isaac ariail reed
INTERPRETATION AND
SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences
the universit y of chicago press
Chicago & London
isaac ariail reed is assistant professor of sociology
at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
Printed in the United States of America
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isbn-13: 978-0-226-70673-3 (cloth)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reed, Isaac (Isaac Ariail)
Interpretation and social knowledge : on the use of theory in
the human sciences / Isaac Ariail Reed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-70673-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-70673-7 (cloth : alkaline paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-70674-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-70674-5 (paperback : alkaline paper)
1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of.
3. Social sciences—Philosophy. 4. Social sciences—Methodology.
5. Interpretation (Philosophy) I. Title.
bd175 .r37 2011
121—dc22 2011010293
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
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ansi z39.48-1992.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction 1
chapter one Knowledge 15
chapter two Reality 39
chapter three Utopia 67
chapter four Meaning 89
chapter five Explanation 123
Epilogue 163
Acknowledgments 173
References 175
Index 191
Chapter One
Knowledge
I
The construction of social knowledge occurs at the intersection of
two meaning-systems, one of theory and one of fact. Let us begin,
briefly, with the latter.
The problems that surround what Robert Merton called “establishing
the phenomenon”1
have long been the subject of methodological
disputation in social research. Methodology is a reflection on the efficacy
of our various techniques for establishing facts—survey data and
in-depth interviewing, quantitative versus qualitative approaches to
the historical archive, and so on. All of these methodologies (and the
disputes about them) are, however, confronted by the problem that,
in the case of human affairs, many of the most essential facts of the
matter—the social facts—are not immediately observable. Rather,
they are observable through what Émile Durkheim called their “individual
manifestations.”2
1. Robert K. Merton, “Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing
the Phenomenon, Specified Ignorance and Strategic Research Materials,” Annual
Review of Sociology 13 (1987).
2. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: Free Press,
1966), 277.
16 chapter one
Why is this the case? Certainly much of what human beings who
live in societies do is observable, recordable, etc. And there are many
behaviors that we do not observe or record directly that we can,
nonetheless, be fairly sure happened. It is not our spatial or temporal
distance from social facts that makes them a difficult category. It is that
reporting on the carryings on of human beings requires a reference
to the meaning of their actions, in a very minimal yet fundamental
way. The telling of the facts of the matter, in human affairs, already
involves a structure of meaning and intention, and, therefore, of inference
on the part of the investigator toward aspects of life that are not
visible, and never were nor will be visible. Social facts understood in
this manner can never be fully stated in protocol sentences that are
verifiable by literal observation, but must be inferred and understood
in a dialogue about what is happening or has happened, at a certain
time, in a certain space, in a given society.
For example, when one states that, in 1692, after examination
by the village doctor, it was determined by a set of adults in Salem
Village, Massachusetts, and its environs that the fits and screams of
“afflicted” girls were due to their being under an “evil hand,” one is
stating a rather uncontroversial fact. We know this happened—that
these adults made this determination. But understanding this fact
already involves understanding the possible meanings for the people
of seventeenth-century Massachusetts of the physically observable
behavior of the girls, the meaning of the utterance “evil hand,” the
meaning of the term “doctor,” and the expectations that other people
had of doctors, and so on. It is in this way that social facts are
“thick.”
Dispute already reigns here. However, the “thickness” of human
facts3
—that is, the way in which they already contain inferences to
3. Concerning the gathering and interpretation of evidence in the human sciences,
Carlo Ginzburg writes that “It is one thing to analyze footprints, stars, feces, sputum,
corneas, pulsations, snow covered fields, or cigarette ashes; it is quite another to examine
handwriting or paintings or conversation. There is a basic difference between
nature, inanimate and living, and culture—certainly greater than the infinitely more
superficial and mutable differences that exist between individual disciplines.” Ginzburg
constructs an extended argument that the “evidential paradigm” in the human sciences
requires specific attention to the semiotics of facts. I agree. In particular, I agree
with Ginzburg’s embrace of an anthropocentric approach to evidence in the human
sciences, and thus his idea that there is a commonality in the way in which detective
work, art history and painting attribution, and psychoanalysis look closely at minute
traces that reveal the characteristics of a in individual, action, or historical moment.
