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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Interpretive social science [was `Modern Man']
Message-ID: <678@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
Date: Fri, 12-Jun-87 15:28:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.678
Posted: Fri Jun 12 15:28:18 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 14-Jun-87 04:10:45 EDT
References: <3568624e.44e6@apollo.uucp>
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.uchicago.edu.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
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Xref: utgpu talk.religion.misc:2927 sci.philosophy.tech:170

nelson_p@apollo.uucp:
>I was a sociology major and then a psychology major before settling
>on bio-psych (physiological psychology).  Now I work as an engineer
>in computer graphics (technology applied to the creation of
>illusions).  One of the reasons I drifted was because there was no
>knowledge to be found in the first two 'disciplines'.  It was just so
>much social philosophy, which may or may not have been 'true' or
>'correct' but I would challenge anyone to demonstrate the ultimate
>verity of such knowledge.  ...

Following are some excerpts from the editors' introduction to
*Interpretive Social Science: A Reader*, ed. by Paul Rabinow and
William M. Sullivan (U. Calif. Press, 1979).  This contains essays by
Robert N. Bellah, Clifford Geertz, Albert O. Hirschman, Thomas Kuhn,
Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, and others.  I apologize to anyone who
dislikes extensive quotations on the net from published sources --
the point is both to recommend a work and to get people to read
something that they otherwise would not:
________________

As long as there has been a social science, the expectation has been
that it would turn from its humanistic infancy to the maturity of
hard science, thereby leaving behind its dependence on value,
judgment, and individual insight.  The dream of modern Western man to
be freed from his passions, his unconscious, his history, and his
traditions through the liberating use of reason has been the deepest
theme of contemporary social science thought.  Perhaps the deepest
theme of the twentieth century, however, has been the shattering of
the triumphalist view of history bequeathed to us by the nineteenth.
What Comte saw as the inevitable achievement of man, positive reason,
[Max] Weber saw as an iron cage [see the conclusion of Weber's *The
Protestant Ethic* -- RC].

The aim of this anthology is to present to a wide audience --
historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians
of religion, scientists, and philosophers -- a carefully selected
group of papers exemplary of the interpretive or hermeneutic approach
to the study of human society.

These readings address major theoretical issues by situating the
approach critically against positivist, structuralist, and
neo-Marxist positions. ...


DECONSTRUCTION
Interpreting the Crisis in the Social Sciences

Many contemporary searchers in the social sciences continue to see
themselves, as did their predecessors, as the heralds of the new age
of an at last established science.  They remain, like their
predecessors, disappointed.

The strength of natural science, according to Thomas Kuhn, has lain
in its ability to go beyond endless methodological discussions by
developing general shared paradigms which define problems and
procedures.  Social scientists have seized upon Kuhn's thesis in part
as a way of explaining the embarrassing failure of any of the social
sciences, including linguistics and economics, to develop either the
agreement on method or the generally acknowledged classic examples of
explanation characteristic of the natural sciences.  While not
denying the persistence and theoretical fruitfulness of certain
explanatory schemes in the social sciences, social investigators have
never reached the extraordinary degree of basic agreement that
characterizes modern natural science.  For Kuhn, such agreements
among practicing investigators constitutes the stage of
``paradigmatic'' science, a time of secure development, of extending
the explanatory capacity of an agreed-upon paradigm.  Paradigms are
the result of a chaotic stage that Kuhn calls ``pre-paradigmatic,''
in which the insights and mode of discourse later to become
universally accepted must fight it out with competing pre-paradigm
explanations.  Most fields, throughout their history, find themselves
in this situation.

This much of Kuhn's argument might be construed to buttress the
defenses of social sciences waiting to ``take off'' into a paradigm
stage of science.  Behaviorism, structural-functionalism, various
schools of materialism, Keynesianism, structuralism, and others have
all put themselves forward at some time as paradigm candidates.  If
none has yet succeeded in silencing its opponents with Newtonian
authority, perhaps a few more studies, or theories, or methodological
battles and our paradigms will emerge, at last triumphant.  However,
even if we admit this as a possibility -- and we shall show shortly
that there are compelling reasons for *not* admitting it -- Kuhn's
account of scientific development concludes on a disquieting note.
He shows that in the history of science even after the breakthrough
into the paradigm stage occurs, the stability achieved is only a
relative one.  The great paradigms of natural science have all, after
flourishing, finally been replaced by others.  The epochal case is
the revolution in twentieth-century physics in which relativity
theory and quantum mechanics undermined and succeeded the Newtonian
system.  From that point on, in physics the nineteenth century's
conception of logical, cumulative progress through a purely objective
science of observation and deductive explanation has been
progressively undermined.

