Dilthey's Distinction Between "Explanation" and '"Understanding" and the Possibility of Its "Mediation"

Abstract

Dilthey's Distinction Between "Explanation" and '"Understanding" and the Possibility of Its "Mediation" KARL-OTTO APEL 1. EXPOSITION OF THE THESIS MAX WEBER, THE FOUNDER of "interpretive sociology" (verstehende Soziologie), was influenced by Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians when he framed the question of "interpretive explanations" (verstehendeErkli~rungen).It was in this context that he wrote: "That an interpretation possesses a particularly high degree of evidence [i.e., qualitatively for understanding], does not itself prove anything about its empirical validity.... Rather, our 'understanding' of the context must always be checked by the usual methods of causal correlations as far as possible, before an ever so 'evident' interpretation becomes a valid 'understandable explanation.' " To this degree Weber denies "that 'understanding' and 'explanation' have no [positive] relationship to one another, although they most certainly begin at opposite poles in their work. ''2 Such statements by Max Weber are often used in systematic evaluations as arguments against Dilthey's distinction between the "understanding" typical of the human sciences and the kind of "explanation" typical of the natural sciences. In this way, e.g., Weber's demand for a way to check the evidence of claims based upon "understanding" by means of the "usual methods of causal correlations" has even been seen as a prefiguration of Hempel's argument for the "unity of science" model of nomological causal explanations or, to be more precise, of strong, deterministic and weak, statistical causal explanation. 1 See Max Weber, GesammelteAufsi~tzezur Wissenschaftstheorie(Ttibingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], x968), 428. " Ibid., 436. [131] 132 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In fact, Hempel attributed to "empathetic understanding," as he called it, mere psychological and heuristic significance, even for historical and social sciences, in the discovery of historically testable, explanatory hypotheses. He emphasized especially that the evidence for the discovery of understandable reasons for behavior does not yet indicate that the factual occurrence of this kind of behavior can be explained. For this we need to be able to show that these "reasons" actually were causally effective. But to show this on Hempel's account we must already engage in checking a nomological explanatory hypothesis by empirical means. 3 According to this line of thought, the possible mediation of explanation and understanding, as it is already formulated in Max Weber's concept of "understanding explanation," amounts to showing that Dilthey's distinction between the two is irrelevant to the philosophy of science. Dilthey's distinction would amount then merely to a kind of ideologically destructive separation , as is sometimes claimed, even a tearing apart of the natural and the so-called "human sciences" (Geisteswissenschaften), a separation which can be traced in part to metaphysical prejudices, in part to a psychological confusion in nineteenth-century philosophy. In contrast to this interpretation, I want to uphold the following thesis. In the human and social sciences there are different types of mediation between 'understanding' and 'explanation'. The philosophical-epistemological conception of these different types of mediation does not stand in contradiction to the proper understanding of Dilthey's distinction, rather presupposes it. To my mind, this distinction and its mediation is not only psychologically relevant, but relevant methodologically as well, and, hence, relevant to the philosophy of science too. Of course, neither--the distinction and its mediation---can be made understandable under the assumptions of an abstract "logic of science." By such a logic I mean the method of explicating "explanations" as "systematizations of knowledge" (C. G. Hempel); it abstracts from the outset from the pragmatic presuppositions of explanations which answer particular questions, or it at best regards these pragmatic presuppositions as external, empirical conditions of scientific knowledge. In opposition to this view, we can, in my view, adequately explicate both the distinction between explanation and understanding as well as the types of mediations between them only by means of a transcendental-pragmatic epistemology and philosophy of science. By this I mean a transformation of Kant's approach, in the following sense. See C. G. Hempel,Aspectsof ScientificExplanationand otherEssaysin thePhilosophyof Science (NewYork:The FreePress, x965),239f., 258. EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING 133 The abstract logic of science promulgated by Logical Positivism completely overlooked the categorical conditions of the possibility of synthetic...