In this book, however, I take a cue from a comment at the end of Ginzburg’s essay
knowledge 17
meanings that are, technically speaking, invisible—is but one aspect of
a much larger problem of interpretation in social research. For, while
establishing the phenomenon may be the most important and most
difficult task a social researcher faces, it is neither the task that produces
the most controversy in social science nor the final step in the
production of social knowledge. For, as soon as we have established
the phenomenon—or, some would say, thickly described it—then
we ask the next question: how are we to understand it?
In other words, it is the responsibility of the social researcher
not only to report the facts,4
but to propose a deeper or broader
comprehension of them. When investigators attempt to do this, we
reach for our theories. We do this because we need some way of
comprehending what is, to speak colloquially, “underneath” the facts.
We want to know what generates them, determines them, what their
consequences are, how we should think about them politically, what
their connection to the here and now is, and so on. To do this, it is
very seldom enough to continue to gather more facts, no matter how
“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.” There, he writes that “[t]hough pretentions
to systematic knowledge may appear more and more far-fetched, the idea of totality
does not necessarily need to be abandoned. On the contrary, the existence of a deeply
rooted relationship that explains superficial phenomena is confirmed the very moment
it is stated that direct knowledge of such a connection is not possible. Though reality
may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones—signs, clues—which allow us to
penetrate it.” Ginzburg writes that this idea is the “crux of the conjectural or semiotic
paradigm.” What this indicates to me is the need to recognize not only the way in which
evidential reasoning relies upon an “anthropocentric” view of the human sciences,
but also how the success of those sciences depends upon the use of social theory to
penetrate the clues that have been gathered, so as to generate deep interpretations of
sociohistorical episodes. After all, to follow Ginzburg’s argument about the emergence
of the evidential paradigm in the work of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, and
Giovanni Morelli, all three may have been interested in the clues left unintentionally
behind by humans, but their theories of what drives individuals to do this, and of the
relationship between the motives of individuals and larger forces and forms of social
life, are rather different. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 118, 123.
4. Here I use the term “report” in direct reference to W. G. Runciman’s concept
of reportage. In a series of theoretical arguments beginning with a critique of Max
Weber’s epistemology, Runciman has developed the position that interpretation is a
problem for the human sciences at the level of description, but not at the level of explanation.
I disagree, and the argument of this book runs directly counter to Runciman’s
proposed solution to the problem of interpretation and social knowledge. See W. G.
Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), and W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, 3 vols. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I take up the problem of interpretation and
explanation explicitly in chapter 5.
18 chapter one
thickly we comprehend them and present them to our colleagues. We
need theory to help us explain and evaluate social life.
Our theories are, by their very nature, meaningful human constructions.
They exist primarily in the heads of investigators and the pages
of their books and journals. Sometimes they consist of a vast, abstract
architecture of interrelated and highly consistent terms, sometimes
they attempt to specify in the abstract a single mechanism, sometimes
they propose a new way to think about something we all already think
about, such as democracy. But the world of social theory is meaningful
in the basic human sense of providing a coherent model for and model
of the (social) world. The hope is that this meaningful world is also a
useful one, so that our attempts to develop a deeper understanding
of social phenomena are sometimes successful.
Our facts are thus a set of meanings, and our theories are a set of
meanings. When we bring theories and facts together, then, we are
bringing two meaning-full worlds, or meaning-systems, together.
To a certain degree, of course, our theories may indeed influence
our use of evidence to construct the facts, or our emphasis on different
facts. But this happens less than we think, and at the level of
bare social facts—the level of understanding required to report what
happened—we quite often can achieve a good deal of consensus,
despite our theoretical, or even epistemological, differences. (This is
not always the case, and I will consider an example of a disputation
over facts below.) Rather, the influence of theory on our knowledge
claims most often comes in a much more conscious and controlled
form—when we deliberately bring terms foreign to our subjects of
study (e.g., “mode of production,” “episteme,” “ideological state
apparatus,” “habitus”) to bear on our facts, in an effort to grasp
some essential aspect of social life that is not given up easily by the
facts.
