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Using illustrative descriptions of criminal & military acts, discussed are the problems of (1) action attribution & action individuation, & (2) the relationship between psychological constructs & social contexts. Focus is on the role of knowledge & intention in the logic of action description, & on the reflexive logics of action/intention/knowledge attributions. It is argued that the philosophical problem of action individuation can be resolved in the analysis of agents' in situ descriptions & attributions of action, & that the different kinds of action description & attribution have a different logic-in-use, here termed socio-logic. 1 Appendix, 16 References. I. Shagrir

This thesis is concerned with the analysis of practical reasoning and members orderly methods for producing descriptions, drawing inferences and making judgments, The analyses are conducted from within the ethnomethodological perspective and rely extensively upon linguistic- philosophical resources. The investigation of members practices consists in empirical studies of social- communicative interaction using conversational and textual materials. The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Harvey Sacks provide a significant analytical resource in this endeavour.Given the immense complexity and pervasiveness of the above aspects of practical reasoning, this thesis takes as its starting (and focal) point the investigation of membership categorization practices: the methods by which persons in the culture categorize, or use categorizations of, other persons; the cultural resources available for this work; and the various interactional tasks accomplished through it.Membership categorizations turn out to be members methods for normatively organizing their reasoning and belief about, and their knowledge and perception of, the social world: activities, persons, social events and social settings. They are basic organizational resources in the normative production, reproduction and transmission of ”social structures\"; they provide descriptions of collectivities , work as social-structural mapping devices, and are usable for the provision of accounts, explanations, histories, predictions etc. As descriptive of persons and collectivities, categorizations work as inscriptive and inferential devices and provide judgmental parameters. Various kinds of categories and categorizations (including collectivity categories, and individually assignable categories) are investigated for their dimensions of use, their organizational properties and their normative character.The flexibilities of categorizational work, grounded in the conventional organization of category concepts, provide for and display the complexity, order and richness that are an abiding feature of courses of social interaction. Even those phenomena traditionally treated as contingent, aberrant, 'problematic', or purely idiosyncratic (e.g., attributions of prejudice, equivocality, dilemmas, etc.) turn out to be grounded and available in methodic practices and in the conventional properties of cultural resources (here, membership categorizations) that are at the disposal of every competent member.Some properties of descriptions are also analyzed in terms of the issues of co-selection of items, the conventional implications of selected items and their orderings, the inferential possibilities thus made available, and the provision for, and work of, ascriptions and accounts uncover the irremediably normative (and occassionedly moral) character of such work. The normative and moral character of members’ practical reasoning and the various conventions of inference are further elucidated through the analysis of specific ordering devices and contrast work.The pervasive, everyday practical nature of moral judgement work, of values-in-use and of “morality” emerges as a fundamental precept of this work. This perspective is briefly located in the context of some of the work of specific, contemporary moral philosophers.