CHAPTER ONE
INTERPRETATION AND THE
SCIENCES OF MAN~:'
I
Is there a sense in which interpretation is essential to explanation in the
sciences of man? The view that it is, that there is an unavoidably 'hermeneutical'
component in the sciences of man, goes back to Dilthey. But
recently the question has come again to the fore, for instance, in the work
of Gadamer,l in Ricoeur's interpretation of Freud,2 and in the writings of
Habermas.3
Interpretation, in the sense relevant to hermeneutics, is an attempt to
make clear, to make sense of, an object of study. This object must, therefore,
be a text, or a text-analogue, which in some way is confused, incomplete,
cloudy, seemingly contradictory - in one way or another,
unclear. The interpretation aims to bring to light an underlying coherence
or sense.
This means that any science which can be called 'hermeneutical', even
in an extended sense, must be dealing with one or another of the confusingly
interrelated forms of meaning. Let us try to see a little more clearly
what this involves.
We need, first, an object or field of objects, about which we can speak in
terms of coherence or its absence, of making sense or nonsense.
Second, we need to be able to make a distinction, even if only a relative
one, between the sense or coherence made, and its embodiment in a
particular field of carriers or signifiers. For otherwise the task of making
clear what is fragmentary or confused would be radically impossible. No
* I have greatly benefited in preparing this paper from discussions held under the auspices of
the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge, whose meetings were supported by the
Ford Foundation.
1 E.g., H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen, 1960).
Paul Ricoeur, De ['interpretation (Paris, 1965).
E.g., J. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1968).
16 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 17
sense could be given to this idea. We have to be able to make for our
interpretations claims of the order: the meaning confusedly present in this
text or text-analogue is clearly expressed here. The meaning, in other
words, is one which admits of more than one expression, and, in this
sense, a distinction must be possible between meaning and expression.
The point of the above qualification, that this distinction may be only
relative, is that there are cases where no clear, unambiguous, non-arbitrary
line can be drawn between what is said and its expression. It can be
plausibly argued (I think convincingly, although there is no space to go
into it here) that this is the normal and fundamental condition of meaningful
expression, that exact synonymy, or equivalence of meaning, is a
rare and localized achievement of specialized languages or uses of
civilization. But this, if true (and I think it is), does not do away with the
distinction between meaning and expression. Even if there is an important
sense in which a meaning re-expressed in a new medium cannot be
declared identical, this by no means entails that we can give no sense to
the project of expressing a meaning in a new way. It does of course raise an
interesting and difficult question about what can be meant by expressing
it in a clearer way: what is the 'it' which is clarified if equivalence is
denied? I hope to return to this in examining interpretation in the sciences
of man.
Hence the object of a science of interpretation must be describable in
terms of sense and nonsense, coherence and its absence; and must admit of
a distinction between meaning and its expression.
There is also a third condition it must meet. We can speak of sense or
coherence, and of their different embodiments, in connection with such
phenomena as gestalts, or patterns in rock formations, or snow crystals,
where the notion of expression has no real warrant. What is lacking here
is the notion of a subject for whom these meanings are. Without such a
subject, the choice of criteria of sameness and difference, the choice
among the different forms of coherence which can be identified in a given
pattern, among the different conceptual fields in which it can be seen, is
arbitrary.
In a text or text-analogue, on the other hand, we are trying to make
explicit the meaning expressed, and this means expressed by or for a
subject or subjects. The notion of expression refers us to that of a subject.
The identification of the subject is by no means necessarily unproblematical,
as we shall see further on; it may be one of the most difficult
problems, an area in which prevailing epistemological prejudice may
blind us to the nature of our object of study. I think this has been the case,
as I will show below. And moreover, the identification of a subject does
not assure us of a clear and absolute distinction between meaning and expression,
as we saw above. But any such distinction, even a relative o~e, is
without any anchor at all, is totally arbitrary, without appeal to a subject.
The object of a science of interpretation must thus have: sense, distinguishable
from its expression, which is for or by a subject.
2
Before going on to see in what way, if any, these conditions are realized in
the sciences of man, I think it would be useful to set out more clearly what
rides on this question, why it matters whether or not we think of the
sciences of man as hermeneutical, what the issue is at stake here.
The issue here is at root an epistemological one. But it is inextricable
from an ontological one, and, hence, cannot but be relevant to our
notions of science and of the proper conduct of enquiry. We might say
that it is an ontological issue which has been argued ever since the seventeenth
century in terms of epistemological considerations which have appeared
to some to be unanswerable.
The case could be put in these terms: what are the criteria of judgement
in a hermeneutical science? A successful interpretation is one which
makes clear the meaning originally present in a confused, fragmentary,
cloudy form. But how does one know that this interpretation is correct?
Presumably because it makes sense of the original text: what is strange,
mystifying, puzzling, contradictory is no longer so, is accounted for. The
interpretation appeals throughout to our understanding of the 'language'
of expression, which understanding allows us to see that this expression is
puzzling, that it is in contradiction to that other, and so on, and that these
difficulties are cleared up when the meaning is expressed in a new way.
But this appeal to our understanding seems to be crucially inadequate.
What if someone does not 'see' the adequacy of our interpretation, does
not accept our reading? We try to show him how it makes sense of the original
nonsense or partial sense. But for him to follow us he must read the
original language as we do, he must recognize these expressions as
puzzling in a certain way, and hence be looking for a solution to our problem.
If he does not, what can we do? The answer, it would seem, can,only
be more of the same. We have to show him through the reading of other
expressions why this expression must be read in the way we propose. But
success here requires that he follow us in these other readings, and so on, it
would seem, potentially forever. We cannot escape an ultimate appeal to
a common understanding of the expressions, of the 'language' involved.
18 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 19
This is one way of trying to express what has been called the 'hermeneutical
circle'. What we are trying to establish is a certain reading of
text or expressions, and what we appeal to as our grounds for this reading
can only be other readings. The circle can also be put in terms of partwhole
relations: we are trying to establish a reading for the whole text,
and for this we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet
because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense, where expressions
only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings of partial
expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole.
Put in forensic terms, as we started to do above, we can only convince
an interlocutor if at some point he shares our understanding of the language
concerned. If he does not, there is no further step to take in rational
argument; we can try to awaken these intuitions in him, or we can simply
give up; argument will advance us no further. But of course the forensic
predicament can be transferred into my own judging: if I am this illequipped
to convince a stubborn interlocutor, how can I convince myself?
How can I be sure? Maybe my intuitions are wrong or distorted, maybe I
am locked into a circle of illusion.
Now one, and perhaps the only, sane response to this would be to say
that such uncertainty is an ineradicable part of our epistemological predicament;
that even to characterize it as 'uncertainty' is to adopt an
absurdly severe criterion of 'certainty', which deprives the concept of any
sensible use. But this has not been the only or even the main response of
our philosophical tradition. And it is another response which has had an
important and far-reaching effect on the sciences of man. The demand has
been for a level of certainty which can only be attained by breaking
beyond the circle.
There are two ways in which this break-out has been envisaged. The
first might be called the 'rationalist' one and could be thought to reach a
culmination in Hegel. It does not involve a negation of intuition, or of our
understanding of meaning, but rather aspires to attainment of an understanding
of such clarity that it would carry with it the certainty of the
undeniable. In Hegel's case, for instance, our full understanding of the
whole in 'thought' carries with it a grasp of its inner necessity, such that
we see how it could not be otherwise. No higher grade of certainty is
conceivable. For this aspiration the word 'break-out' is badly chosen; the
aim is rather to bring understanding to an inner clarity which is absolute.
The other way, which we can call 'empiricist', is a genuine attempt to
go beyond the circle of our own interpretations, to get beyond subjectivity.
The attempt is to reconstruct knowledge in such a way that there is
no need to make final appeal to readings or judgements which cannot
be checked further. That is why the basic building block of knowledge
on this view is the impression, or sense-datum; a unit of information
which is not the deliverance of a Judgement, which has by definition no
element in it of reading or interpretation, which is a brute datum. The
highest ambition would be to build our knowledge from such building
blocks by judgements which could be anchored in a certainty beyond
subjective intuition. This is what underlies the attraction of the notion
of the association of ideas, or if the same procedure is viewed as a
method, induction. If the original acquisition of the units of information
is not the fruit of judgement or interpretation, then the constatation
that two such elements occur together need not be the fruit of
interpretation either, of a reading or intuition which cannot be
checked. For if the occurrence of a single element is a brute datum,
then so is the co-occurrence of two such elements. The path to true
knowledge would then repose crucially on the correct recording of such
co-occurrences.
This is what lies behind an ideal of verification which is central to an
important tradition in the philosophy of science, whose main contemporary
protagonists are the logical empiricists. Verification must be
grounded ultimately in the acquisition of brute data. By 'brute d~ta' I
mean here and throughout data whose validity cannot be questIOned
by offering another interpretation or reading, data whose credibility
cannot be founded or undetermined by further reasoning.
4
If such a
difference of interpretation can arise over given data, then it must be
possible to structure the argument so as to distinguish the basic, brute
data from the inferences made on the basis of them.
The inferences themselve;s, of course, to be valid, must similarly be
beyond the challenge of a rival interpretation. Here the logical empiricists
added to the armoury of traditional empiricism, which set
great store by the method of induction, the whole domain of logical
and mathematical inference which had been central to the rationalist
4 The notion of brute data here has some relation to, but is not at all the same as, the 'brute
facts' discussed by Elizabeth Anscombe, 'On brute facts', Analysis, 18 (1957-5 8), pp.
69-72., and John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 50-3· For Anscombe and
Searle brute facts are contrasted to what may be called 'institutional facts', to use Searle's
term, i.e., facts which presuppose the existence of certain institutions. Voting would be an
example. But, as we shall see below in section II, some institutional facts, such as X's
having voted Liberal, can be verified as brute data in the senseused here, and thus find a
place in the category of political behaviour. What cannot as eaSily be descnbed In terms of
brute data are the institutions themselves. Cf. the discussion below in section II.
20 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 21
positIOn (with Leibniz at least, although not with Hegel), and which
offered another brand of unquestionable certainty.
Of course, mathematical inference and empirical verification were
combined in such a way that two theories or more could be verified of the
same domain of facts. But this was a consequence to which logical empiricism
was willing to accommodate itself. As for the surplus meaning in
a theory which could not be rigorously co-ordinated with brute data, it
was considered to be quite outside the logic of verification.
As a theory of perception, this epistemology gave rise to all sorts of
problems, not least of which was the perpetual threat of scepticism and
solipsism inseparable from a conception of the basic data of knowledge as
brute data, beyond investigation. As a theory of perception, however, it
seems largely a thing of the past, in spite of a surprising recrudescence in
the Anglo-Saxon world in the 193os and 1940s. But there is no doubt that
it goes marching on, among other places, as a theory of how the human
mind and human knowledge actually function.