So, by bringing our theoretical terms to bear on what happened
at the Salem Witch Trials, we might come to understand that rather
horrendous set of actions as an expression of the economic transformation
of early America and the politico-economic interests of
the parties involved. Or we might grasp it as one of the last violent
episodes in the vast formation of early modern European patriarchy,
in which the inner resentments and fears of men found their grisly
public resolution. Or we might understand Salem as an early expression
of American populism, a willingness of some actors, some of the
time, to speak outside of the legal structures established by elites,
knowledge 19
whatever the risks—and thus as a story that should be recuperated
by those interested in the establishment of a more democratic United
States today. Each of these proposals gains in power what it loses in
obviousness, and each incorporates into its interpretation the basic
reports of what happened at Salem. The results of this incorporation
are very different, however, and that is what makes them exciting
and valuable.5
II
To say that theory and fact are both meaning-systems is not to say
that they are meaning-systems that work in exactly the same manner.
Indeed, the intellectual disciplines dedicated to the study of
meaning—hermeneutics and semiotics—are flush with typologies,
dichotomies, and elaborate theoretical artifices all designed to work
out the different ways in which language—or, more generally, signification—can
work in its various social contexts. And needless to say
there are surely many ways of gathering evidence and thus producing
factual reports on what happened in social life, and many genres of
theoretical exploration and imagination. But let us stick to the basics,
at least at first. What is the difference between theory and fact
as meaning-systems?
I think the central difference is that in the meaning-system of
fact, we expect evidence to function referentially or indexically when
indicating what happened, and in the meaning-system of theory,
we expect theoretical terms to function relationally or conceptually.
Some evidence is directly indexical—we think of it as a trace of a
physical act that happened at a certain point in time and space.6
But,
5. These different sorts of interpretations crisscross the literature on Salem and
on early modern witchcraft. See in particular Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1974); Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial
of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Evelyn Heinemann,
Witches: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women (London: Free
Association, 2000). For a summary of the scholarly literature on witch hunts and its
relationship to feminist concerns, see Elspeth Whitney, “International Trends: The
Witch ‘She’/the Historian ‘He’: Gender and the Historiography of the European
Witch-Hunts,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 3 (1995).
6. Peirce writes that “an index stands for its object by virtue of a real connection
with it or because it forces the mind to attend to that object” (Charles S. Peirce, “Of
Reasoning in General,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998]: 11–26, 14), and Roy Rappaport ex-
20 chapter one
as discussed above, most of the reality we are busy studying in the
human sciences is not reducible to its biophysical supports. Thus it
is safer to say that we expect the gathering, organizing, and presenting
of evidence, as an active and dynamic meaning-system, to serve a
primarily referential function—even if what it references is not (or is
not only) a material object or biological person. In the language game
of fact, there are myriad evidential signs—sentences, photographs,
quotations, assertions, graphs, tables, charts—and we expect these
signifiers to express a certain content that is or was in the social world.
This means that meaningful facts result from the connection of evidential
signs to a ground that emerges, from research, as the object
of investigation—the selected set of social actions that happened.
Evidential signs, colligated together, connect the sociological investigator,
and the people who read her text, to a set of social actions
that are the ground of factual signification (see fig. 1).7
The English locutions “evidence for” and “theory of ” hint at how
differently theoretical meaning works. In theory, meaning develops to
a great degree by the ways in which contrasts between expressions—
e.g., “forces of production” and “relations of production”—create
conceptual contrasts in the minds of researchers. This is not to say
that those concepts cannot, in turn, reference something else, perhaps
something in the world. But if they do (and this book is, in part, an
effort to figure out what, if anything, theory references) it is surely
reasonable to point out that we do not expect theory to reference the
social world in the same concrete manner that we expect evidence
to reference the social world. Indeed, the whole point of theory is to
be abstract and conceptual. The necessary result of this is that what
theory “references,” first and foremost, is not really a referent at all
plains that “A true index is a sign that is either an effect of, or an aspect of, or a part
of its object” (Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,
Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999], 63).
7. As I explain below, I think that all signs function both referentially and relationally,
and thus the difference between the tendencies of evidential signs and theoretical
signs is a matter of degree, not a strict distinction. To use Peircian language, most
signs have elements of the symbolic, the indexical, and the iconic (and especially the
first two), and thus the difference between theory and fact is the tendency of the latter
to foreground the indexical dimension of signification, and the former to foreground
the symbolic dimension. (As Rappaport comments, “The terms ‘index,’ ‘icon,’ and
‘symbol’ should be taken to be possible aspects of signs rather than labels for necessarily
separate and distinct signs.” Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity, 66).
knowledge 21
in the concrete sense of meaningful social actions that actually happened.
