Fay General Laws And Explaining Human Behaviour Notes

Brian Fay - General Laws and Explaining Human Behaviour

• Three theses of essay:

  • explanations of behaviour in terms of its reasons rest upon general laws because such explanations are causal in nature

  • it is unlikely that these general laws are statable in the intentionalist vocabulary of the social sciences

  • the social sciences must be genuinely theoretical if they are to be viable

• Despite the fact that general laws cannot be stated conventionally, there remains a viable theoretical science of human behaviour - critical theory

• Singularity thesis claims that reason-explanations can account for human behaviour without implying general laws

• This thesis is supported by two arguments

  • the logical-connection argument claims that behaviour is explained by principles of actions, and that there is a logical relation between the outcome and the principle, rather than a general, recurring pattern. It claims that explanation involves specifying the reasons that rationalise an action

    • but there is a difference between there being ‘a’ reason you might act and ‘the’ reason that actually motivates you to act

    • so the argument is only successful insofar as the given reasons actually motivate - they may be sufficient but not necessary, or necessary but not sufficient. So they must actually motivate i.e. be causal

      • BOTH Humean ‘constant conjunction’ and the supposedly non-lawlike realist ‘causal mechanism’ theory assume general laws - in the latter case, because if it were not outline under precisely which conditions the mechanism is applicable, it would not be a full explanation

      • BOTH also rely upon generalizations - for Humeans, causal explanations are a type of generalization, for realists, generalizations indicate the existence of mechanisms

  • the essential-nature argument claims that a good explanation of a phenomena relies upon an account of the nature of the entities involved

    • e.g.. in the case of a practical reasoning process, an action can be explained by the nature of the decision making process - given this, the specific action was inevitable

    • we don’t need to reformulate a particular instance into a generalization with the use of substitute letters like x, y and z

    • This is because reasoning can be functional - e.g. someone dances because they seek to dance

    • for this reason we tend to be interested in the conditions under which the function doesn’t operate

    • functional characterizations are so because we see order in them and hence assume general laws can describe them. thus the essential nature argument fails. fucking duh.

• So, reason-explanations view actions as the causal outcome of mental events. Because they are causal and causal explanations are essentially nomological, reason-explanations rest implicitly on general laws

• But what about the blockhead objection that we don’t know what the general laws are? We do seem to be far more confident regarding particular instances than general laws. This can be accounted for in three ways:

  • sometimes general laws do not speak in the same terms as specific instances e.g. molecules vibrating replaces water heating

  • we can make causal assertions e.g. smoking causes cancer without any knowledge of what the general law might be, and still have these assertions supported by evidence

  • difference between homonomic and heteronomic generalizations

    • homonomic - we have reason to believe that the...

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