In a sense, the contemporary period has seen a better, more rigorous
statement of what this epistemology is about in the form of computerinfluenced
theories of intelligence. These try to model intelligence as
consisting of operations on machine-recognizable input which could
themselves be matched by programs which could be run on machines. The
machine criterion provides us with our assurance against an appeal to
intuition or interpretations which cannot be understood by fully explicit
procedures operating on brute data - the input.s
The progress of natural science has lent great credibility to this epistemology,
since it can be plausibly reconstructed on this model, as for
instance has been done by the logical empiricists. And, of course, the
temptation has been overwhelming to reconstruct the sciences of man on
the same model; or rather to launch them in lines of enquiry that fit this
paradigm, since they are constantly said to be in their 'infancy'. Psychology,
where an earlier vogue of behaviourism is being replaced by a boom
of computer-based models, is far from the only case.
The form this epistemological bias - one might say obsession - takes is
different for different sciences. Later I would like to look at a particular
case, the study of politics, where the issue can be followed out. But in
general, the empiricist orientation must be hostile to a conduct of enquiry
Cf. discussion in M. Minsky, Computation (Englewood Cliffs, N], 1967), pp. 104-7,
where Minsky explicitly argues that an effective procedure, which no longer requires
intUItIOn or Interpretation, is one which can be realized by a machine.
which is based on interpretation, and which encounters the hermeneutical
circle as this was characterized above. This cannot meet the
requirements of intersubjective, non-arbitrary verification which it considers
essential to science. And along with the epistemological stance
goes the ontological belief that reality must be susceptible to understanding
and explanation by science so understood. From this follows a
certain set of notions of what the sciences of man must be.
On the other hand, many, including myself, would like to argue that
these notions about the sciences of man are sterile, that we cannot come
to understand important dimensions of human life within the bounds
set by this epistemological orientation. This dispute is of course familiar
to all in at least some of its ramifications. What I want to claim is that
the issue can be fruitfully posed in terms of the notion of interpretation
as I began to outline it above.
I think this way of putting the question is useful because it allows us
at once to bring to the surface the powerful epistemological beliefs
which -underlie the orthodox view of the sciences of man in our
academy, and to make explicit the notion of our epistemological predicament
implicit in the opposing thesis. This is in fact rather more
way-out and shocking to the tradition of scientific thought than is often
admitted or realized by the opponents of narrow scientism. It may not
strengthen the case of the opposition to bring out fully what is involved
in a hermeneutical science as far as convincing waverers is concerned,
but a gain in clarity is surely worth a thinning of the ranks - at least in
philosophy.
3
Before going on to look at the case of political science, it might be worth
asking another question: why should we even pose the question whether
the sciences of man are hermeneutical? What gives us the idea in the first
place that men and their actions constitute an object or a series of
objects which meet the conditions outlined above?
The answer is that on the phenomenological level or that of ordinary
speech (and the two converge for the purposes of this argument) a
certain notion of meaning has an essential place in the characterization
of human behaviour. This is the sense in which we speak of a situation,
an action, a demand, a prospect having a certain meaning for a person.
Now it is frequently thought that 'meaning' is used here in a sense
which is a kind of illegitimate extension from the notion of linguistic
meaning. Whether it can be considered an extension or not is another
22 PHHOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
matter; it certainly differs from linguistic meaning. But it would be
very hard to argue that it is an illegitimate use of the term.
When we speak of the 'meaning' of a given predicament, we are
using a concept which has the following articulation. (1) Meaning is
for a subject: it is not the meaning of the situation in vacuo, but its
meaning for a subject, a specific subject, a group of subjects, or perhaps
what its meaning is for the human subject as such (even though particular
humans might be reproached with not admitting or realizing
this). (2) Meaning is of something; that is, we can distinguish between
a given element - situation, action, or whatever - and its meaning. But
this is not to say that they are physically separable. Rather we are
dealing with two descriptions of the element, in one of which it is
characterized in terms of its meaning for the subject. But the relations
between the two descriptions are not symmetrical. For, on the one
hand, the description in terms of meaning cannot be, unless descriptions
of the other kind apply as well; or put differently, there can be no
meaning without a substrate. But on the other hand, it may be that the
same meaning may be borne by another substrate - for instance, a
situation with the same meaning may be realized in different physical
conditions. There is a necessary role for a potentially substitutable
substrate; or all meanings are of something.
(3) Things only have meaning in a field, that is, in relation to the
meanings of other things. This means that there is no such thing as a
single, unrelated meaningful element; and it means that changes in the
other meanings in the field can involve changes in the given element.
Meanings can not be identified except in relation to others, and in this
way resemble words. The meaning of a word depends, for instance, on
those words with which it contrasts, on those which define its place in the
language (e.g., those defining 'determinable' dimensions, like colour,
shape), on those which define the activity or 'language game' it figures in
(describing, invoking, establishing communion), and so on. The relations
between meanings in this sense are like those between concepts in a
semantic field.
Just as our colour concepts are given their meaning by the field of
contrast they set up together, so that the introduction of new concepts
will alter the boundaries of others, so the various meanings that a subordinate's
demeanour can have for us, as deferential, respectful, cringing,
mildly mocking, ironical, insolent, provoking, downright rude, are established
by a field of contrast; and as with finer discrimination on our part,
or a more sophisticated culture, new possibilities are born, so other terms
of this range are altered. And as the meaning of our terms 'red', 'blue',
'green' is fixed by the definition of a field of contrast through the
determinable term 'colour', so all these alternative demeanours are only
available in a society which has, among other types, hierarchical relations
of power and command. And corresponding to the underlying language
game of designating coloured objects is the set of social practices which
sustain these hierarchical structures and are fulfilled in them.
Meaning in this sense -let us call it experiential meaning - thus is for a
subject, of something, in a field. This distinguishes it from linguistic
meaning which has a four- and not a three-dimensional structure.
Linguistic meaning is for subjects and in a field, but it is the meaning of
signifiers and it is about a world of referents. Once we are clear about the
likenesses and differences, there should be little doubt that the term
'meaning' is not a misnomer, the product of an illegitimate extension into
this context of experience and behaviour.
There is thus a quite legitimate notion of meaning which we use when
we speak of the meaning of a situation for an agent. And that this concept
has a place is integral to our ordinary consciousness and hence speech
about our actions. Our actions are ordinarily characterized by the purpose
sought and explained by desires, feelings, emotions. But the language
by which we describe our goals, feelings, desires is also a definition
of the meaning things have for us. The vocabulary defining meaning words
like 'terrifying', 'attractive' - is linked with that describing feeling
_ 'fear', 'desire' - and that describing goals - 'safety', 'possession'.
Moreover, our understanding of these terms moves inescapably in a
hermeneutical circle. An emotion term like 'shame', for instance,
essentially refers us to a certain kind of situation, the 'shameful', or
'humiliating', and a certain mode of response, that of hiding oneself, of
covering up, or else 'wiping out' the blot. That is, it is essential to this
feeling's being identified as shame that it be related to this situation and
give rise to this type of disposition. But this situation in its turn can only
be identified in relation to the feelings which it provokes; and the
disposition is to a goal which can similarly not be understood without
reference to the feelings experienced: the 'hiding' in question is one which
will cover up my shame; it is not the same as hiding from an armed
pursuer; we can only understand what is meant by 'hiding' here if we
understand what kind of feeling and situation is being talked about. We
have to be within the circle.
An emotion term like 'shame' can only be explained by reference to
other concepts which in turn cannot be understood without reference to
24 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
shame. To understand these concepts we have to be in on a certain experience,
we have to understand a certain language, not just of words, but also
a certain language of mutual action and communication, by which we
blame, exhort, admire, esteem each other. In the end we are in on this
because we grow up in the ambit of certain common meanings. But we can
often experience what it is like to be on the outside when we encounter the
feeling, action, and experiential meaning language of another civilization.
Here there is no translation, no way of explaining in other, more
accessible concepts. We can only catch on by getting somehow into their
way of life, if only in imagination. Thus if we look at human behaviour as
action done out of a background of desire, feeling, emotion, then we are
looking at a reality which must be characterized in terms of meaning. But
does this mean that it can be the object of a hermeneutical science as this
was outlined above?
There are, to remind ourselves, three characteristics that the object of a
science of interpretation has: it must have sense or coherence; this must be
distinguishable from its expression, and this sense must be for a subject.
Now, in so far as we are talking about behaviour as action, hence in
terms of meaning, the category of sense or coherence must apply to it.
This is not to say that all behaviour must 'make sense', if we mean by this
be rational, avoid contradiction, confusion of purpose, and the like.
Plainly a great deal of our action falls short of this goal. But in another
sense, even contradictory, irrational action is 'made sense of' when we
understand why it was engaged in. We make sense of action when there is
a coherence between the actions of the agent and the meaning of his
situation for him. We find his action puzzling until we find such a coherence.
It may not be bad to repeat that this coherence in no way implies
that the action is rational: the meaning of a situation for an agent may be
full of confusion and contradiction; but the adequate depiction of this
contradiction makes sense of it.
Thus we necessarily have a hermeneutical circle. Our conviction that
the account makes sense is contingent on our reading of action and situation.
But these readings cannot be explained or justified except by reference
to other such readings, and their relation to the whole. If an interlocutor
does not understand this kind of reading, or will not accept it as
valid, there is nowhere else the argument can go. Ultimately, a good
explanation is one which makes sense of the behaviour; but then to
appreciate a good explanation, one has to agree on what makes good
sense; what makes good sense is a function of one's readings; and these in
turn are based on the kind of sense one understands.
But how about the second characteristic, that sense should be distinguishable
from its embodiment? This is necessary for a science of interpretation
because interpretation lays a claim to make a confused meaning
clearer; hence there must be some sense in which the 'same' meaning is
expressed, but differently.
This immediately raises a difficulty. In talking of experiential meaning
above, I mentioned that we can distinguish between a given element and
its meaning, between meaning and substrate. This carried the claim that a
given meaning may be realized in another substrate. But does this mean
that we can always embody the same meaning in another situation? Perhaps
there are some situations, standing before death, for instance, which
have a meaning which cannot be embodied otherwise.
But fortunately this difficult question is irrelevant for our purposes. For
here we have a case in which the analogy between text and behaviour
implicit in the notion of a hermeneutical science of man only applies with
important modifications. The text is replaced in the interpretation by
another text, one which is clearer. The text-analogue of behaviour is not
replaced by another such text-analogue. When this happens we have
revolutionary theatre, or terroristic acts designed to make propaganda of
the deed, in which the hidden relations of a society are supposedly shown
up in a dramatic confrontation. But this is not scientific understanding,
even though it may perhaps be based on such understanding, or claim to
be.
But in science the text-analogue is replaced by a text, an account.
Which might prompt the question how we can even begin to talk of
interpretation here, of expressing the same meaning more clearly, when
we have two such utterly different terms of comparison, a text and a tract
of behaviour? Is the whole thing not just a bad pun?