Rather, the immediate reference of theoretical expressions is,
as far as I can tell, (1) other theoretical expressions and (2) imagined
societies, social actions, and social relations whose primary existence
is in researchers’ heads.
This may seem a strange thing to say, but anyone who has recently
had the experience of being initiated into a group of theoretically
informed social researchers (or, even worse, into a group of social
theorists) probably has an intuitive sense of its truth. The disputations
of the early and the late Wittgenstein aside, if there is one language
you cannot learn by asking, at each turn in the conversation, “can
you point to what that word refers to?” it is the language of social
theory. This does not, however, make theory irrelevant to or useless
for understanding social reality. Quite the opposite is the case. It is
precisely because theory is abstract that it enables analysis of facts, and,
ultimately, the construction of knowledge. Furthermore, this distinction
between theory and evidence is relative; there are relational
aspects of evidence as a language, and referential aspects of theory as
a language.8
As an example of the former, consider how gender history
must, even at its most empirical and evidential, use the binary of
male/female as source of meaning. As an example of the latter, think
8. For an explanation from the philosophy of science for how the theory/data
distinction can function as a matter of degree, see Mary Hesse, “The Hunt for Scientific
Reason,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science
Association 2 (1980).
Evidence
(Representamen)
Investigator
and community
of inquiry
Social
actions
(Object)(Interpretant)
Reportage = interpretation of
social actions that happened( )
Figure 1: The factual sign
22 chapter one
of the referential importance of Speenhamland for Polanyi’s abstract
theories of economy and society. Here reference to a set of quite actual
processes enabled the development of highly abstract definitions
and elaborations of the historical prerequisites for the institutionalization
of a “market society”—a theoretical term understood in relation
to the abstractions of Marx, Weber, and others.
Still, the point holds, especially when push comes to shove: the
most effective way to criticize another researcher’s evidence is to suggest
that it fails to accurately represent the phenomenon it claims to
represent—that it is referentially incorrect; theory, when it is taken
to task on its own, separate from any evidence, can be devastated
if the critic can show conceptual incoherence. However, perhaps
more frequent than either of these criticisms is the critique of a social
knowledge claim as suffering from a disjunction between theory
and evidence: the evidence does not bear out the theory, the theory
does not fit the evidence, this is the wrong theory to use to interpret
this evidence, etc. This sort of response, by an audience, to a failed
knowledge claim gives us a clue as to what happens when theory and
evidence do come together successfully.
III
In most of its contacts with actual happenings in the social world
(represented by evidence), theory is metacommentary. It proposes to
rethink, reframe, and recast facts that have already been established;
it proposes to set up a research question to be investigated; it hypothesizes
about a cause whose traces can be either measured quantitatively,
confirmed comparatively, or perhaps verified via testimony
and interview; it creates the conditions for critique by denaturalizing
the inevitable, reopening the possible, and exhorting for the radically
democratic. All of these functions are invaluable, but they are also
supervenient upon the existence of referential evidence in a wellcolligated
meaning-system of fact. In this format, the sign-system
of theory combines with the sign-system of fact in an obvious way:
facts provide an “example of ” a theory, theory provides “a new way
to view” the facts.
The importance of these functions of theory should not be underestimated.
However, they refer to a kind of discourse in which the
difference between theory and fact remains obvious because the two
meaning-systems remain to some degree in disjunction. The stakes
knowledge 23
are higher when the meanings of theory and the meanings of fact
mix in a more extensive and effective manner to produce the social
knowledge claims that I will call maximal interpretations. In maximal
interpretations, theory and fact articulate in such a way that the referential
functions of evidence and the relational functions of theory are
subsumed under a deeper understanding. No longer is evidence used
merely to shore up a factual “example” of a theoretical expression.
