دانلود کتاب Rationality

How are we to understand the beliefs and actions of other men in other cultures? Can we, in fact, translate the meanings and the reason of one culture into the language of another? From their beginnings the sociological sciences have been variously and inescapably involved with questions such as these. In recent years they have been raised more persistently and challengingly by philosophers. The problem of the culture-boundedness of meaning, of the universality of the criteria of rationality as they have been developed in Western society; of the comprehensibility of ritual acts have come into the full focus of a many-sided debate conducted between philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. The issues go to the very core of what a social science is and can claim to do.

This volume contains the principal contributions to this continuing debate. They are so arranged that the reader can follow step by step the controversies which have raged in books and periodicals over the past decade about the role of the social scientist and the philosophical status of sociological knowledge.