This question leads us to open up another aspect of experiential
meaning which we abstracted from earlier. Experiential meanings are
defined in fields of contrast, as words are in semantic fields.
But what was not mentioned above is that these two kinds of definition
are not independent of each other. The range of human desires, feelings,
emotions, and hence meanings is bound up with the level and type of
culture, which in turn is inseparable from the distinctions and categories
marked by the language people speak. The field of meanings in which a
given situation can find its place is bound up with the semantic field of the
terms characterizing these meanings and the related feelings, desires,
predicaments.
But the relationship involved here is not a simple one. There are two
26 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
simple types of models of relation which could be offered here, but both
are inadequate. We could think of the feeling vocabulary as simply describing
pre-existing feelings, as marking distinctions which would be
there without them. But this is not adequate because we often experience
in ourselves or others how achieving, say, a more sophisticated vocabulary
of the emotions makes our emotional life, not just our descriptions of
it, more sophisticated. Reading a good, powerful novel may give me the
picture of an emotion which I had not previously been aware of. But we
cannot draw a neat line between an increased ability to identify and an
altered ability to feel emotions which this enables.
The other simple inadequate model of the relationship is to jump from
the above to the conclusion that thinking makes it so. But this clearly will
not do either, since not just any new definition can be forced on us, nor can
we force it on ourselves; and some which we do gladly take up can be
judged inauthentic, or in bad faith, or just wrong-headed by others. These
judgements may be wrong, but they are not in principle illicit. Rather we
make an effort to be lucid about ourselves and our feelings, and admire a
man who achieves this.
Thus, neither the simple correspondence view is correct, nor the view
that thinking makes it so. But both have prima facie warrant. There is
such a thing as self-lucidity, which points us to a correspondence view;
but the achievement of such lucidity means moral change, that is, it
changes the object known. At the same time, error about oneself is not
just an absence of correspondence; it is also in some form inauthenticity,
bad faith, self-delusion, repression of one's human feelings, or something
of the kind; it is a matter of the quality of what is felt just as much as what
is known about this, just as self-knowledge is.
H this is so, then we have to think of man as a self-interpreting animal.
He is necessarily so, for there is no such thing as the structure of meanings
for him independently of his interpretation of them; for one is woven into
the other. But then the text of our interpretation is not that heterogeneous
from what is interpreted; for what is interpreted is itself an interpretation;
a self-interpretation which is embedded in a stream of action. It is an
interpretation of experiential meaning which contributes to the constitution
of this meaning. Or to put it in another way: that of which we are
trying to find the coherence is itself partly constituted by self-
interpretation.
Our aim is to replace this confused, incomplete, partly erroneous selfinterpretation
by a correct one. And in doing this we look not only to the
self-interpretation but to the stream of behaviour in which it is set; just as
in interpreting a historical document we have to place it in the stream of
events which it relates to. But of course the analogy is not exact, for here
we are interpreting the interpretation and the stream of behaviour in
which it is set together, and not just one or the other.
There is thus no utter heterogeneity of interpretation to what it is
about; rather there is a slide in the notion of interpretation. Already to be
a living agent is to experience one's situation in terms of certain meanings;
and this in a sense can be thought of as a sort of proto-'interpretation'.
This is in turn interpreted and shaped by the language in which the
agent lives these meanings. This whole is then at a third level interpreted
by the explanation we proffer of his actions.
In this way the second condition of a hermeneutical science is met. But
this account poses in a new light the question mentioned at the beginning:
whether the interpretation can ever express the same meaning as the
interpreted. And in this case, there is clearly a way in which the two will
not be congruent. For if the explanation is really clearer than the lived
interpretation then it will be such that it would alter in some way the
behaviour if it came to be internalized by the agent as his self-interpretation.
In this way a hermeneutical science which achieves its goal, that is,
attains greater clarity than the immediate understanding of agent or
observer, must offer us an interpretation which is in this way crucially out
of phase with the explicandum.
Thus, human behaviour seen as action of agents who desire and are
moved, who have goals and aspirations, necessarily offers a purchase for
descriptions in terms of meaning - what I have called 'experiential
meaning'. The norm of explanation which it posits is one which 'makes
sense' of the behaviour, which shows a coherence of meaning. This
'making sense of' is the proferring of an interpretation; and we have seen
that what is interpreted meets the conditions of a science of interpretation:
first, that we can speak of its sense or coherence; and second, that
this sense can be expressed in another form, so that we can speak of the
interpretation as giving clearer expression to what is only implicit in the
explicandum. The third condition, that this sense be for a subject, is
obviously met in this case, although who this subject is is by no means an
unproblematical question, as we shall see later on.
This should be enough to show that there is a good prima facie case to
the effect that men and their actions are amenable to explanation of a
hermeneutical kind. There is, therefore, some reason to raise the issue and
challenge the epistemological orientation which would rule interpretation
out of the sciences of man. A great deal more must be said to bring
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
out what is involved in the hermeneutical sciences of man. But before
getting on to this, it might help to clarify the issue with a couple of
examples drawn from a specific field, that of politics.
II
I
In politics, too, the goal of a verifiable science has led to the concentration
on features which can supposedly be identified in abstraction from our
understanding or not understanding experiential meaning. These - let us
call them brute data identifications - are what supposedly enable us to
break out from the hermeneutical circle and found our science four square
on a verification procedure which meets the requirements of the empiricist
tradition.
But in politics the search for such brute data has not gone to the lengths
which it has in psychology, where the object of science has been thought
of by many as behaviour qua 'colourless movement', or as machine-recognizable
properties. The tendency in politics has been to stop with something
less basic, but - so it is thought - the identification of which cannot
be challenged by the offering of another interpretation or reading of the
data concerned. This is what is referred to as 'behaviour' in the rhetoric of
political scientists, but it has not the rock bottom quality of its psychological
homonym.
Political behaviour includes what we would ordinarily call actions, but
ones that are supposedly brute data identifiable. How can this be so?
Well, actions are usually described by the purpose or end-state realized.
But the purposes of some actions can be specified in what might be
thought to be brute data terms; some actions, for instance, have physical
end-states, like getting the car in the garage or climbing the mountain.
Others have end-states which are closely tied by institutional rules to
some unmistakable physical movement; thus, when I raise my hand in the
meeting at the appropriate time, I am voting for the motion. The only
questions we can raise about the corresponding actions, given such
movements or the realization of such end-states, are whether the agent
was aware of what he was doing, was acting as against simply emitting
reflex behaviour, knew the institutional significance of his movement,
and so on. Any worries on this score generally turn out to be pretty
artificial in the contexts political scientists are concerned with; and where
they do arise they can be checked by relatively simple devices, for example
asking the subject: did you mean to vote for the motion?
INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
Hence, it would appear that there are actions which can be identified
beyond fear of interpretative dispute; and this is what gives the foundation
for the category of 'political behaviour'. There are some acts of
obvious political relevance which can be specified thus in physical terms,
such as killing, sending tanks into the streets, seizing people and confining
them to cells; and there is an immense range of others which can be
specified from physical acts by institutional rules, such as voting. These
can be the object of a science of politics which can hope to meet the
stringent requirements of verification. The latter class particularly has
provided matter for study in recent decades - most notably in the case of
voting studies.
But of course a science of politics confined to such acts would be much
too narrow. For on another level these actions also have meaning for the
agents which is not exhausted in the brute data descriptions, and which is
often crucial to understanding why they were done. Thus, in voting for
the motion I am also saving the honour of my party, or defending the
value of free speech, or vindicating public morality, or saving civilization
from breakdown. It is in such terms that the agents talk about the motivation
of much of their political action, and it is difficult to conceive a
science of politics which does not come to grips with it.
Behavioural political science comes to grips with it by taking the meanings
involved in action as facts about the agent, his beliefs, his affective
reactions, his 'values', as the term is frequently used. For it can be thought
verifiable in the brute data sense that men will agree to subscribe or not to
a certain form of words (expressing a belief, say); or express a positive or
negative reaction to certain events, or symbols; or agree or not with the
proposition that some act is right or wrong. We can thus get at meanings
as just another form of brute data by the techniques of the opinion survey
and content analysis.
An immediate objection springs to mind. If we are trying to deal with
the meanings which inform political action, then surely interpretive
acumen is unavoidable. Let us say we are trying to understand the goals
and values of a certain group, or grasp their vision of the polity; we might
try to probe this by a questionnaire asking them whether they assent or
not to a number of propositions, which are meant to express different
goals, evaluations, beliefs. But how did we design the questionnaire?
How did we pick these propositions? Here we relied on our understanding
of the goals, values, vision involved. But then this understanding can
be challenged, and hence the significance of our results questioned. Perhaps
the finding of our study, the compiling of proportions of assent and
3° PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
dissent to these propositions, is irrelevant, is without significance for
understanding the agents or the polity concerned. This kind of attack is
frequently made by critics of mainstream political science, or for that
matter social science in general.
To this the proponents of this mainstream reply with a standard move
of logical empiricism: distinguishing the process of discovery from the
logic of verification. Of course, it is our understanding of these meanings
which enables us to draw up the questionnaire which will test people's
attitudes in respect to them. And, of course, interpretive dispute about
these meanings is potentially endless; there are no brute data at this level,
every affirmation can be challenged by a rival interpretation. But this has
nothing to do with verifiable science. What is firmly verified is the set of
correlations between, say, the assent to certain propositions and certain
behaviour. We discover, for instance, that people who are active politically
(defined by participation in a certain set of institutions) are more
likely to consent to certain sets of propositions supposedly expressing
the values underlying the system.6
This finding is a firmly verified correlation
no matter what one thinks of the reasoning, or simple hunches, that
went into designing the research which established it. Political science as
a body of knowledge is made up of such correlations; it does not give a
truth value to the background reasoning or hunch. A good interpretive
nose may be useful in hitting on the right correlations to test, but science
is never called on to arbitrate the disputes between interpretations.
.Thus, in addition to those overt acts which can be defined physically or
institutionally, the category of political behaviour can include assent or
dissent to verbal formulae, or the occurrence or not of verbal formulae in
speech, or expressions of approval or rejection of certain events or
measures as observed in institutionally defined behaviour (for instance,
turning out for a demonstration).
Now there are a number of objections which can be made to this notion
of political behaviour; one might question in all sorts of ways how interpretation-free
it is in fact. But I would like to question it from another
angle. One of the basic characteristics of this kind of social science is that
it reconstructs reality in line with certain categorial principles. These
allow for an inter-subjective social reality which is made up of brute data,
identifiable acts and structures, certain institutions, procedures, actions.
It allows for beliefs, affective reactions, evaluations as the psychological
6 See H. McClosky, 'Consensus and ideology in American politics', American Political
Science Review, 5: 58 (r964), pp. 361-82.
properties of individuals. And it allows for correlations between these
twO orders or reality: for example, that certain beliefs go along with
certain acts, certain values with certain institutions, and so on.