Rather, the signs of evidence become themselves intertwined with the
signs of theory, such that both come to express a deeper social force,
a longstanding democratic imperative, or an underlying discursive
formation. They become part of a maximal interpretation.9
In other words, while “establishing the phenomenon” requires
interpretation at the level of evidence and method—the arrangement
of evidential signs—such work tends toward one end of a spectrum
that runs from minimal to maximal interpretation. At the minimal
end of the spectrum, the frequency of theoretical terms is slight (or
. . . minimal), and the claims tend to be less controversial—though
they can, on rare occasions, be startlingly new. The maximal end of
the spectrum involves statements that mix, in a consistent and deep
way, theoretical and evidential signification, in an effort to produce
a powerful comprehension of the matter at hand. Here is a minimal
interpretation: ‘On the night of August 4, 1789, feudal privileges in
France were abolished.’ Here is a maximal interpretation: ‘ The French
Revolution was a social revolution with political consequences.’
To believe the first statement to be true, one has to understand
the meaning of certain basic terms (most notably ‘feudal privileges’),
9. The concept of maximal interpretation could be compared to (and indeed
draws inspiration from) Arthur C. Danto’s account of “deep interpretation,” and in
particular his article of that name from 1981. However, while Danto works to situate and
comprehend a format of “deep interpretation” that is quite distinct from the “routine
acceptance of the term,” and even compares it to the “divination anciently practiced by
the Greeks,” I attempt to use the distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation
as more of a matter of degree, which enables me to comprehend the sorts of truth
claims actually made in texts written by social researchers. Still, Danto makes absolutely
clear something essential to understanding maximal interpretations, namely that “the
distinction between depth and surface cuts at right angles across the philosophically
more commonplace distinction between inner and outer.” It is precisely because the
distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation cuts across the distinction
between inner and outer (or “subjective” and “objective”) that I can distinguish
between maximal interpretations that pay a great deal of attention to subjectivity
and meaning, and those that pay less attention to these “inner” phenomena. But this
should become clear in my discussion of Marx below. See Arthur C. Danto, “Deep
Interpretation,” Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 11 (1981): 691, 695, 694.
24 chapter one
and one has to agree that a series of actions took place at a specific
time and place that can be adequately described as the ‘abolition’
of feudal privileges (and that that place can be adequately described
as something called ‘France’). This can, of course, be disputed in a
variety of ways, including looking empirically into what demands
aristocrats still made on the peasants who worked on their land after
August 4, 1789, and whether these demands were fulfilled. Still, this
statement can inspire a certain degree of agreement, primarily because
of its status as a relatively minimal interpretation—there is nothing
in the statement to suggest why feudal privileges were abolished, or
what it meant to the future of France that they were abolished.10
No
social research can exist without minimal interpretations, but very few
works in the human sciences limit themselves to them, and even those
have to choose some statements over others. Minimal interpretation
is necessary but not sufficient for powerful social research.
To believe the second statement to be true, one has to understand
that the term “social revolution” is given meaning partially by the
language of social theory, and in particular one must understand the
contrast between ‘social’ and ‘political’ as a fundamental theoretical
disagreement about the causes and consequences of social action in
many times and places. Furthermore, to believe the second statement
one has to agree that all sorts of statements of the first kind
(i.e., that feudal privileges were abolished, that a national assembly
was constituted, that the army began taking directions from the new
government) have their explanation in the underlying social conflict
between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in France. And here
social scientists dip their pens in the venom of polemic; if we know
one thing from the scholarship on the French Revolution from the
last century, it is that the disagreements about explanations of the
Revolution always outrun the disagreements about its facts.
Maximal interpretations, then, are always organizing, explaining,
judging—in a word, interpreting—minimal interpretations, drawing
themselves into relationship with the facts, but also going “beyond”
10. I am aware that there are debates around the term ‘feudalism’ that could be
characterized as involving the sorts of theoretically informed interpretive disputes that
characterize maximal interpretations (see, e.g., Elizabeth A. R. Brown’s classic, “The
Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American
Historical Review 79 [1974]). However, particularly in the context of debates about
the French revolution, I think the phrase ‘feudal privileges in France’ can be said to
have a relatively clear set of manifest historical referents.
knowledge 25
the facts. This is not to say that, given a maximal interpretation, one
cannot go out in search of minimal interpretations that support it.
