Prolegomena to a Social Theory of Communicative Genres

Abstract

A fundamental postulate of the social sciences is that societies are clusters (loose structures, perhaps even tight systems) of which are either organized in reality, or at least are capable of being organized on several levels: as an ecological system, as a structure of several institutions, as a culture. A correlative assumption is that these structures determine social interaction in specifiable degrees with respect to certain elementary functions of social life, such as kinship, economics, politics, religion, and so on. In this context the term objective means, first of all, that the can be ascertained independently of whims, that is to say that intersubjective agreement about the results of systematic observations is possible in principle. But in the natural sciences the term objective has an additional meaning which rests on the (tacit or explicitly stated) ontological premise that the facts upon which the are based are, in some fashion, independently of all human activity, even if it is admitted that scientific human activity is needed to fashion data out of these pre-existent facts. This sense of objectivity certainly cannot apply to the of the social sciences. Social facts have come to be only in the form of pre-scientific activity and its products. It is merely repeating the obvious (although even the obvious is sometimes willfully ignored) to say that this essential characteristic of social reality does not somehow imply that social are not in the first sense of the term. The ecology of human societies, their culture, their technological practices and, generally, the social structure consisting of institutionally determined social interactions are ascertainable in that sense just as objectively as protons, chemical elements, molecules, or organisms. The intrinsic humanity of social reality does not mean that it is subjective in a sense that makes it inaccessible to systematic study of the kind which we dignify with the term science. It signifies merely that the of the social sciences originate in subjective, i.e., subjectively meaningful human activities: that they are in fact socially constructed. No doubt I am not the first to assert that reductionism in the social sciences is aprioristic and thoroughly anti-empirical. A social science that is committed to the empirical study of social reality must take systematic account of the intersubjective construction of the reality which it investigates. The methodology of social science is therefore necessarily two-layered. The first layer is reconstructive and the second explanatory. Both layers are necessary in the scientific study of social reality. 1 In a logical sense reconstruction comes before explanation. It establishes the which are to be explained. The are not simply there to be observed: they must be recognized, observed, and interpreted. In the reconstruction of the preconstructed social realities, interpretation is necessary to establish the typical meanings which these realities have for the human beings who live in them and by them, i.e., for the human beings who are the original constructors of meaning in social reality. Controlled and rigorous interpretation must of course follow the general rules of interpretation, a hermeneutic canon. Denial of the need of interpretation (i.e., of this first step in reconstruction) merely results in inadvertent common-sensically naive interpretation which is insensitive to the