To put it another way, what is objectively (inter-subjectively) real is
brute data identifiable. This is what social reality is. Social reality described
in terms of its meaning for the actors, such that disputes could
arise about interpretation which could not be settled by brute data (e.g.,
are people rioting to get a hearing, or are they rioting to redress humiliation,
or out of blind anger, or because they recover a sense of dignity in
insurrection?), is given subjective reality, that is, there are certain beliefs,
affective reactions, evaluations which individuals make or have about or
in relation to social reality. These beliefs or reactions can have an effect on
this reality; and the fact that such a belief is held is a fact of objective
social reality. But the social reality which is the object of these attitudes,
beliefs, reactions can only be made up of brute data. Thus any description
of reality in terms of meanings which is open to interpretive question is
only allowed into this scientific discourse if it is placed, as it were, in
quotes and attributed to individuals as their opinion, belief, attitude.
That this opinion, belief, etc. is held is thought of as a brute datum, since
it is redefined as the respondent's giving a certain answer to the
questionnaire.
This aspect of social reality which concerns its meanings for the agents
has been taken up in a number of ways, but recently it has been spoken of
in terms of political culture. Now the way this is defined and studied illustrates
clearly the categorial principles above. For instance, political culture
is referred to by Almond and Powell as the 'psychological dimension
of the political system'.? Further on they state: 'Political culture is the pattern
of individual attitudes and orientations towards politics among the
members of a political system. It is the subjective realm which underlies
and gives meaning to political actions'.8 The authors then go on to distinguish
three different kinds of orientations, cognitive (knowledge and beliefs),
affective (feelings), and evaluative (judgements and opinions).
From the point of view of empiricist epistemology, this set of categorial
principles leaves nothing out. Both reality and the meanings it has for
actors are coped with. But what it in fact cannot allow for are intersubjective
meanings, that is, it cannot allow for the validity of descriptions of
? Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: a Developmental
Approach (Boston and Toronto, 1966), p. 23.
8 Ibid., p. 50.
32 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 33
social reality in terms of meanings, hence not as brute data, which are not
in quotation marks and attributed as opinion, attitude, etc. to individual(s).
It is this exclusion that I would like to challenge in the name of
another set of categorial principles, inspired by a quite other
epistemology.
2
We spoke earlier about the brute data identification of acts by means of
institutional rules. Thus, putting a cross beside someone's name on a slip
of paper and putting this in a box counts in the right context as voting for
that person; leaving the room, saying or writing a certain form of words,
counts as breaking off the negotiations; writing one's name on a piece of
paper counts as signing the petition, and so on. But what is worth looking
at is what underlies this set of identifications. These identifications are the
application of a language of social life, a language which marks distinctions
among different possible social acts, relations, structures. But what
underlies this language?
Let us take the example of breaking off negotiations above. The language
of our society recognizes states or actions like the following: entering
into negotiation, breaking off negotiations, offering to negotiate,
negotiating in good (bad) faith, concluding negotiations, making a new
offer, and so on. In other more jargon-infested language, the semantic
'space' of this range of social activity is carved up in a certain way, by a
certain set of distinctions which our vocabulary marks; and the shape and
nature of these distinctions is the nature of our language in this area.
These distinctions are applied in our society with more or less formalism
in different contexts.
But of course this is not true of every society. Our whole notion of
negotiation is bound up for instance with the distinct identity and autonomy
of the parties, with the willed nature of their relations; it is a very
contractual notion. But other societies have no such conception. It is
reported about the traditional Japanese village that the foundation of its
social life was a powerful form of consensus, which put a high premium
on unanimous decision.9
Such a consensus would be considered shattered
if two clearly articulated parties were to separate out, pursuing opposed
aims and attempting either to vote down the opposition or push it into a
9 See. Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, 1959), chap. 5.
ThiS type of consensus is also found in other traditional societies. See, for instance, the
desa system of the Indonesian village.
settlement on the most favourable possible terms for themselves. Discussion
there must be, and some kind of adjustment of differences. But our
idea of bargaining, with the assumption of distinct autonomous parties in
willed relationship, has no placei:here; nor does a series of distinctions,
like entering into and leaving negotiation, or bargaining in good faith (sc.
with the genuine intention of seeking agreement).
Now difference between our society and one of the kind just described
could not be well expressed if we said we have a vocabulary to describe
negotiation which they lack. We might say, for instance, that we have a
vocabulary to describe the heavens that they lack, viz., that of Newtonian
mechanics; for here we assume that they live under the same heavens as we
do, only understand it differently. But it is not true that they have the
same kind of bargaining as we do. The word, or whatever word of their
language we translate as 'bargaining', must have an entirely different
gloss, which is marked by the distinctions their vocabulary allows in
contrast to those marked by ours. But this different gloss is not just a
difference of vocabulary, but also one of social reality.
But this still may be misleading as a way of putting the difference. For it
might imply that there is a social reality which can be discovered in each
society and which might exist quite independently of the vocabulary of
that society, or indeed of any vocabulary, as the heavens would exist
whether men theorized about them or not. And this is not the case; the
realities here are practices; and these cannot be identified in abstraction
from the language we use to describe them, or invoke them, or carry them
out. That the practice of negotiation allows us to distinguish bargaining
in good or bad faith, or entering into or breaking off negotiations,
presupposes that our acts and situation have a certain description for US,
for example, that we are distinct parties entering into willed relations.
But they cannot have these descriptions for us unless this is somehow
expressed in our vocabulary of this practice; if not in our descriptions of
the practices (for we may as yet be unconscious of some of the important
distinctions), in the appropriate language for carrying them on. (Thus, the
language marking a distinction between public and private acts or
contexts may exist even where these terms or their equivalents are not
part of this language; for the distinction will be marked by the different
language which is appropriate in one context and the other, be it perhaps
a difference of style, or dialect, even though the distinction is not
designated by specific descriptive expressions.)
The situation we have here is one in which the vocabulary of a given
social dimension is grounded in the shape of social practice .in this
34 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 35
dimension; that is, the vocabulary would not make sense, could not be
applied sensibly, where this range of practices did not prevail. And yet
this range of practices could not exist without the prevalence of this or
some related vocabulary. There is no simple one-way dependence here.
We can speak of mutual dependence if we like, but really what this points
up is the artificiality of the distinction between social reality and the
language of description of that social reality. The language is constitutive
of the reality, is essential to its being the kind of reality it is. To separate
the two and distinguish them as we quite rightly distinguish the heavens
from our theories about them is forever to miss the point.
This type of relation has been recently explored, for instance by John
Searle, with his concept of a constitutive rule. As Searle points out,IO we
are normally induced to think of rules as applying to behaviour which
could be available to us whether or not the rule existed. Some rules are
like this, they are regulative like commandments: do not take the goods of
another. But there are other rules, for example, those governing the
Queen's move in chess, which are not so separable. If one suspends these
rules, or imagines a state in which they have not yet been introduced, then
the whole range of behaviour in question, in this case chess playing,
would not be. There would still, of course, be the activity of pushing a
wooden piece around on a board made of eight squares by eight; but this
is not chess any longer. Rules of this kind are constitutive rules. By contrast
again, there are other rules of chess, such as that one say 'J'adoube'
when one touches a piece without intending to play it, which are clearly
regulative. II
I am suggesting that this notion of the constitutive be extended beyond
the domain of rule-governed behaviour. That is why 1suggest the vaguer
word 'practice'. Even in an area where there are no clearly defined rules,
there are distinctions between different sorts of behaviour such that one
sort is considered the appropriate form for one action or context, the
other for another action or context; for example doing or saying certain
things amounts to breaking off negotiations, doing or saying other things
amounts to making a new offer. But just as there are constitutive rules,
that is rules such that the behaviour they govern could not exist without
them, and which are in this sense inseparable from that behaviour, so I am
suggesting that there are constitutive distinctions, constitutive ranges of
10 Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 33-42 •
11 See the discussion in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969),
pp. 21-3 I.
language which are similarly inseparable, in that certain practices are not
without them.
We can reverse this relationship and say that all the institutions and
practices by which we live are constituted by certain distinctions and
hence a certain language which is thus essential to them. We can take
voting, a practice which is central to large numbers of institutions in a
democratic society. What is essential to the practice of voting is that some
decision or verdict be delivered (a man elected, a measure passed),
through some criterion of preponderance (simple majority, two-thirds
majority, or whatever) out of a set of micro-choices (the votes of the
citizens, MPs, delegates). If there is not some such significance attached to
our behaviour, no amount of marking and counting pieces of paper,
raising hands, or walking out into lobbies amounts to voting. From this it
follows that the institution of voting must be such that certain distinctions
have application: for example, that between someone being elected,
or a measure passed, and their failing of election, or passage; that between
a valid vote and an invalid one which in turn requires a distinction
between a real choice and one which is forced or counterfeited. For no
matter how far we move from the Rousseauian notion that each man
decide in full autonomy, the very institution of the vote requires that in
some sense the enfranchised choose. For there to be voting in a sense
recognizably like ours, there must be a distinction in men's self-interpretations
between autonomy and forced choice.
This is to say that an activity of marking and counting papers has to
bear intentional descriptions which fall within a certain range before we
can agree to call it voting, just as the intercourse of two men or teams has
to bear descriptions of a certain range before we will call it negotiation.
Or in other words, that some practice is voting or negotiation has to do in
part with the vocabulary established in a society as appropriate for
engaging in it or describing it.
Hence implicit in these practices is a certain vision of the agent and his
relation to others and to society. We saw in connection with negotiation
in our society that it requires a picture of the parties as in some sense
autonomous, and as entering into willed relations. And this picture
carries with it certain implicit norms, such as that of good faith
mentioned above, or a norm of rationality, that agreement correspond to
one's goals as far as attainable, or the norm of continued freedom of
action as far as attainable. These practices require that one's actions and
relations be seen in the light of this picture and the accompanying norms,
good faith, autonomy, and rationality. But men do not see themselves in
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATiON AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 37
this way in all societies, nor do they understand these norms in all societies.
The experience of autonomy as we know it, the sense of rational action and
the satisfactions thereof, are unavailable to them. The meaning of these
terms is opaque to them because they have a different structure of
experiential meaning open to them.
We can think of the difference between our society and the simplified
version of the traditional Japanese village as consisting in this, that the
range of meaning open to the members of the two societies is very different.
But what we are dealing with here is not subjective meaning which can fit
into the categorial grid of behavioural political science, but rather intersubjective
meanings. It is not just that the people in our society all or mostly
have a given set of ideas in their heads and subscribe to a given set of goals.
The meanings and norms implicit in these practices are not just inthe minds
of the actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which
cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but which a/ie essentially
modes of social relation, of mutual action.