Undoubtedly one can. It is only to say that, in engaging these maximal
interpretations, we are relying on a language that is not only the language
of fact—it is the language of theory fused with the language of
fact to produce the social knowledge that we tend to value highly.11
IV
Maximal interpretations result from bringing theory together with
minimal interpretations. They are what we want theory to get us
to—an explanation or evaluation of the phenomenon at hand, and
perhaps a proposal for explaining other, as yet unexplored, cases, outcomes,
events, etc. And so theoretical differences become more and
more relevant as we move up the spectrum from minimal to maximal
interpretation. Consider an example.
In the 1990s, an academic conflagration swept through American
anthropology concerning what happened in Hawai’i in 1778 and
1779.12
Was Captain James Cook received by the Hawai’ians as the
god Lono? And why did several Hawai’ians kill Cook when he and his
11. Thus the spectrum of minimal to maximal interpretation could be described
as an attempt to capture the degree of theory-ladenness of truth claims. In maximal
interpretations, then, one uses a relatively greater amount of abstract terms that could
be combined conceptually (“in theory”) but which are, in the maximal interpretation,
articulated with the minimal interpretations that describe, in a more indexical way,
people’s behaviors. The result of this articulation is an in-depth truth claim about
social life. This definition of theory-ladenness and its implications for the opposition
of minimal to maximal interpretation emerged in a conversation with Mayer Zald
about the issue.
12. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking
in the Pacific (Princeton and Honolulu: Princeton University Press and Bishop
Museum Press, 1992). Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook,
for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For reviews of the dispute,
see Ian Hacking’s chapter “The End of Captain Cook,” in The Social Construction
of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Robert Borofsky,
“Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins,” Current Antrhopology 38, no. 2 (1997). The
shorter reviews of Obeyesekere’s and Sahlins’s books are numerous, but for a brief
and strongly pro-Sahlins review, see David R. Stoddart, “Captain Cook and How We
Understand Him,” Geographical Review 87, no. 4 (1997). For a more ironic account
of the continuing battles over Cook’s memory, see Greg Dening, “Review,” William
and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997). Obeyesekere’s original article is indispensable
for understanding the precise nature of his objections; see Gananath Obeyesekere,
“‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of
James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992).
26 chapter one
sailors, due to a broken mast, returned to the island of Kealakekua Bay
shortly after they left it? Finally, what is the source of insight or obliviousness
that aids or hinders anthropologists who attempt to answer
these questions? In this controversy, minimal interpretations about
what happened in Hawai’i all those years ago were made controversial,
but that was not the end of the story. The dispute invoked and
relied upon the meanings of theory, and thus quickly became a dispute
about maximal interpretations, which is to say, a polemic about
why what happened happened and what its significance is for “us.”13
“How did the Hawai’ians receive Cook?” is a question that can be
answered, initially at least, minimally. There is a great deal of evidence
that suggests that they referred to him as “akua”—sometimes translated
as “god.” But how the Hawai’ians related to “gods” is itself
a question that has to be established through interpretation and
inference—calling a person a “god” is a social fact in this case, and
indeed, debates over the translation of “akua” tend to center on
whether the social organization that results from recognition of an
akua is such that the better translation might be “chief.” Marshall Sahlins
had been questioned on this matter before Ganneth Obeyesekere
wrote The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,14
and he had responded then, as
he did in his reply to Obeyesekere, with a wealth of evidence—drawn
from many shipmen’s journals—concerning the terms the Hawai’ians
used when they received Cook, what these terms meant in that context,
and so on.15
In other words, he responded to some of the initial
criticisms of his work on Hawai’i by attempting to solidify his minimal
interpretation of the case.
But whether, ultimately, the term “akua” should be translated in
English as “god” or “chief,” or understood as meaning something
in between, the issue was not to be left there. Indeed, the battles
over Cook in Hawai’i had never been limited to the facts—in 1982
13. What constitutes the “us” as a community of inquiry dedicated to comprehending
social behavior and human history is precisely what much careful postcolonial
theory has rendered problematic. Conflicts over the authors and audiences of scholarly
work, as well as what sorts of knowledge they take for granted, are one of the underlying
tensions sublimated into the discursive battles of social theory, in my view. See Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
14. Jonathan Friedman, “Captain Cook, Culture, and the World System,” Journal
of Pacific History 20 (1985).
