پایان نامه کارشناسی ارشد زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی با عنوان ﺟﺒﺮﺍﺟﺘﻤﺎﻋﻲ ﺩﺭ ﺁﺛﺎﺭ ﻣﻨﺘﺨﺐ ﺟﺎﻥ ﺍﺷﺘﺎﻳﻦ ﺑﮏ ﻭ ﺟﻼﻝ ﺁﻝ ﺍﺣﻤﺪ

 

Social Determinism in Selective Works of John Steinbeck and Jalal Ale-Ahmad

 
Background
 
          Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior. Social determinism would look only at social phenomena, such as customs and expectations, education, industrial and financial conditions, and interpersonal interactions. This doctrine states that people think and act in accordance with their social conditioning rather than through genetic predisposition or a real freedom of choice, and that human action must have la sufficient distinctly social cause.
 
This phenomenon elaborates that human behaviors are shaped and directed by the frame of its surroundings. Based on this point of view all the new born human body is like a clean and unwritten paper sheet, so all the goodies and badies, defeats and triumphs that happen to men are the consequences of family, friends and in a larger scope society. From the moment of birth, men started being familiar with social happenings, ups and downs, laws, limitations, must and necessities and all sort of social needs and little by little these social interchanges going to be institutionalized in them, so they don’t understand its determinism compeletly. Human beings are the product of society and the properties of this society can vividly be seen on its product.
 
          Consider certain human behaviors, such as having a particular sexual orientation, committing murder, or writing poetry. A social determinist would look only at social phenomena, such as customs and expectations, education, and interpersonal interactions, to decide whether or not a given person would exhibit any of these behaviors. They would discount biological and other non-social factors, such as genetic makeup, the physical environment, etc. Ideas about nature and biology would be considered to be socially constructed.
 
          Social deterministic approach is laid in the ideas of Kant. Kant has called human beings as the surrendered creature toward society. In his point of view social determinism has occupied all parts of human beings life. He believes that human beings have no identity before to the society. He believes that people are an empty bowl that must be filled with social needs and necessities and people are not immune of its determinism or social pressure. Since human beings have variety of wishes, hopes, dreams, logical or illogical goals and affluent greed to achieve it, the only way to control them out of them is social forces or pressure. Social pressure is a term which is entitled to the forces which prevents people from crossing the red lines and social norms. Social forces get its power from social institutes and organization.  
 
          Kant argued that there were two aspects to reality: one was the world as it appeared to observation and entered into thought, the other was the world as it really was, independently of any conceptual framework of an observer. In observing and thinking about the world, human beings apply categorization.Kant's main idea, whatever sense can finally be made of it, depends on his fundamental two-world doctrine. He locates determinism in the empirical world or world of appearances, and freedom in the world of things-in-themselves, the world of reason. It is important that the latter world is not in time.  So he is a determinist of a kind, opposed to the tradition of Compatibilism, not really in the Incompatibilist tradition, but tries to make his determinism and freedom-as-origination consistent by his own private means.