. The actors may have all sorts of beliefs and attitudes whith may be
nghtly thought of as their individual beliefs and attitudes, even if others
share them; they may subscribe to certain policy goals or certain forms of
th~oryabout the polity, or feel resentment at certain things, and so on. They
bnng these with them into their negotiations, and strive to satisfy them.
But what they do not bring into the negotiations is the set of ideas and
norms constitutive of negotiation themselves. These must be the common
~ropertyo~ th.e society before there can be any question of anyone entering
mto negotiatIOn or not. Hence they are not subjective meanings, the
pr~pertyof one or some individuals, but rather inter-subjective meanings,
whICh are constitutive of the social matrix in which individuals find themselves
and act.
The inter-subjective meanings which are the background to social action
ar~ ~ften treated by political scientists under the heading 'consensus'. By
thiS IS meant convergence of beliefs on certain basic matters, or of attitude.
But the two are not the same. Whether there is consensus or not the condition
of there being either one or the other is a certain set of comm~nterms of
reference. A society in which this was lacking would not be a society in the
normal sense of the term, but several. Perhaps some multi-racial or multitribal
states approach this limit. Some multi-national states are bedevilled
by consistent cross-purposes, e.g., my own country, Canada. But consensus
as a convergence of beliefs or values is not the opposite of this kind of
fundamental diversity. Rather the opposite of diversity is a high degree of
inter-subjective meanings. And this can go along with profound cleavage.
Indeed, inter-subjective meanings are a condition of a certain kind of very
profound cleavage, such as was visible in the Reformation, or the
American Civil War, or splits in left wing parties, where the dispute is at
fever pitch just because each side can fully understand the other.
In other words, convergence of belief or attitude or its absence presupposes
a common language in which these beliefs can be formulated, and in
which these formulations can be opposed. Much of this common language
in any society is rooted in its institutions and practices; it is constitutive
of these institutions and practices. It is part of the inter-subjective
meanings. To put the point another way, apart from the question of
how much people's beliefs converge is the question of how much they
have a common language of social and political reality in which these
beliefs are expressed. This second question cannot be reduced to the first;
inter-subjective meaning is not a matter of converging beliefs or values.
When we speak of consensus we speak of beliefs and values which could
be the property of a single person, or many, or all; but inter-subjective
meanings could not be the property of a single person because they are
rooted in social practice.
We can perhaps see this if we envisage the situation in which the ideas
and norms underlying a practice are the property of single individuals.
This is what happens when single individuals from one society interiorize
the notions and values of another, for example children in missionary
schools. Here we have a totally different situation. We are really talking
now about subjective beliefs and attitudes. The ideas are abstract, they
are mere social 'ideals'. Whereas in the original society, these ideas and
norms are rooted in their social relations, and they can formulate
opinions and ideals on the basis of them.
We can see this in connection with the example we have been using all
along, that of negotiations. The vision of a society based on negotiation is
coming in for heavy attack by a growing segment of modern youth, as are
the attendant norms of rationality and the definition of autonomy. This is
a dramatic failure of 'consensus'. But this cleavage takes place in the
ambit of this inter-subjective meaning, the social practice of negotiation
as it is lived in our society. The rejection would not have the bitter quality
it has if what is rejected were not understood in common, because it is
part of a social practice which we find hard to avoid, so pervasive is it in
our society. At the same time there is a reaching out for other forms which
stilI have the 'abstract' quality of ideals which are subjective in this sense,
that is, not rooted in practice; which is what makes the rebellion look so
'unreal' to outsiders, and so irrational.
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 39
3
Inter-subjective meanings, ways of experiencing action in society which
are expressed in the language and descriptions constitutive of institutions
and practices, do not fit into the categorial grid of mainstream political
science. This allows only for an inter-subjective reality which is brute
data identifiable. But social practices and institutions which are partly
constituted by certain ways of talking about them are not so identifiable.
We have to understand the language, the underlying meanings, which
constitute them.
We can allow, once we accept a certain set of institutions or practices as
our starting point and not as objects of further questioning, that we can
easily take as brute data that certain acts are judged to take place or
certain states judged to hold within the semantic field of these practices;
for instance, that someone has voted Liberal, or signed the petition. We
can then go on to correlate certain subjective meanings - beliefs, attitudes,
etc. - with this behaviour or its lack. But this means that we give up
trying to define further just what these practices and institutions are,
what the meanings are which they require and hence sustain. For these
meanings do not fit into the grid; they are not subjective beliefs or values,
but are constitutive of social reality. In order to get at them we have to
drop the basic premise that social reality is made up of brute data alone.
For any characterization of the meanings underlying these practices is
open to question by someone offering an alternative interpretation. The
negation of this is what was meant as brute data. We have to admit that
inter-subjective social reality has to be partly defined in terms of meanings;
that meanings as subjective are not just in causal interaction with a
social reality made up of brute data, but that as inter-subjective they are
constitutive of this reality.
We have been talking here of inter-subjective Ill,eaning. Earlier I was
contrasting the question of inter-subjective meaning with that of consensus
as convergence of opinions. But there is another kind of non-subjective
meaning which is also often inadequately discussed under the head of
'consensus'. In a society with a strong web of inter-subjective meanings,
there can be a more or less powerful set of common meanings. By these I
mean notions of what is significant, which are not just shared in the sense
that everyone has them, but are also common in the sense of being in the
common reference world. Thus, almost everyone in our society may share
a susceptibility to a certain kind of feminine beauty, but this may not be a
common meaning. It may be known to no one, except perhaps market
researchers, who play on it in their advertisements. But the survival of a
national identity as francophones is a common meaning of Quebecois;
for it is not just shared, and not just known to be shared, but its being a
common aspiration is one of the common reference points of all debate,
communication, and all public life in the society.
We can speak of a shared belief, aspiration, etc. when there is convergence
between the subjective beliefs, aspirations, of many individuals.
But it is part of the meaning of a common aspiration, belief, celebration,
etc. that it be not just shared but part of the common reference world. Or
to put it another way, its being shared is a collective act, it is a consciousness
which is communally sustained, whereas sharing is something we do
each on his own, as it were, even if each of us is influenced by the others.
Common meanings are the basis of community. Inter-subjective
meaning gives a people a common language to talk about social reality
and a common understanding of certain norms, but only with common
meanings does this common reference world contain significant common
actions, celebrations, and feelings. These are objects in the world that
everybody shares. This is what makes community.
Once again, we cannot really understand this phenomenon through the
usual definition of consensus as convergence of opinion and value. For
what is meant here is something more than convergence. Convergence is
what happens when our values are shared. But what is required for
common meanings is that this shared value be part of the common world,
that this sharing be shared. But we could also say that common meanings
are quite other than consensus, for they can subsist with a high degree of
cleavage; this is what happens when a common meaning comes to be lived
and understood differently by different groups in a society. It remains a
common meaning, because there is the reference point which is the
common purpose, aspiration, celebration. Such is for example the
American Way, or freedom as understood in the USA. But this common
meaning is differently articulated by different groups. This is the basis of
the bitterest fights in a society, and this we are also seeing in the USA
today. Perhaps one might say that a common meaning is very often the
cause of the most bitter lack of consensus. It thus must not be confused
with convergence of opinion, value, attitude.
Of course, common meanings and inter-subjective meanings are closely
interwoven. There must be a powerful net of inter-subjective meanings
for there to be common meanings; and the result of powerful common
meanings is the development of a greater web of inter-subjective meanings
as people live in community.
On the other hand, when common meanings wither, which they can do
4° PHI-LOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
through the kind of deep dissensus we described earlier, the groups tend
to grow apart and develop different languages of social reality, hence to
share fewer inter-subjective meanings.
To take our above example again, there has been a powerful common
meaning in our civilization around a certain vision of the free society in
which bargaining has a central place. This has helped to entrench the
social practice of negotiation which makes us participate in this intersubjective
meaning. But there is a severe challenge to this common
meaning today, as we have seen. Should those who object to it really
succeed in building up an alternative society, there would develop a gap
between those who remain in the present type of society and those who
had founded the new one.
Common meanings, as well as inter-subjective ones, fall through the
net of mainstream social science. They can find no place in its categories.
For they are not simply a converging set of subjective reactions, but part
of the common world. What the ontology of mainstream social science
lacks is the notion of meaning as not simply for an individual subject; of
a subject who can be a 'we' as well as an '1'. The exclusion of this
possibility, of the communal, comes once again from the baleful
influence of the epistemological tradition for which all knowledge has
to be reconstructed from the impressions imprinted on the individual
subject. But if we free ourselves from the hold of these prejudices, this
seems a wildly implausible view about the development of human consciousness;
we are aware of the world through a 'we' before we are
through an '1'. Hence we need the distinction between what is just
shared in the sense that each of us has it in our individual worlds and,
that which is in the common world. But the very idea of something
which is in the common world in contradistinction to what is in all the
individual worlds is totally opaque to empiricist epistemology. Hence it
finds no place in mainstream social science. What this results in must
now be seen.
III
I
Thus, to sum up the last pages: a social science which wishes to fulfil the
requirements of the empiricist tradition naturally tries to reconstruct
social reality as consisting of brute data alone. These data are the acts of
people (behaviour) as identified supposedly beyond interpretation either
by physical descriptions or by descriptions clearly defined by institutions
and practices; and secondly, they include th~ subjective reality of individuals'
beliefs, attitudes, values, as attested by their responses to certain
forms of words, or in some cases their overt non-verbal behaviour.
What this excludes is a conside~ation of social reality as characterized
by inter-subjective and common meanings. It excludes, for instance, an
attempt to understand our civilization, in which negotiation plays such a
central part both in fact and in justificatory theory, by probing the selfdefinitions
of agent, other and social relatedness which it embodies. Such
definitions which deal with the meaning for agents of their own and
others' action, and of the social relations in which they stand, do not in
any sense record brute data, in the sense that this term is being used in this
argument; that is, they are in no sense beyond challenge by those who
would quarrel with our interpretations of these meanings.
Thus, I tried to adumbrate above the vision implicit in the practice of
negotiation by reference to certain notions of autonomy and rationality.
But this reading will undoubtedly be challenged by those who have
differe~t fundamental conceptions of man, human motivation, the
human condition; or even by those who judge other features of our
present predicament to have greater importance. If we wish to avoid these
disputes, and have a science grounded in verification as this is understood
by the logical empiricists, then we have to avoid this level of study altogether
and hope to make do with a correlation of behaviour which is brute
data identifiable.
A similar point goes for the distinction between common meanings and
shared subjective meanings. We can hope to identify the subjective meanings
of individuals if we take these in the sense in which there are adequate
criteria for them in people's dissent or assent to verbal formulae or their
brute data indentifiable behaviour. But once we allow the distinction
between such subjective meanings which are widely shared and genuine
common meanings, then we can no longer make do with brute data
identification. We are in a domain where our definitions can be challenged
by those with another reading.
