Drawing on the example of Deutscher's earlier research as well as cognate work by ethnomethodologists, this volume provides a more complex and valid account of the relationship between what we say and what we do. Going well beyond the interpersonal level, the authors explore the problematics of symbolic language and suggest a relevant line of investigation for those doing applied work in the nexus of human relations.

This book has some of the qualities of a detective story and of a drama. As a drama, it resembles a dialogue between the author and his friends and foes. The book has a beginning, middle, and end that do not correspond to the economical, but quite a historical character of most scientific writing where the literature is reviewed and problems stated, the evidence presented and a conclusion reached. Instead, the beginning is an account of the author's confrontation with a nagging, persistent, and perhaps ultimately insoluble problem that faces every honest researcher - can we explain behaviour by giving evidence of attitudes? The middle develops new leads and materials but never abandons the central characters of the first act. The end, in Pirandello fashion, leaves us with a feeling of illumination, but illumination of the essential paradoxes and difficulties - not the light that breaks on a heroic solution.

This book provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy on the origin of bioethics that shows the importance of bringing emotions into bioethical discourse. Divided into two parts, the book begins by defining bioethics and explaining the importance of emotions in making us human, allowing us to consider life holistically. Ferrarello argues that emotions and bioethics are better served when they are combined, and that dismissing emotions as nothing more than a nuisance to our rationality has created a society that does not fit our human nature. Chapters explore how ethics relate to intimate life and how ethical agents determine themselves within their surrounding world, uniquely and interrogatively using ‘bioethics’ to consider not only medical dilemmas but also issues concerning environmental and individual well-being. By addressing personal, interpersonal, and societal problems as dynamically interconnected in bioethical problems she helps us to renew our sense of responsibility toward a good quality of life. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable reading for students of health science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as for those interested in the link between emotions and bioethical discourse from both a psychological and philosophical perspective.

The relation between attitudes and behavior has been of enduring concern to social scientists over the past half century. The present volume is a sequel to a landmark theoretical and methodological critique of the literature on that relationship, published by the first author, Dr. Deutscher, in 1973. It is informed throughout by a symbolic interactionist perspective, and turns on issues of validity and credibility of the verbal evidence on which social science still heavily relies in its accounts of behavior. What Sentiments and Acts provides is a more complex, nuanced, and valid account of the relationship between what we say and what we do. Drawing on the example of Deutscher's earlier research and of cognate work by ethno-methodologists--this book is, in part, the history of a problem--the authors argue for a "double screen," in part methodological and in part conceptual, through which the evidence for inconsistencies must be sifted. The account here adduced goes well beyond the merely interpersonal level; it insists, instead, on the problematics of the symbolic language used to express or convey the meaning of human behavior. In so doing, it extends the perspective on social organization it embodies, and suggests a relevant and welcome line of investigation for those doing applied work in the nexus of human relations.