Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences

Abstract

The complex interactions between hermeneutics and the social sciences can be simplified historically into two anti-positivist waves: one in the mid-nineteenth century, running into the early twentieth, and the other in the mid-to-late twentieth. This is the case at least in Europe; in North America, the pragmatist tradition which fed into symbolic interactionism was both more continuous across the two centuries and also less preoccupied with anti-positivism and what has been called ‘methodological dualism’: the insistence on the differences between natural and social science (Bernstein 1992; Helle 2005; Aiken 2006). The story, like the term ‘sociology’ (the most prominent of the emergent socialsciences in this connection) begins essentially with Comte (1798-1857). Comte’s positivism, like the twentieth-century version, had a model of the unity of the sciences but, unlike later positivism, was not reductionist. However, sociology, the queen of the sciences for Comte and the last to ascend to the positive stage, was, like the other sciences, oriented to prediction and control: ‘savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir’. Early hermeneutic approaches to history and the (other) social sciences took shape in opposition to positivism. Schleiermacher’s consolidation of hermeneutics in a systematic form establishedthe term understanding (Verstehen), which has survived as standard usage in Englishlanguage social science discourse, and made it central to interpretation – understood as a more systematic activity. Schleiermacher’s contribution was made the central and culminating point of the account of ‘the rise of hermeneutics’ given by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), with whom hermeneutics becomes central to the self-definition of what he called the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften. In these sciences, as Dilthey put it, the mental activity of humans and of some other animals, and its products, can be understood. Dilthey and his contemporary, the philosopher of history J.G. Droysen (1808-84) developed what we would now call a research programme for history and the other human sciences based on the distinctiveness of human psychic expressions and the understanding of those expressions. In a move which was to become a definitional feature of later interpretive social science, Dilthey, like Schleiermacher, emphasised the continuity between everydayunderstanding and more formal processes of interpretation. His distinction between the natural and human sciences was developed in large part in opposition to Comtean positivism, which had become influential, even in the German-speaking countries, by the middle of the nineteenth century. In a parallel but more methodological formulation, two other neo-Kantian thin-kers, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, argued that the study of culture is essentially concerned with individual processes and relating them to shared human values, whereas the natural sciences are concerned with general laws about objects which are essentially remote from questions of value. We are interested, for example, in the French Revolution not just as a member of a class of revolutions exhibiting certain common features (this would be, for Rickert, a natural-scientific mode of approaching it), but as a unique event embodying, and perhaps also violating, certain crucial human values.1