Yet the issue for the human sciences is not simply that all
scientific facts depend on a context of theory, nor that no logic of
inquiry can be formulated to match the rigor of the procedures of
scientific verification.  The Kantian critical philosophy already
emphasized the relations between the objects of observation and the
subject of knowledge.  For Kant and his followers the universal and
objective validity of proven hypotheses is guaranteed precisely
because the subject constituting the fields of objects is a universal
and purely formal one.  The explanatory power of science is the
consequence of its basis in a logical, epistemic subject whose
activities can be generalized and understood as context-free
operations.  However, for comprehending the human world Kant
acknowledged the necessity of a ``practical anthropology'' focusing
on a subject not reducible to the pure theoretical subject of the
*Critique of Pure Reason*.  This subject knows himself through
reflection upon his own actions in the world as a subject not simply
of experience but of intentional action as well.  While the
interpretive approach [expounded here] is not in any strict sense
Kantian, it shares the postulate that practical understanding in
context cannot be reduced to a system of categories defined only in
terms of their relations to each other.

To put forward an approach to the human sciences as a paradigm
candidate requires that one accept the analogy to natural science
according to which human actions can be fixed in their meaning by
being subsumed under the law like operations of the epistemic
subject.  Gregory Bateson's recent attempt to apply models from
systems theory to the problems of the relations of mind to society,
and Jean Piaget's development of the structuralist project, represent
significant advances over what Piaget terms the atomistic empiricism
of causal explanation in social science.  For both the key focus is
upon holism, for which Bateson uses the metaphor of ecology.

Holistic explanation in these new forms seeks to organize a wide
variety of human phenomena that cannot be comprehended through models
based upon linear relations among elements.  The emphasis on mutually
determining relationships is the powerful central insight of
cybernetic and structuralist thinking.  However, it is crucial that
these relations are conceived as reducible to specific operations
that can be defined without reference to the particular context of
human action.  Although this position is an advance in
sophistication, it remains an effort to integrate the sciences of man
within a natural scientific paradigm.  Action in the historical,
cultural context is again reduced to the operations of a purely
epistemic subject.  The Kantian criticism of this effort remains
unsurpassed or at least unrefuted in that the problem of the
concrete, practical subject remains unresolved.

Now the time seems ripe, even overdue, to announce that there is not
going to be an age of paradigm in the social sciences.  We contend
that the failure to achieve paradigm takeoff is not merely the result
of methodological immaturity, but reflects something fundamental
about the human world.  If we are correct, the crisis of social
science concerns the nature of social investigation itself.  The
conception of the human sciences as somehow necessarily destined to
follow the path of the modern investigation of nature is at the root
of this crisis.  Preoccupation with that ruling expectation is
chronic in social science; that *idee fixe* has often driven
investigators away from a serious concern with the human world into
the sterility of purely formal argument and debate.  As in
development theory, one can only wait so long for the takeoff.  The
cargo-cult view of the ``about to arrive science'' just won't do.

The interpretive turn refocuses attention on the concrete varieties
of cultural meaning, in their particularity and complex texture, but
without falling into the traps of historicism or cultural relativism
in their classical forms.  For the human sciences both the object of
investigation -- the web of language, symbol, and institutions that
constitutes signification -- and the tools by which investigation is
carried out share inescapably the same pervasive context that is the
human world.  All this is by no means to exalt ``subjective''
awareness over a presumed detached scientific objectivity, in the
manner of nineteenth-century Romanticism.  Quite the contrary, the
interpretive approach denies and overcomes the almost de rigueur
opposition of subjectivity and objectivity.  The current emergence of
interpretive approaches in philosophy and the social sciences is
moving in a very different direction.  The interpretive approach
emphatically refutes the claim that one can somehow reduce the
complex world of signification to the products of a
self-consciousness in the traditional philosophical sense.  Rather,
interpretation begins from the postulate that the web of meaning
constitutes human existence to such an extent that it cannot ever be
meaningfully reduced to constitutively prior speech acts, dyadic
relations, or any predefined elements.  Intentionality and empathy
are rather seen as dependent on the prior existence of the shared
world of meaning within which the subjects of human discourse
constitute themselves.  It is in this literal sense that interpretive
social science can be called a return to the objective world, seeing
that world as in the first instance the circle of meaning within
which we find ourselves and which we can never fully surpass.  
[P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan]
________________

I may or may not post further excerpts from the book later on.

Richard Carnes