The profound option of mainstream social scientists for the empiricist
conception of knowledge and science makes it inevitable that they should
accept the verification model of political science and the categorial principles
that this entails. This means in turn that a study of our civilization
in terms of its inter-subjective and common meanings is ruled out. Rather
this whole level of study is made invisible.
On the mainstream view, therefore, the different practices and institutions
of different societies are not seen as related to different clusters of
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 43
inter-subjective or common meanings; rather, we should be able to
differentiate them by different clusters of 'behaviour' and/or subjective
meaning. The comparison between societies requires on this view that
we elaborate a universal vocabulary of behaviour which will allow us to
present the different forms and practices of different societies in the
same conceptual web.
Now present-day political science is contemptuous of the older
attempt at comparative politics via a comparison of institutions. An
influential school of our day has therefore shifted comparison to certain
practices, or very general classes of practices, and proposes to compare
societies according to the different ways in which these practices are
carried on. Such are the 'functions' of the influential 'developmental
approach'.u But it is epistemologically crucial that such functions be
identified independently of those inter-subjective meanings which are
different in different societies; for otherwise, they will not be genuinely
universal; or will be universal only in the loose and unilluminating sense
that the function-name can be given application in every society but
with varying, and often widely varying, meaning - the same being
'glossed' very differently by different sets of practices and inter-subjective
meanings. The danger that such universality might not hold is not
even suspected by mainstream political scientists since they are unaware
that there is such a level of description as that which defines intersubjective
meanings, and are convinced that functions and the various
structures which perform them can be identified in terms of brute data
behaviour.
But the result of ignoring the difference in inter-subjective meanings
can be disastrous to a science of comparative politics, viz., that we
interpret all other societies in the categories of our own. Ironically, this
is what seems to have happened to American political science. Having
strongly criticized the old institution-focussed comparative politics for
its ethnocentricity (or Western bias), it proposes to understand the
politics of all society in terms of such functions, for instance, as 'interest
articulation' and 'interest aggregation' whose definition is strongly
influenced by the bargaining culture of our civilization, but which is far
from being guaranteed appropriateness elsewhere. The not surprising
result is a theory of political development which places the Atlantic-type
polity at the summit of human political achievement.
Much can be said in this area of comparative politics (interestingly
12 See Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics.
explored by Alasdair MacIntyre).J3 But I would like to illustrate the
significance of these two rival approaches in connection with another
common problem area of politics: This is the question of what is called
'legitimacy'.14
2
It is an obvious fact, with which politics has been concerned since at least
Plato, that some societies enjoy an easier, more spontaneous cohesion
which relies less on the use of force than others. It has been an important
question of political theory to understand what underlies this differen.ce.
Among others, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville
have dealt with it.
Contemporary mainstream political scientists approach this question
with the concept 'legitimacy'. The use of the word here can be easily
understood. Those societies which are more spontaneously cohesive can
be thought to enjoy a greater sense of legitimacy among their members.
But th~ application of the term has been shifted. 'Legitimacy' is a term in
which we discuss the authority of the state or polity, its right to our
allegiance. However we conceive of this legitimacy, it can only be
attributed to a polity in the light of a number of surrounding conceptions
_ for example, that it provides men freedom, that it emanates from their
will, that it secures them order, the rule of law, or that it is founded on
tradition, or commands obedience by its superior qualities. These conceptions
are all such that they rely on definitions of what is significant for
men in general or in some particular society or circumstances, definitions
of paradigmatic meaning which cannot be identifiable as brute data. Even
where some of these terms might be given an 'operational definition' in
terms of brute data - a term like 'freedom', for instance, can be defined in
terms of the absence of legal restriction, afa Hobbes - this definition
would not carry the full force of the term, and in particular that whereby
it could be considered significant for men.
According to the empiricist paradigm, this latter aspect of the meaning
of such a term is labelled 'evaluative' and is thought to be utterly
heterogeneous from the 'descriptive' aspect. But this analysis is far from
firmly established; no more so in fact than the empiricist paradigm of
knowledge itself with which it is closely bound up. A challenge to this
13 'How is a comparative science of politics possible?', in Alasdair Mcintyre, Against the
Self-Images ofthe Age (London, 1971).
14 Macintyre's article also contains an interesting discussion of 'legitimacy' from a
different, although I think related, angle.
44 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 45
paradigm in the name of a hermeneutical science is also a challenge to the
distinction between 'descriptive' and 'evaluative' and the entire conception
of Wertfrieheit which goes with it.
In any case, whether because it is 'evaluative' or can only be applied in
connection with definitions of meaning, 'legitimate' is not a word which
can be used in the description of social reality according to the conceptions
of mainstream social science. It can only be used as a description of
subjective meaning. What enters into scientific consideration is thus not
the legitimacy of a polity but the opinions or feelings of its member
individuals concerning its legitimacy. The differences between different
societies in their manner of spontaneous cohesion and sense of community
are to be understood by correlations between the beliefs and
feelings of their members towards them on one hand and the prevalence of
certain brute data identifiable indices of stability in them on the other.
Thus Robert Dahl in Modern Political Analysisl5
speaks of the different
ways in which leaders gain 'compliance' for their policies. The more
citizens comply because of 'internal rewards and deprivations', the less
leaders need to use 'external rewards and deprivations'. But if citizens
believe a government is legitimate, then their conscience will bind them to
obey it; they will be internally punished if they disobey; hence government
will have to use less external resources, including force.
Less crude is the discussion of Seymour Lipset in Political Man. 16
But it
is founded on the same basic ideas, viz. that legitimacy defined as
subjective meaning is correlated with stability. 'Legitimacy involves the
capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the
existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the
society.'17
Lipset is engaged in a discussion of the determinants of stability in
modern polities. He singles out two important ones in this chapter,
effectiveness and legitimacy. 'Effectiveness means actual performance,
the extent to which the system satisfies the basic functions of government
as most of the population and such powerful groups within it as big
business or the armed forces see them.'18 Thus we have one factor which
has to do with objective reality, what the government has actually done;
and the other which has to do with subjective beliefs and 'values'. 'While
effectiveness is primarily instrumental, legitimacy is evaluative.'19 Hence
15 Foundation of Modern Political Science Series (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), pp. 31-2.
16 New York, 1963, chap. 3.
17 Ibid., p. 64. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.
from the beginning the stage is set by a distInction between social reality
and what men think and feel about it.
Lipset sees two types of crisis of legitimacy that modern societies have
affronted more or less well. One concerns the status of major conservative
institutions which may be under threat from the development of ~odern
industrial democracies. The second concerns the degree to which all
political groups have access to the political process: Thus, under th~ first
head, some traditional groups, such as landed arIstocracy or clerIcals,
have been roughly handled in a society like France, and have remained
alienated from the democratic system for decades afterwards; whereas in
England the traditional classes were more gently handled, themselves
were willing to compromise and have been slowly integrated and transformed
into the new order. Under the second head, some societies managed
to integrate the working class or bourgeoisie into the politi~al pr.ocess
at an early stage, whereas in others they have been kept out till qUite
recently, and consequently have developed a deep sense of alienation from
the sy~tem, have tended to adopt extremist ideologies, and have generally
contributed to instability. One of the determinants of a society's performance
on these two heads is whether or not it is forced to affront the
different conflicts of democratic development all at once or one at a time.
Another important determinant of legitimacy is effectiveness.
This approach, which sees stability as partly the result of legitimacy
beliefs and these in turn as resulting partly from the way the status,
welfare, and access to political life of different groups fare, seems at first
blush eminently sensible and well designed to help us understand the
history of the last century or two. But this approach has no place for a
study of the inter-subjective and common meanings which are constitutive
of modern civilization. And we may doubt whether we can understand
the cohesion of modern societies or their present crisis if we leave
these out of account.
Let us take the winning of the allegiance of the working class to the new
industrial regimes in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This is far
from being a matter simply or even perhaps most significantly of the speed
with which this class was integrated into the political process and the
effectiveness of the regime. Rather the consideration of the granting of
access to the political process as an independent variable may be
misleading. .
It is not just that we often find ourselves invited by historians to
account for class cohesion in particular countries in terms of other
factors, such as the impact of Methodism in early nineteenth century
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 47
England (Elie Halevy)20 or the draw of Germany's newly successful
nationalism. These factors could be assimilated to the social scientist's
grid by being classed as 'ideologies' or widely held 'value systems' or some
other such concatenations of subjective meaning.
But perhaps the most important such 'ideology' in accounting for the
cohesion of industrial democratic societies has been that of the society of
work, the vision of society as a large-scale enterprise of production in
which widely different functions are integrated into interdependence; a
vision of society in which economic relations are considered as primary,
as it is not only in Marxism (and in a sense not really with Marxism) but
above all with the tradition of Classical Utilitarianism. In line with this
vision there is a fundamental solidarity between all members of society
who labour (to use Arendt's language),21 for they are all engaged in producing
what is indispensable to life and happiness in far-reaching
interdependence.
This is the 'ideology' which has frequently presided over the integration
of the working class into industrial democracies, at first directed
polemically against the 'unproductive' classes, for example in England
with the anti-Corn Law League, and later with the campaigns of Joseph
Chamberlain ('when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the
gentleman?'), but later as a support for social cohesion and solidarity.
But, of course, the reason for putting 'ideology' in quotes above is that
this definition of things, which has been well integrated with the conception
of social life as based on negotiation, cannot be understood in the
terms of mainstream social science, as beliefs and 'values' held by a large
number of individuals. For the great interdependent matrix of labour is
not just a set of ideas in people's heads but is an important aspect of the
reality which we live in modern society. And at the same time, these ideas
are embedded in this matrix in that they are constitutive of it; that is, we
would not be able to live in this type of society unless we were imbued
with these ideas or some others which could call forth the discipline and
voluntary coordination needed to operate this kind of economy. All industrial
civilizations have required a huge wrench from the traditional
peasant populations on which they have been imposed; for they require
an entirely unprecedented level of disciplined sustained, monotonous
effort, long hours unpunctuated by any meaningful rhythm, such as that
of seasons or festivals. In the end this way of life can only be accepted
20 Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1913).
21 The Human Condition (New York, 1959).
when the idea of making a living is endowed with more significance than
that of just avoiding starvation; and this it is in the civilization of labour.
Now this civilization of work is only one aspect of modern societies,
along with the society based on negotiation and willed relations (in
Anglo-Saxon countries), and other common and inter-subjective meanings
which have different importance in different countries. My point is
that it is certainly not implausible to say that it has some importance in
explaining the integration of the working class in modern industrial
democratic society. But it can only be called a cluster of inter-subjective
meaning. As such it cannot come into the purview of mainstream political
science; and an author like Lipset cannot take it into consideration when
discussing this very problem.
