Cees-Jan Pen asked:
>1) WHY HAS THE BEHAVIOURAL LOCATION THEORY LOST ITS
>POPULARITY AFTER THE 1980S?
>2) WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION OF THE RECENT BY SOME
>AUTHORS StRESSED 'REVITALIZATION OF THE BEHAVIOURAL
>LOCATION THEORY'?
Dear Cees-Jan
I cannot really answer your request, because I did neither follow nor
investigate the fate of location theory during the last two decades.
However, there has been a decline of behavioral approaches in general.
Behaviorism is a general perspective within social sciences and psychology.
It's origin is strongly related to positivistic philosophy of science,
which took, impressed by the success of physics, the classical epistemology
of natural sciences as a model for all science. Simply speaking, this meant
to treat human behavior as a matter of causal relations and of
deterministic explanations. Within philosophy this perspective has become
profoundly discredited. Today, within the humanities human behavior is
regarded as an intentional phenomenon. This means, that it is not treated
as a result of of any causes (or stimuli) but as a result of
interpretations, in particular subjective conceptions of future conditions
and conceptions of activities which could lead to these states. Mental
processes, however, are usually not conceived as a result of determining
environmental conditions, as the behavioral perspective would like to have
it, but as processes which have their own and autonomous dynamic. According
to that perspective, which is most clearly formulated in the work of Alfred
Schutz (and later for instance in Giddens' Structuration-Theory and
Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action), human activities are regarded as
"actions", which are steered by indeterminable mental processes. In
principle, but with variations, such a conception of human activities is
today philosophical standard. Within such a perspective, deterministic
models may be used for statistical representation of human activities, but
they cannot serve as models that explain human activities. This theoretical
development may be one of the (good) reasons for the decline of behavioral
approaches within many disciplines. As long as the "revitalization of
location theory" follows the behaviorist lines, it will face the same
critique (and fate) again.
Literature:
- Benno Werlen 1992: Society, Action and Space. (Routledge) -> Particularly
chapter one.
- Anthony Giddens 1976: New Rules of Sociological Method. (Hutchinson) ->
Particularly chapter 2 and 4, (with the exception of the paragraph on the
problem of adequance, which relies on a misunderstanding of Schutz)
- for the philosophical background on deterministic and indeterministic
models of human acitivities see for instance: Georg Henrik von Wright 1971:
Explanation and Understanding. (Cornell University Press), and more
difficult: Richard Rorty 1979: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
(Princeton University Press)
There is no standard interpretation on philosophy of science available.
Other authors may tell you quite different stories.
Regards
Wolfgang
------------------------------------
Dr. Wolfgang Zierhofer
Imfeldstr. 4
CH - 5430 Wettingen
Switzerland
Tel. +41 (0) 56 426 00 75
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