Description
When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: 'requests', 'proposals', 'complaints', 'excuses'. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labeling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to others' behaviors in order to quiz, sanction, praise, blame, or otherwise hold them to account. This book develops a new account of action grounded in certain fundamental ideas about the nature of human sociality: that social conduct is naturally interpreted as purposeful; that human behavior is shaped under a tyranny of social accountability; and that language is our central resource for social action and reaction.
Table of Contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I. Preliminaries to Action: 1. Basics of action; 2. The study of action; Part II. The Nature of Action: 3. The distribution of action; 4. The ontology of action; Part III. Action and Human Diversity: 5. Collateral effects; 6. Natural meaning; Postface; Index.
