Full Description
This book provides a thorough analysis of the scientific, critical, and cultural questions at the foundation of theory-building in communication and other social sciences. Any claim to knowledge, the author explains, can be analyzed in terms of a series of characteristics: the object of its explanation, the explanatory form and evidentiary method employed, its characteristic explanations, the scope of its performance, and its consequences of value. From identifying basic epistemological questions to exploring the impact of the knowledge industry on society, the volume offers readers the analytical tools to understand, compare, and evaluate theories and their use both inside and outside the classroom. The book also includes a systematic analysis of communication's most influential theories and traces their genealogies across different content fields and disciplines.
Contents
1. On Reading This Book
2. The Nature of the Phenomenal World
3. Our Manner of Engagement of the Phenomenal World
4. The Nature of the Individual
5. The Character of the Justified Argument
6. The Character of the Practical Argument
7. The Relationship between Theory and Method
8. Scholarship in Society
9. Communication Theory Analysis
