: propositions that set out requirements for change.

Large Groups are not constituted simply by adding further members to small groups. There is a qualitative difference between the social actions which take place in small communities and those in large ones. Large communities are irreducibly characterized by anonymity, i.e., the members of large groups don’t know of most of the other members as individual. Therefore, social action in large groups is based on a sign process: each member of a large group is understood as a representative of (...) the other anonymous members of the group as well as a sign for the group as a whole. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION 'Anthropology' does not have quite the same meaning in Germany as it has in English-speaking countries. As the word is used in the latter ...

In the 1970s, particularly in his article “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text”, Paul Ricœur proposed a hypothesis concerning the homology between the text and social action. That hypothesis is not reducible to the narrative logic prevailing in late Ricœur’s writings, and we are searching to elucidate its further implications in social sciences. A new hermeneutics of social meanings can be founded upon it, enriched by the methodological experience of structural semiotics and taking (...) into account some special processes of sense-giving as “remote-model behavior” and “sense-suppressing action”. . (shrink)

Free will can be understood as a novel form of action control that evolved to meet the escalating demands of human social life, including moral action and pursuit of enlightened self-interest in a cultural context. That understanding is conducive to scientific research, which is reviewed here in support of four hypotheses. First, laypersons tend to believe in free will. Second, that belief has behavioral consequences, including increases in socially and culturally desirable acts. Third, laypersons can reliably distinguish free (...) actions from less free ones. Fourth, actions judged as free emerge from a distinctive set of inner processes, all of which share a common psychological and physiological signature. These inner processes include self-control, rational choice, planning, and initiative. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of what history an obstacle that stands in the way of our performing a certain action must have in order to render us socially unfree to x. The most promising view on this question is the moral responsibility view, according to which such an obstacle renders us socially unfree to x, if and only if another person is morally responsible for its existence. The main challenge of this view is to identify a serviceable test (...) for establishing when someone is morally responsible for the existence of an obstacle. Numerous attempts to do so have been made over the years, but none of them proved to be successful. In my discussion of the moral responsibility view I will expose the failure of the most recent and powerful attempt to identify such a test. Then I will suggest a more plausible test and defend it from a few possible objections. Before discussing the moral responsibility view I will discuss its main rivals and show why it is superior to them in the first place. (shrink)

In his recent book Professor Tuomela presents a philosophical account of social action that relies upon the presuppositions of his purposive-causal theory of individual action. In particular, the concept of “we-intention” plays as central a role in the new theory as does that of intention in the earlier one. This article examines Tuomela’s concept of “we-intention”. Tuomela’s introduction of the concept into social action theory is motivated by the assumption that theories of individual actions and social actions (...) are analogous relative to the role of a concept of intention in those theories. This assumption is criticized; and a number of difficulties with the new concept are discussed. (shrink)

