The Hermeneutic Imagination (RLE Social Theory) by Josef Bleicher

Author:Josef Bleicher [Bleicher, Josef]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317651819
Google: QTJHBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-13T05:00:34+00:00

5

OBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION IN MACRO-SOCIOLOGY AND THE HERMENEUTIC DIMENSION

Sociology, as developed within the framework of behaviourism and its empiricistic metascience, cannot concern itself legitimately with social phenomena that are irreducible to the behaviour of individual actors. One such phenomenon is, of course, society, but even ‘the social’ as a category is here in danger of losing its independent character leaving sociology without a distinctive subject matter. From the aspect of methodology, it has to be added that the imposition of a specific set of procedural norms for the study of meaningful action can only be carried through if the practitioners of this discipline refuse to engage in any critical reflection concerning the appropriateness of this particular mode of investigation.

The price to be paid for trying to emulate the ‘hard’ sciences is a kind of intellectual sclerosis that manifests itself in narrowly conceived research programmes with often utterly trivial results and the tendency to misperceive the object. It is my view that this undesirable condition is intimately linked with the failure to come to grips with the meaning-dimension that exists both within the object and between it and the researcher, or, to put it differently, there is more to social phenomena than meets the eye.

Non-scientistic sociology can, therefore, be defined by its recognition of the meaningfulness of social phenomena. Yet within this alternative approach to sociology there exists a major cleavage in relation to how this ‘meaning’ is to be conceived and studied. Macro-sociology focuses on objective meaning, thereby paralleling Dilthey’s systematic Geisteswissenschaften, whereas micro-sociology considers subjectively intended meaning as the object of sociology which gives rise to a problematic similar to the one that emerged in the discussion of the historical Geisteswissenschaften and hermeneutical theory.

Both these contemporary strands can claim Weber as their ancestor - given certain modifications which they consider to be required.

Weber’s methodology shares to some extent Dilthey’s concern when it is stated that the ‘cultural sciences … analyse the phenomenon of life in terms of cultural significance’ (Weber, 1949, p. 75). Human creations cannot adequately be studied within the framework of the natural sciences, which can only capture quantitative aspects, since they ‘are concerned with psychological and intellectual phenomena’; it follows that here ‘empathic understanding is naturally a problem’ (Weber, 1949, p. 74).

Historical phenomena are characterized by the fact that they embody cultural values which, through being meaningful, attract the historian’s interest: they are constituted by a ‘value-orientation’. The relationship that emerges between the historian and his object is a form of understanding, ‘value-interpretation’, in which the meaning of objectivations is explicated.1

The problem that confronts the study of meaningful phenomena is to render it objective. In relation to this hermeneutic problem, Weber’s scheme, which tries to bring together the interpretive understanding of meaningful phenomena with a concern for scientific canons, centres on the requirement that sociological accounts be adequate on both the levels of meaning and cause. That is to say that sociologically relevant interpretations have to be supplemented by a causal explanation of action in terms of its underlying motives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.