Explaining and Understanding Human Behaviour
Exploring the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences
Module details
- Offered to 2nd Years
- Mondays 16.00-18.00
- 2-term module worth 5 ECTS
- Available to eligible students as part of I-Explore
- Extra Credit or Degree Credit where your department allows
This module explores philosophical problems that surround attempts in psychology, sociology, anthropology and other ‘human sciences’ to understand and explain human behaviour. We will begin with the age-old philosophical problem of free will, asking whether it is possible to bring our individual actions and cultural practices within the scope of a theory of mind or society. Examples in the weeks that follow will include apparently irrational beliefs in other cultures, aesthetic and moral value judgments, mental ill health, deviant behaviour and the nature and binding force of social norms. This is an interdisciplinary module in which you will be encouraged to question your own assumptions about what makes us tick.
Information blocks
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module you will be better able to:
- Demonstrate awareness of common problems in the human sciences in attempts to understand and explain human behaviour.
- Develop decision-making skills by selecting pertinent examples from course content
- Integrate concepts using self-directed primary and secondary research.
- Present individual and group work to peers and respond to constructive feedback from facilitator and other learners.
- Apply key concepts, research, and feedback in two end-of-term essays.
Indicative core content
- The free will problem.
- Anscombe’s analysis of the concept of intention.
- Durkheim’s ‘first and most basic rule of sociological method’, to ‘consider social facts as things’.
- Malinowski’s call to consider forms of life ‘from the native’s point of view’.
- Value as an anthropological problem, as seen e.g. in Malinowski’s study of the Kula ring.
- Evans-Pritchard’s account of witchcraft among the Azande
- Bourdieu’s sociology of taste.
- Freud’s economic, topographical and structural models of the minds, and his approach to explaining neurotic illness.
- Irving Goffman’s studies of the ‘interaction order’ of everyday activities.
- Harold Garfinkel’s studies of participants’ order-production methods.
- Debates surrounding cultural relativism and rationality, as they apply to so-called ‘primitive’ societies, apparently irrational beliefs (e.g. of ‘primitive’ people in anthropology or of ‘mentally ill’ people in psychiatry), functionalist accounts of social norms, etc.
- The regress problem of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rules and rule-following, and Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian critique of ‘the idea of a social science’.
- The problem of making ‘knowledge-how’ (Gilbert Ryle) or ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polyani) propositionally explicit.
- The ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of knowledge.
- The problem of ambiguity in the human sciences as between a deed repeatedly done and the doing of it on a particular occasion.
- The problem of the reflexivity of the human sciences, i.e. of our attempts to understand ‘our own’ actions and practices, especially with respect to the language of the human sciences.
Assessment
- Coursework: Essay - 1500-2000 words. This assessment has a lower weighting than the later essay of the same length, as it comes early in the course and you may not have much experience in the subject (40%)
- Coursework: Essay - 1500-2000 words. This assessment has a higher weighting than the prior essay of the same length because it comes at the end of the module and so it will better evaluate your summative learning (60%)
Key information
- Requirements: You are expected to attend all classes and undertake approximately 85 hours of independent study in total during the module. Independent study includes reading and preparation for classes, researching and writing coursework assignments and preparing for other assessments.
- This module is designed as an undergraduate Level 5 course. See Imperial Horizons level descriptors [pdf]