15. Marshall Sahlins, “Captain Cook at Hawaii,” Journal of the Polyneisan Society
98 (1989).
knowledge 27
Greg Dening, and in 1988 Jonathan Friedman, challenged Sahlins’s
explanation of why the Hawai’ians did what they did16
—and, with
Obeyesekere’s book, the debate quickly moved beyond what could
be minimally established by, and argued about, using the evidence.
And this makes sense: when it comes to the relationship of Hawai’i
to the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, we do
not just want to know a small tidbit of what happened during that
time. We do not just want to know that the Hawai’ians killed Cook,
we also want to know why they killed him, and furthermore, what
this violent action means to us today. (For example: was it a valiant
adumbration of the anticolonial revolutions of the twentieth
century?) These “maximal” questions cannot be answered by the
evidence alone, though they can never leave the evidence behind.
Theory must be mobilized, and a fusion of theory and fact must be
attempted by bringing together theoretical signifiers with evidential
ones, in search of a new interpretation. In this case, two different
theoretical schemas became intertwined with the evidence and thus
confronted each other, as it were, on the beach in Hawai’i: Marshall
Sahlins’s theories of culture and mythology, and of structure and history,
and Ganneth Obeyesekere’s theories of practical rationality, and
of the knowledge-politics of colonialism and postcolonialism. Both
are highly abstract meaning formations that purport to say something
general about what drives social action. They are both meaningful
human creations that were brought to bear upon the evidence, in
the attempt to create new and deeper knowledge about the British,
the Hawai’ians, and “us.”
Sahlins first explains the Hawai’ians’ friendly treatment of Cook
as an expression of the ritualized behavior called forth by Hawai’ian
mythology. He advances much detail to show that a series of unlikely
coincidences—including Cook arriving at the beginning of the time
of the season of the Hawai’ian akua Lono, and Cook sailing around
the island at a certain time in a certain direction—confirmed empirically
to the Hawai’ians that their myth-guided interpretation of Cook
was correct, and suggested to the Hawai’ians that Cook and his men
were acting according to the same understandings as the Hawai’ians
16. Greg Dening, “Sharks That Walk the Land: The Death of Captain Cook,”
Meanjin 41 (1982); Jonathan Friedman, “No History Is an Island,” Critique of Anthropology
8 (1988). I owe these insights into earlier critiques of Sahlins, and my original
awareness of their existence, to Borofsky, “Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins.”
28 chapter one
were. Then, argues Sahlins, Cook left at about the time when, in the
mythological interpretation of the calendar, the akua Lono’s season
was over. And so, when Cook returned, this return was unexpected
by the Hawai’ans in a mythological sense of the term ‘unexpected.’
Cook was outside the sense-making categories of their mythology,
and thus a profanation who had to be eliminated. So, they killed
him. But in doing so, they appropriated Britishness into their sacred
mythological system. This explains why many British symbols were
used by Hawai’ian chiefs after the initial encounter with Cook, and
why several Hawai’ian leaders named their sons “King George.”
Obeyesekere is incredulous about Sahlins’s maximal interpretation
of Cook’s arrival and subsequent death (i.e., that its cause was
Hawai’ian myth and the ritualized behaviors that enacted it), and
highly skeptical about the theory that organizes the evidence to produce
this maximal interpretation (namely, the structural study of
myth). This leads him to reread the evidence and provide a quite
different maximal interpretation. According to Obeyesekere, the
Hawai’ians, like all humans, possessed a certain amount of practical
rationality—that is, an ability to perceive the social and natural
world realistically and solve impending problems. The Hawai’ians
correctly perceived Cook as the representative of a colonial threat,
and, as a result, killed him. Obeyesekere also proposes, as part of his
maximal interpretation, an explanation for why many Europeans
thought that the Hawai’ians had received Cook as a god. In the midst
of constructing the colonial regime, Obeyesekere argues, Europeans
could comfort their conscience by pretending that colonized peoples
themselves felt Europeans to be superior. Finally, he offers a highly
charged political interpretation of Sahlins himself as a participant in
this Western ideology, which covers over the brutalities of the colonization
of Hawai’i and other parts of the globe. So, we have two
maximal interpretations:
‘The Hawai’ians killed Cook because he was matter out of place, and
they wanted to order the world according to their mythology. Ironically,
however, in reaffirming this mythology in their encounter with
the British, they also changed it. Such are the intersections between
structure and history.’
and
‘The Hawai’ians killed Cook because they knew the English were a
threat to do violence to them and exploit them. Ironically, however,
knowledge 29
because of colonial ideologies, Europeans and American anthropologists
have continued to believe that the Hawai’ians thought Cook was a god,
when the Hawai’ians knew quite well that he was a man. Such are the
fallacies of ideology in the service of power and domination.’
