Abstract

This dissertation examines the following question: can social scientists construct explanations of social actions which do not draw upon, and are not vulnerable to, participant accounts of the same actions? Chapter I shows that Durkheim's arguments for the affirmative position on this question and Winch's for the negative are inconclusive. Alternative conceptions of a necessary connection between participant and observer accounts of social actions are considered. Special attention is given to the claim that any explanation of human actions must appeal to the agents' reasons for their actions. In Chapter II and III, functional explanations are examined as an alleged counter-example to this proposal. ;Chapter II explores the status of functional explanations in biology. It is argued that, in a biological context, the fact that a function of X, a feature of systems of type S, is F helps to explain the persistence of Xs in Ss in the following way. It is a thesis of evolutionary biology that adaptive traits tend to persist while nonadaptive ones disappear. Hence showing how Xs have been adaptive for Ss explains why Xs have persisted in Ss. A function statement explains the persistence of Xs in Ss by providing this information. ;Chapter III draws upon this analysis of functional explanations in biology in order to elaborate the conditions which must be met by legitimate functional explanations in sociology. It is argued that functional explanations of the origin or persistence of social practices ultimately depend upon theories about the unconscious or upon evolutionary theory as it might be used by sociobiologists or by social evolutionists of a Darwinian sort. Finally, it is argued that even if it is assumed that there is an adequate theoretical base of this sort for functional explanations, functional explanations do not in fact succeed in explaining social actions in a way which is independent of the agents' reasons for their actions. ;Some implications of these results for the question of the appropriate relationship between participant and observer accounts of social action are considered. It is argued that the development of a sociological theory which explains social actions without drawing upon participant accounts of the same actions is unlikely