social action a subclass of human action involving the interaction among agents and their mutual orientation, or the action of groups. While all intelligible actions are in some sense social, social actions must be directed to others. Talcott Parsons (1902–79) captured what is distinctive about social action in his concept of ‘double contingency,’ and similar concepts have been developed by other philosophers and sociologists, including Weber, Mead, and Wittgenstein. Whereas in monological action the agents’ fulfilling their purposes depends only on contingent facts about the world, the success of social action is also contingent on how other agents react to what the agent does and how that agent reacts to other agents, and so on. An agent successfully communicates, e.g., not merely by finding some appropriate expression in an existing symbol system, but also by understanding how other agents will understand him. Game theory describes and explains another type of double contingency in its analysis of the interdependency of choices and strategies among rational agents. Games are also significant in two other respects. First, they exemplify the cognitive requirements for social interaction, as in Mead’s analysis of agents’ perspective taking: as a subject (‘I’), I am an object for others (‘me’), and can take a third-person perspective along with others on the interaction itself (‘the generalized other’). Second, games are regulated by shared rules and mediated through symbolic meanings; Wittgenstein’s private language argument establishes that rules cannot be followed ‘privately.’ Some philosophers, such as Peter Winch, conclude from this argument that rule-following is a basic feature of distinctively social action. Some actions are social in the sense that they can only be done in groups. Individualists (such as Weber, Jon Elster, and Raimo Tuomela) believe that these can be analyzed as the sum of the actions of each individual. But holists (such as Marx, Durkheim, and Margaret Gilbert) reject this reduction and argue that in social actions agents must see themselves as members of a collective agent. Holism has stronger or weaker versions: strong holists, such as Durkheim and Hegel, see the collective subject as singular, the collective consciousness of a society. Weak holists, such as Gilbert and Habermas, believe that social actions have plural, rather than singular, collective subjects. Holists generally establish the plausibility of their view by referring to larger contexts and sequences of action, such as shared symbol systems or social institutions. Explanations of social actions thus refer not only to the mutual expectations of agents, but also to these larger causal contexts, shared meanings, and mechanisms of coordination. Theories of social action must then explain the emergence of social order, and proposals range from Hobbes’s coercive authority to Talcott Parsons’s value consensus about shared goals among the members of groups. See also ACTION THEORY, HOLISM, PHILOS- OPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , WEBE. J.Bo.