Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices by Dimitri Ginev

Author:Dimitri Ginev [Ginev, Dimitri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351683982
Google: 0chHDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 38136688
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Empirical ontologies and the double hermeneutics

The unity of the ontological and the methodological claim implied by the irreducibility thesis is warranted by (the methodology of) the double hermeneutics. With the intention of elucidating in a preliminary manner the kind of the double hermeneutics that will be at issue, I briefly turn to a critique of a program gaining currency in social theory. In criticizing the sheer empiricism of this program, I will first try to show how a revision of it brings into play the implementation of the double hermeneutics.6 In a second step, the contours of the outlined version will be sharpened through a critical analysis of an established version of the double hermeneutics. The claim that there is an integral circle of interpretation uniting emic and etic conceptualizations will begin to emerge. Finally, the focus will be on the narrative dimensions of the double hermeneutics.

The program of “empirical ontologies” of networks of human and nonhuman agents – a program that enjoys popularity chiefly in science and technology studies – successfully combines ideas and research technics borrowed from actor-network theory, constructivist sociology, traditional ethnography, and the ethnomethodology of working places. It is a program that tries to extend the ethnographic descriptions of social entities and states of affairs (like the disease of atherosclerosis and the reality of fish-farming) as they are placed and enacted in complex milieus of social practices creating – and being created by – dynamic orders, artifacts, technological devices, and settings of equipment. Being enacted in various configurations of practices, the entity/state appears to have a multiplied status without becoming fragmented into many units. The ontic diversity concerns the manifold of the entity/state’s “modes of existence” (in Latour’s [2013, 184–185] sense as modes described beyond the “prison of epistemological distinctions”). The enactment in practices occupies the central position in this extended thick description since it creates the dynamic unity of the entities and the practical orders in which they circulate. It is the contextualized enactment that requires an empirical ontology of the whole complexity of entities-enacted-in-social-practices. In undoing any strong demarcation between humans and nonhumans in the complexity of enacted entities within particular settings of practices, the studies of empirical ontology present a new development of the actor-network theory.7

Empirical ontology is an initiative that promotes a way out of relativist-epistemological perspectivalism (as it is advocated by various versions of standpoint epistemology). By putting all participants in a system of orchestrated practices on a par, the methodology of perspectivalism dissects each particular entity enacted in practices, thereby representing it as a manifold of separate objects whose existences depend on the practitioners/participants’ standpoints. By contrast, empirical ontology offers a holist approach to practices, without assuming a grounding order. The interrelatedness of practices has an ontic priority over the practitioners’ positions which nonetheless contribute to controlling and warranting the order created within this interrelatedness. Whereas perspectivalism relativizes and pluralizes the domain of configured practices, empirical ontology tries to retain the unity of the network in which the enacted entities become multiple with regard to their modes of existence.

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