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its corresponding COVID-19 is challenging national preparedness and response ability to pandemics. No one is prepared well, but governments around the world must respond as effectively and efficiently as possible to pandemics, and every occurrence of such worldwide disease must be a lesson for preparedness. While plans and programs may be in place to arrest the rapid spread of the virus, the success of any state intervention relies much on how cohesive the society is, (...) how trusting the people are, and how trustworthy the government is. Social cohesion begets trust, and trust engenders obedience and calm. The absence of social cohesion produces social unrest and social erosion, lack or absence of social trust creates risk societies, disobedience. When these conditions exist, the spread of a virus is inevitable. Furthermore, they create a pandemic of confusion and fear, of stigmatization and discrimination. The ways that nations respond to the pandemic today and how the society responds to state actions will principally determine their lots and destinies in the next decades or even in the next elections. The pandemic reveals the quality of leaders and people a nation has. Governments that are successful at controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and minimizing fatalities of COVID-19 will enjoy even more social cohesion and public trust, while those that deferred vigorous interventions to control its spread will see greater social stress and distrust, resulting in the paralyzation of the public’s faith in leaders and government institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools by Geoffrey BakerKim BoeskovGeoffrey Baker: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021)If indeed there exists, as Geir Johansen has proposed,1 a self-critical movement within the field of music education, Geoffrey Baker is undoubtedly one of its leading (...) figures. According to Johansen, the self-critical turn is characterized by an increasing number of music educators directing criticism toward music education itself by denouncing overly romantic visions of “the power of music” and scrutinizing how music educational practices are implicated in the propulsion of problematic social forces of inequality, oppression, and injustice. Baker’s widely read book from 2014, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,2 thoroughly denounced the globally acclaimed Venezuelan ‘musical miracle’ as a myth. Based on extensive field work in Venezuela, Baker painstakingly dissected El Sistema as an archaic, morally, and pedagogically flawed model of music education veiled in the empty rhetoric of music as a tool of social redemption and documented how such models are ripe with opportunities for abuse, in every sad sense of the word.The continuation of Baker’s critical project is published in the form of a four-hundred-page book, entitled Rethinking Social Action Through Music. Baker presents the text as “a ‘post-El Sistema’ project”3 as it constitutes a departure [End Page 92] from his preoccupation with ‘The System’ toward potential alternatives to the Venezuelan model. He finds such an alternative in the Red (Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín), a network of music schools in the Colombian city of Medellín, which figures as the center of attention in Baker’s institutional ethnography. However, even as the Colombian institution is invoked as a counterexample to its Venezuelan sibling, the Red is not held up for its ability to enact social change or display of innovative pedagogical principles. What Baker finds exemplary and worthy of investigation is the willingness he locates within the administrative layer of the Red to continuously engage in reflective work with regards to the tensions, conflicts, and pitfalls, as well as potentials of musical-social work. Particularly, Baker’s attention is directed to the decision-making processes and discussions among the leaders of the institution; how senior staff members adopt self-critical stances, how needs for institutional change are recognized, the recurring frictions between musical staff and members of the institution’s social team, and tensions between public statements expressing confidence in the program’s efficacy and internal conversations full of ambivalence and doubt.It is with reference to the reflexive processes of the Red that Baker conducts insightful and well-informed discussions of a range of themes relevant to music educators and scholars. Baker situates his analysis within the wider landscape of SATM (Social Action Through Music), which can roughly be understood as the field of musical practice emanating from the large socio-musical orchestral programs conceived in Latin America in the last decades of the 20th century and subsequently spread as ‘Sistema-inspired’ offspring throughout the globe in the beginning of the 21st century. Yet, the discussions found in this book are easily connected to pertinent themes of the philosophy and sociology of music education, such as the notion of artistic citizenship, decolonization, the political nature of music education, ‘the social’ in music education, to name a few. One of the striking qualities of this book is its ability to identify important issues in the local context of Medellín, extract the underlying mechanisms and through empirical examples unfold a much broader discussion of what social justice and social change might mean in the field of music education. Baker, originally educated as an ethnomusicologist, reflects on these topics with depth and nuance, underscoring the relevance of approaching these complex issues through ethnographic work, rather than basing such discussions solely on conceptual exploration.Appearing as a red line throughout the book is Baker’s insistence on foregrounding the ambiguity and ambivalence of musical-social work. In fact, his critical encounter with the field... (shrink)

Is human freedom and choice exaggerated in recent social theory? Should agency be the central in sociology? In this, penetrating and assured book, one of the leading commentators in the field asks where social theory is going. Barnes argues that social theory has taken the wrong turn in over-stating individual freedom. The result is that social contexts in which all individual actions are situated, is dangerously under-theorized. Barnes calls for a form of social theory that recognizes that sociability is the (...) essential characteristic of human life. It is our capacity to communicate with each other, and plan for each other’s welfare, that makes us truly human. Once this is allowed, notions of “agency”, “freedom”, and “choice” lose their connotation with free-floating individualism. Instead the embedded character of agency is starkly revealed. This is a model of well-informed and balanced analysis. It will be of interest to students of sociology, philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain‐general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the control (...) of action. As such, we label the model “ICON” (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory‐based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory‐of‐mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a “default stance” in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain‐general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing. (shrink)

Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous–response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds. Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different (...) timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective. (shrink)