Practical Action: Wittgenstein, Pragmatism And Sociology

Product Description This book delineates a pluralist and dynamic model of practical action which thoughtfully takes into account the reflexive conception of agency that is, by and large, prevailing in current social sciences research. Such a model will challenge the one the cognitive sciences have rather successfully imposed on our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action. To make this model available, the book compares Wittgensteins theses on knowing, the pragmatist outlook on inquiry and the analysis of action in common offered by interactionist sociology. It thus shows how an integrated theory of practical action would warrant a radically contextual conception of human individual and collective behaviour. About the Author Albert Ogien is a Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research, France, and he teaches at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, France. His publications include The Managerial Spirit (1995), The Social Forms of Thought (2007), Desacralize Numbers (2013), and Sociology of Deviance (2018), among others. In the past decade, he has undertaken, with the philosopher Sandra Laugier, an inquiry into the experience of democracy, resulting in the books Why Disobey in Democracy? (2010), The Democracy Principle (2014), and Antidemocracy (2017).