ABSTRACT
Human actions remain at the core of most serious explanatory work undertaken within the behavioural sciences, but there still remain major obstacles blocking an appreciation of the truly unique status of the phenomena the people subsume under this rubric. In recent years, then, a kind of ‘fall-back’ position has been developed within the social and behavioural sciences to cover Durkheim's and much contemporary macro-level explanatory work of a statistical type, whatever the precise statistical tool in use. The abiding assumption of almost all of the work in the field which employs probabilistic concepts in the context of formulating theoretical explanations of human conduct is the equation of ‘human action’ with ‘event’. The transition from the original loci of inferential-statistical applications to their modern fields of use is sometimes treated as a process of successful intellectual cross-fertilization. The uses (and abuses) of probability theory are many and varied.
