Common Sense and Sociological Explanations1
Common Sense and Sociological Explanations1
复制标题
常识和社会学解释1
DOI：
10.1086/678271
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
4.4
通讯作者：
D. Watts
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Watts
长期以来，社会学家一直主张用社会学的方法来解释，将其与常识进行对比。然而，这篇文章的论点是，社会学家比他们意识到的更依赖常识。此外，这种未被承认的依赖性给他们对社会行动的解释带来了严重的问题，也就是说，为什么人们会做他们所做的事情。许多这样的解释，有人认为，混淆了可理解性与因果关系的方式是不有效的科学解释的标准。由此可见，如果社会学家希望他们的解释在科学上是有效的，他们就必须在这些基础上对它们进行具体的评估，特别是通过强迫他们做出预测。然而，在变得更加科学的过程中，可以预测，社会学家的解释也将变得不那么令人满意，从直观的，有意义的角度来看。因此，即使新的数据来源和改进的方法为社会学研究开辟了令人兴奋的新方向，社会学家也将越来越多地不得不在不令人满意的科学解释和令人满意但不科学的故事之间做出选择。
Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways that are not valid by the standards of scientific explanation. It follows that if sociologists want their explanations to be scientifically valid, they must evaluate them specifically on those grounds—in particular, by forcing them to make predictions. In becoming more scientific, however, it is predicted that sociologists’ explanations will also become less satisfying from an intuitive, sense-making perspective. Even as novel sources of data and improved methods open exciting new directions for sociological research, therefore, sociologists will increasingly have to choose between unsatisfying scientific explanations and satisfying but unscientific stories.