But, of course, such a massive fact does not escape notice. What happens
rather is that it is re-interpreted. And what has generally happened is
that the interdependent productive and negotiating society has been
recognized by political science, but not as one structure of inter-subjective
meaning among others, rather as the inescapable background of social
action as such. In this guise it no longer need be an object of study. Rather
it retreats to the middle distance, where its general outline takes the role
of universal framework, within which (it is hoped) actions and structures
will be brute data identifiable, and this for any society at any time. The
view is then that the political actions of men in all societies can be understood
as variants of the processing of 'demands' which is an important
part of our political life. The inability to recognize the specificity of our
inter-subjective meanings is thus inseparably linked with the belief in the
universality of North Atlantic behaviour types or 'functions' which vitiates
so much of contemporary comparative politics.
The notion is that what politics is about perennially is the adjustment
of differences, or the production of symbolic and effective 'outputs' on the
basis of demand and support 'inputs'. The rise of the inter-subjective
meaning of the civilization of work is seen as the increase of correct
perception of the political process at the expense of 'ideology'. Thus
Almond and Powell introduce the concept of 'political secularization' to
describe 'the emergence of a pragmatic, empirical orientation' to
politics.22
A secular political culture is opposed not only to a traditional
one, but also to an 'ideological' culture, which is characterized by 'an
inflexible image of political life, closed to conflicting information' and
'fails to develop the open, bargaining attitudes associated with full
22 Comparative Politics, p. 58.
24 Thus Lewis Feuer in The Conflict ofGenerations (New York, 1969), attempts to account
for the 'misperception of social reality" in the Berkeley student uprising of 1968 In terms
of a generational conflict (pp. 466-70), which in ~urn isrooted In the psychology of
adolescence and attaining adulthood. Yet Feuer himself m hiS first chapter notes the
comparative recency of self-defining political generations, a phenomenon which dates
from the post-Napoleonic era (p. 33). But an adequate attempt to explam thiS hlstoncal
shift which after all underlay the Berkeley rising and many others, would I beheve have
to take us beyond the ambit of individual psychology to psycho-h.istory, to a ~tudy of t~e
intrication of psychological conflict and inter-subjective meanmgs. A vanant of thiS
form of study has been adumbrated in the work of Erik Erikson.
. ty cannot be interpreted as bargaining "gambits in the name of anySOCle .
demands, old or new. These can only be interpreted withm the accepted
f ework of our social science as a return to ideology, and hence as
.ra~ional. Now in the case of some of the more bizarre and bloody forms
lrra b . d d' . 1
of protest, there will be little disagree~e~t; they will e JU ge lff.atiOn~
b all but their protagonists. But wlthm the accepted categones thiS
i7rationality can only be understood in terms of individual psychology; it
is the public eruption of private pathology; it ~ann.ot be un~er~tood as a
malady of society itself, a malaise which afflicts Its constitutive mean~~M
.
No one can claim to begin to have an adequate explanatiOn for these
major changes which our civilization is undergoing. But in contrast t.o the
incapacity of a science which remains within the accepted cate.gones, a
hermeneutical science of man which has a place for a study of l~tersub.
ctive meaning can at least begin to explore fruitful avenues. Plamly the
~isciplinewhich was integral to the civilization of work and bargaining is
beginning to fail. The structures of this civilization, interdepend~nt.work,
bargaining, mutual adjustment of individual ends, are begmnmg to
change their meaning for many, and are beginning to be felt not as normal
and best suited to man, but as hateful or empty. And yet we are all caught
in these inter-subjective meanings in so far as we live in this society, and in
a sense more and more all-pervasively as it progresses. Hence the virulence
and tension of the critique of our society which is always in some real
sense a self-rejection (in a way that the old socialist opposition never
was).
Why has this set of meanings gone sour? Plainly, we have to accept t.hat
they are not to be understood at their face value. The free, productive,
bargaining culture claimed to be sufficient for man. If it was not, then we
have to assume that while it did hold our allegiance, it also had other
meanings for us which commanded this allegiance and which have now
gone.
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
secularization'.13 The clear understanding here is that a secularized culture
is one which essentially depends less on illusion, which sees things as
they are, which is not infected with the 'false consciousness' of traditional
or ideological culture (to use a term which is not in the mainstream
vocabulary).
3
This way of looking at the civilization of work, as resulting from the
retreat of illusion before the correct perception of what politics perennially
and really is, is thus closely bound up with the epistemological
premises of mainstream political science and its resultant inability to
recognize the historical specificity of this civilization's inter-subjective
meanings. But the weakness of this approach, already visible in the
attempts to explain the rise of this civilization and its relation to others
becomes even more painful when we try to account for its present malaise:
even crisis.
The strains in contemporary society, the breakdown of civility, the rise
of deep alienation, which is translated into even more destructive action
tend to shake the basic categories of our social science. It is not just tha;
such a development was quite unpredicted by this science, which saw in
the rise of affluence the cause rather of a further entrenching of the
bargaining culture, a reduction of irrational cleavage, an increase of
tolerance, in short 'the end of ideology'. For prediction, as we shall see
below, cannot be a goal of social science as it is of natural science. It is
rather that this mainstream science hasn't the categories to explain this
breakdown. It is forced to look on extremism either as a bargaining
gambit of the desperate, deliberately raising the ante in order to force a
hearing. Or, alternatively, it can recognize the novelty of the rebellion by
accepting the hypothesis that heightened demands are being made on the
system owing to a revolution of 'expectations', or else to the eruption of
new desires or aspirations which hitherto had no place in the bargaining
process. But these new desires or aspirations must be in the domain of
individual psychology, that is, they must be such that their arousal and
satisfaction is to be understood in terms of states of individuals rather
than in terms of the inter-subjective meanings in which they live. For these
latter have no place in the categories of the mainstream, which thus
cannot accommodate a genuine historical psychology.
But some of the more extreme protests and acts of rebellion in our
2.l Ibid.,p.6r.
INTERPREtATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 49
5° PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN
This is the starting point of a set of hypotheses which attempt to redefine
our past in order to make our present and future intelligible. We might
think that the productive, bargaining culture offered in the past common
meanings (even though there was no place for them in its philosophy), and
hence a basis for community, which were essentially linked with its being in
the process of building. It linked men who could see themselves as breaking
with the past to build a new happiness in America, for instance. But in all
essentials that future is built; the notion of a horizon to be attained by
future greater production (as against social transformation) verges on the
absurd in contemporary America. Suddenly the horizon which was
essential to the sense of meaningful purpose has collapsed, which would
show that like so many other Enlightenment-based dreams the free, productive,
bargaining society can only sustain man as a goal, not as a reality.
Or we can look at this development in terms of identity. A sense of
building their future through the civilization of work can sustain men as
long as they see themselves as having broken with a millennial past ofinjustice
and hardship in order to create qualitatively different conditions for
their children. All the requirements ofa humanly acceptable identity can be
met by this predicament, a relation to the past (one soars above it but preserves
it in folkloric memory), to the social world (the inter-dependent
world of free, productive men), to the earth (the raw material which awaits
shaping), to the future and one's own death (the everlasting monument in
the lives of prosperous children), to the absolute (the absolute values of
freedom, integrity, dignity).
But at some point the children will be unable to sustain this forward
thrust into the future. This effort has placed them in a private haven of
security, within which they are unable to reach and recover touch with the
great realities: their parents have only a negated past, lives which have been
oriented wholly to the future; the social world is distant and without
shape; rather one can only insert oneself into it by taking one's place in the
future-oriented productive juggernaut. But this now seems without any
sense; the relation to the earth as raw material is therefore experienced as
empty and alienating, but the recovery of a valid relation to the earth is the
hardest thing once lost; and there is no relation to the absolute where we are
caught in the web of meanings which have gone dead for us. Hence past,
future, earth, world, and absolute are in some way or another occluded;
and what must arise is an identity crisis of frightening proportions.
These two hypotheses are mainly focussed on the crisis in US civilization
and they would perhaps help account for the fact that the USA is in som~
sense going first through this crisis of all Atlantic nations; not, that is, only
because it is the most affluent, but more because it has ,been more ~ully
based on the civilization of work than European countnes who retamed
omething of more traditional common meanings.
s But they might also help us to understand why alienation is ~o~t sever,e
among groups which have been but marginal in ~fflu~nt ~~r~al~mg SO~Ieties.
These have had the greatest strain in living m thiS cIVIlization ,while
their identity was in some ways antithetical to it. Such are blacks m the
USA, and the community of French-speaking Canadians, each in different
ays. For many immigrant groups the strain was also great, but they
~rced themselves to surmount the obstacles, and the new identity is
sealed in the blood of the old, as it were.
But for those who would not or could not succeed in thus transforming
themselves, but always lived a life of strain on the defensive, the
breakdown of the central, powerful identity is the trigger to a deep turnover.
It can be thought of as a liberation but at the same time it is deeply
unsettling, because the basic parameters of former life are being changed
and there are not yet the new images and definitions to live a new fully
acceptable identity. In a sense we are in a condition where a new social
compact (rather the first social compact) has to be made between these
groups and those they live with, and no one knows where to start.
In the last pages, I have presented some hypotheses which may appear
very speculative; and they may indeed turn out to be without foundation,
even without much interest. But their aim was mainly illustrative. My
principal claim is that we can only come to grips with this phenomenon of
breakdown by trying to understand more clearly and profoundly the
common and inter-subjective meanings of the society in which we have
been living. For it is these which no longer hold us, and to understand this
change we have to have an adequate grasp of these meanings. But this we
cannot do as long as we remain within the ambit of mainstream social
science, for it will not recognize inter-subjective meaning, and is forced to
look at the central meanings of our society as though they were the
inescapable background of all political action. Breakdown is thus inexplicable
in political terms; it is an outbreak of irrationality which must
ultimately be explained by some form of psychological illness.
Mainstream science may thus venture into the area explored by the
above hypotheses, but after its own fashion, by forcing the psychohistorical
facts of identity into the grid of an individual psychology, in
short, by re-interpreting all meanings as subjective. The result might be a
psychological theory of emotional maladjustment, perhaps traced to
certain features of family background, analogous to the theories of the
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 53
authoritarian personality and the California F-scale. But this would no
longer be a political or social theory. We would be giving up the attempt
to understand the change in social reality at the level of its constitutive
inter-subjective meanings.
IV
It can be argued, then, that mainstream social science is kept within
certain limits by its categorial principles which are rooted in the traditional
epistemology of empiricism; and secondly that these restrictions
are a severe handicap and prevent us from coming to grips with important
problems of our day which should be the object of political science. We
need to go beyond the bounds of a science based on verification to one
which would study the inter-subjective and common meanings embedded
in social reality.
But this science would be hermeneutical in the sense that has been
developed in this paper. It would not be founded on brute data; its most
primitive data would be readings of meanings, and its object would have
the three properties mentioned above: the meanings are for a subject in a
field or fields; they are moreover meanings which are partially constituted
by self-definitions, which are in this sense already interpretations, and
which can thus be re-expressed or made explicit by a science of politics. In
our case, the subject may be a society or community; but the inter-subjective
meanings, as we saw, embody a certain self-definition, a vision of the
agent and his society, which is that of the society or community.
