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Why? QUOTES

Why? QUOTES

1 " Both personal experience and professional studies of social processes, after all, had led me to think that people rarely accomplish exactly what they consciously plan, and constantly find events unrolling differently from what they anticipated. Why, then, do people's descriptions and explanations of social processes overwhelmingly emphasize conscious deliberation? "

― Charles Tilly , Why?

2 " Whatever else they do, governmental commissions give reasons. In the Anglo-American political tradition, royal commissions and their nonroyal counterparts regularly form by executive order during national crises. Like reports from the National Research Council, they broadcast consensus among authorities, and thus aim to still controversy. Composed of distinguished citizens whose reputations shield them from charges of partisanship and self-interest, commissions usually call witnesses and issue reports. But at the end, they offer their own considered collective judgment on the matter at hand— their reasons. "

― Charles Tilly , Why?

3 " This closing chapter takes up three problems about authoritative reason giving that earlier chapters have raised but not resolved: what makes reasons credible, how people who work with specialized sorts of reason giving can make their reasons accessible to people outside their specialties, and what particular problems social scientists face when it comes to communicating their reasons, and reconciling them with the reasons that we as ordinary people give for our actions. Governmental commissions, we will see, offer just one of many ways to broadcast reasons. We will also see that the credibility of reasons always depends on the relation between speaker and audience, in part because giving of reasons always says something about the relation itself. "

― Charles Tilly , Why?