But then the difficulties which the proponents of the verification model
foresee will arise. Ifwe have a science which has no brute data, which relies
on readings, then it cannot but move in a hermeneutical circle. A given
reading of the inter-subjective meanings of a society, or of given institutions
or practices, may seem well founded, because it makes sense of these
practices or the development of that society. But the conviction that it
does make sense of this history itself is founded on further related readings.
Thus, what I said above on the identity crisis which is generated by
our society makes sense and holds together only if one accepts this reading
of the inter-subjective meanings of our society, and if one accepts this
reading of the rebellion against our society by many young people (Sc. the
reading in terms of identity crisis). These two readings make sense together,
so that in a sense the explanation as a whole reposes on the
readings, and the readings in their turn are strengthened by the explanation
as a whole.
But if these readings seem implausible, or even more, if they are not
nderstood by our interlocutor, there is no verification procedure which
:e can fall back on. We can only continue to offer interpretations; we are
in an interpretative circle.· .
But the ideal of a science of verification is to find an appeal beyond
differences of interpretation. Insight will always be useful in discovery,
but should not have to play any part in establishing the truth of its
findings. This ideal can be said to have been met by our natural sciences.
But a hermeneutic science cannot but rely on insight. It requires that one
have the sensibility and understanding necessary to be able to make and
comprehend the readings by which we can explain the reality concerned.
In physics we might argue that if someone does not accept a true theory,
then either he has not been shown enough (brute data) evidence (perhaps
not enough is yet available), or he cannot understand and apply some
formalized language. But in the sciences of man conceived as hermeneutical,
the non-acceptance of a true or illuminating theory may come
from neither of these, indeed is unlikely to be due to either of these, but
rather from a failure to grasp the meaning field in question, an inability to
make and understand readings of this field.
In other words, in a hermeneutical science, a certain measure of insight
is indispensable, and this insight cannot be communicated by the gathering
of brute data, or initiation in modes of formal reasoning or some
combination of these. It is unformalizable. But this is a scandalous result
according to the authoritative conception of science in our tradition,
which is shared even by many of those who are highly critical of the
approach of mainstream psychology, or sociology, or political science.
For it means that this is not a study in which anyone can engage,
regardless of their level of insight; that some claims of the form: 'if you
don't understand, then your intuitions are at fault, are blind or inadequate'
will be justified; that some differences will be non-arbitrable by
further evidence, but that each side can only make appeal to deeper insight
on the part of the other. The superiority of one position over another
will thus consist in this, that from the more adequate position one can
understand one's own stand and that of one's opponent, but not the other
way around. It goes without saying that this argument can only have
weight for those in the superior position.
Thus a hermeneutical science encounters a gap in intuitions, which is,
the other side, as it were, of the hermeneutical circle. But the situation is
graver than this; for this gap is bound up with our divergent options in
politics and life.
54 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 55
We speak of a gap when some cannot understand the kind of selfdefinition
which others are proposing as underlying a certain society or
set of institutions. Thus some positivistically minded thinkers will find
the language of identity-theory quite opaque; and some thinkers will not
recognize any theory which does not fit with the categorial presuppositions
of empiricism. But self-definitions are not only important to us as
scientists who are trying to understand some, perhaps distant, social
reality. As men we are self-defining beings, and we are partly what we are
in virtue of the self-definitions which we have accepted, however we have
come by them. What self-definitions we understand and what ones we do
not, is closely linked with the self-definitions which help to constitute
what we are. If it is too simple to say that one only understands an
'ideology' which one subscribes to, it is nevertheless hard to deny that we
have great difficulty grasping definitions whose terms structure the world
in ways which are utterly different from or incompatible with our own.
Hence the gap in intuitions doesn't just divide different theoretical
positions, it also tends to divide different fundamental options in life. The
practical and the theoretical are inextricably joined here. It may not just
be that to understand a certain explanation one has to sharpen one's
intuitions, it may be that one has to change one's orientation - if not in
adopting another orientation, at least in living one's own in a way which
allows for greater comprehension of others. Thus, in the sciences of man
in so far as they are hermeneutical there can be a valid response to 'I don't
understand' which takes the form, not only 'develop your intuitions', but
more radically 'change yourself'. This puts an end to any aspiration to a
value-free or 'ideology-free' science of man. A study of the science of man
is inseparable from an examination of the options between which men
must choose.
This means that we can speak here not only of error, but of illusion. We
speak of 'illusion' when we are dealing with something of greater
substance than error, error which in a sense builds a counterfeit reality of
its own. But errors of interpretation of meaning, which are also selfdefinitions
of those who interpret and hence inform their lives, are more
than errors in this sense: they are sustained by certain practices of which
they are constitutive. It is not implausible to single out as examples two
rampant illusions in our present society. One is that of the proponents of
the bargaining society who can recognize nothing but either bargaining
gambits or madness in those who rebel against this society. Here the error
is sustained by the practices of the bargaining culture, and given a semblance
of reality by the refusal to treat any protests on other terms; it
hence acquires the more substantive reality of illusion. The second example
is provided by much 'revolutionary' activity in our society which in desperate
search for an alternative mode of life purports to see its situation in that
of an Andean guerilla or Chinese peasants. Lived out, this passes from the
stage of laughable error to tragic illusion. One illusion cannot recognize
the possibility of human variation, the other cannot see any limits to man's
ability'to transform itself. Both make a valid science of man impossible.
Inface of all this, we might be so scandalized by the prospect of such a
hermeneutical science, that we will want to go back to the verification
model. Why can we not take our understanding of meaning as part of the
logic of discovery, as the logical empiricists suggest for our unformalizable
insights, and still found our science on the exactness of our predictions?
Our insightful understanding of the inter-subjective meanings of our
society will then serve to elaborate fruitful hypotheses, but the proof of
these puddings will remain in the degree they enable us to predict.
The answer is that if the epistemological views underlying the science of
interpretation are right, such exact prediction is radically impossible, for
three reasons of ascending order of fundamentalness.
The first is the well-known 'open system' predicament, one shared by
human life and meteorology, that we cannot shield a certain domain of
human events, the psychological, economic, political, from external interference;
it is impossible to delineate a closed system.
The second, more fundamental, is that if we are to understand men by a
science of interpretation, we cannot achieve the degree of fine exactitude of
ascience based on brutedata. The data of natural science admit of measurement
to virtually any degree of exactitude. But different interpretations
cannot be judged in this way. At the same time different nuances of interpretation
may lead to different predictions in some circumstances, and
these different outcomes may eventually create widely varying futures.
Hence it is more than easy to be wide of the mark.
But the third and most fundamental reason for the impossibility of hard
prediction is that man is a self-defining animal. With changes in his selfdefinition
go changes in what man is, such that he has to be understood in
different terms. But the conceptual mutations in human history can and
frequently do produce conceptual webs which are incommensurable, that
is, where the terms cannot be defined in relation to a common stratum of
expressions. The entirely different notions of bargaining in our society and
in some primitive ones provide an example. Each will be glossed in terms of
practices, institutions, ideas in each society which have nothing corresponding
to them in the other.
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERPRETATION AND THE SCIENCES OF MAN 57
i
The success of prediction in the natural sciences is bound up with the f
fact that all states of the system, past and future, can be described in the t
same range of concepts, as values, say, of the same variables. Hence all
future states of the solar system can be characterized, as past ones are, in
the language of Newtonian mechanics. This is far from being a sufficient
condition of exact prediction, but it is a necessary one in this sense, that
only if past and future are brought under the same conceptual net can one
understand the states of the latter as some function of the states of the
former, and hence predict.
This conceptual unity is vitiated in the sciences of man by the fact of
conceptual innovation which in turn alters human reality. The very terms
in which the future will have to be characterized if we are to understand it
properly are not all available to us at present. Hence we have such
radically unpredictable events as the culture of youth today, the Puritan
rebellion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the development of
Soviet society, and so on.
Thus it is much easier to understand after the fact than it is to predict.
Human science is largely ex post understanding. Or often one has the
sense of impending change, of some big reorganization, but is powerless
to make clear what it will consist in: one lacks the vocabulary. But there is
a clear asymmetry here, which there is not (or not supposed to be) in
natural science, where events are said to be predicted from the theory with
exactly the same ease with which one explains past events and by exactly
the same process. In human science this will never be the case.
Of course, we strive ex post to understand the changes, and to do this
we try to develop a language in which we can situate the incommensurable
webs of concepts. We see the rise of Puritanism, for instance, as a
shift in man's stance to the sacred; and thus, we have a language in which
we can express both stances - the earlier medieval Catholic one and the
Puritan rebellion - as 'glosses' on this fundamental term. We thus have a
language in which to talk of the transition. But think how we acquired it.
This general category of the sacred is acquired not only from our experience
of the shift which came in the Reformation, but from the study of
human religion in general, including primitive religion, and with the
detachment which came with secularization. It would be conceivable, but
unthinkable, that a medieval Catholic could have this conception - or for
that matter a Puritan. These two protagonists only had a language of
condemnation for each other: 'heretic', 'idolator'. The place for such a
concept was pre-empted by a certain way of living the sacred. After a big
change has happened, and the trauma has been resorbed, it is possible to
to understand it, because one now has available the new language, the
try dO 0 b f 0 k
transformed meaning world. But hard pre IctlOn e ore Just ma es one a
laughing stock. Really to be able to predict the future would be to have
licited so clearly the human condition that one would already have
exp f 0 ThO 0 h dl 0
pre-empted all cultural innovation and trans ormatIOn. IS IS ar y III
the bounds of the possible.
Sometimes men show amazing prescience: the myth of Faust, for
instance, which is treated several times at the beginning of the modern
a
There is a kind of prophesy here, a premonition. But what characer
.
terizes these bursts of foresight is that they see through a glass darkly, for
they see in terms of the old language: Faust sells his soul to the devil. Theoy
are in no sense hard predictions. Human science looks backward. It IS
inescapably historical. 0
There are thus good grounds both in epistemological arguments and III
their greater fruitfulness for opting for hermeneutical sciences of man.
But we cannot hide from ourselves how greatly this opinion breaks with
certain'commonly held notions about our scientific tradition. We cannot
measure such sciences against the requirements of a science of verification:
we cannot judge them by their predictive capacity. We have to
accept that they are founded on intuitions which all do not share, and
what is worse that these intuitions are closely bound up with our fundamental
options. These sciences cannot be wertfrei; they are moral sciences
in a more radical sense than the eighteenth century understood. Finally,
their successful prosecution requires a high degree of self-knowledge, a
freedom from illusion, in the sense of error which is rooted and expressed
in one's way of life; for our incapacity to understand is rooted in our own
self-definitions, hence in what we are. To say this is not to say anything
new: Aristotle makes a similar point in Book I of the Ethics. But it is still
radically shocking and unassimilable to the mainstream of modern
science.