We could produce more and more evidence—as indeed Sahlins
did in his defense of himself—but the theoretical aspects of these
maximal interpretations would not go away entirely. Our knowledge
claims would continue to depend upon the successful resignification
of a minimal interpretation into a maximal one. That is the bane and
glory of maximal interpretation in social research. It is only because
we, as investigators, have theory—or, better put, live in a meaningful
world partially constituted by our theories—that we can propose
to comprehend not just that the Hawai’ians killed Cook, but why
the Hawai’ians killed Cook, and that we can propose to reflect, in a
deep way, on how our knowledge of this episode from the eighteenth
century is twisted, clarified, or unaffected by our politics. But how is
this fusion of theory and fact, this resignification that takes us from
minimal to maximal interpretation, to be accomplished?
V
To begin our answer to this question, let us consider a piece of social
research that provides—for this author at least—the ur-example
of maximal interpretation. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote:
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history,
a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre,
St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses
of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time—that
of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society—in Roman
costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal
foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other
created inside France the only conditions under which free competition
could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered
productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French
borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far
as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date
environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation
was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also
30 chapter one
the resurrected Romanism—the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas,
the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its
sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says,
Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real
military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis
XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of
wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered
that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle.17
Written in 1852, this is a classic, well-known, and much toiled over
combination of theory and fact. And, in this paragraph, one can witness
how theoretical signifiers come together with evidential signifiers
to produce new social knowledge. On the one hand, we have minimal
interpretation of the most basic sort: the naming of individuals who
existed at a certain time and place (“Danton, Robespierre . . .”). The
reference to how French Revolutionaries used “Roman phrases” is
also a relatively minimal interpretation. We can, indeed, show that
those involved in the French revolution used such language. On the
other hand, there are clear and distinct theoretical signifiers throughout,
which stand out in their difference from the evidentiary ones:
“modern bourgeois society,” “unfettered productive power,” “social
formation,” “free competition,” “production of wealth.” The true
power of the paragraph, however, derives from the bringing to bear of
these theoretical signifiers upon the evidential ones, the combination
of phrases like “modern bourgeois society” with phrases like “cut off
the feudal heads that had grown upon it.”
This combination—so effectively researched and written—is what
makes this paragraph part of a maximal interpretation of the French
Revolution. Contained therein are the answers to a whole series of
why and wherefore questions. Why were feudal privileges abolished
and the heads of aristocrats removed from their bodies? (So as to
establish a capitalist mode of production.) Why did the new French
republic go to war so soon? (To create in all of Europe the conditions
it had just created at home, that is, social relations that were no longer
fetters for the forces of production, but rather enabled them.) Why
did the French leaders after 1815 forget the Roman rhetoric of the
17. Karl Marx, The Karl Marx Library, Volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1977), 245.
knowledge 31
1790s? (Because in an established capitalist society, such ideas are of
no use; the effectiveness of rhetoric or ideology is conditioned by the
social situation.) For an explicitly moral and political evaluation of
the French Revolutions (1789–1814 and 1848–51) and for predictions
of what is to come, we must reach beyond this paragraph, but not far
beyond it. The evaluation of ’89 and ’48: “The first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce.” The exhortation for the next revolution:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry
from the past but only from the future.”
The first thing to note is the reliance upon theoretical understanding.
None of this explanation and evaluation makes sense unless
you understand Marx’s (and to some degree Hegel’s) theories—of
modes of production, of social revolution, of dialectical materialism,
of history, and so on. On the other hand, the theory here is almost
perfectly fused to the social facts being interpreted—to the point that
both fact and theory come together to say something about social
reality. This paragraph is far more powerful than those theories are in
and of themselves. Marx uses theory to understand a piece of social
reality in a deep way. We can amass more and more facts about the
French Revolution (and we have), but the gauntlet has been thrown
down by this text of 1852; there is a deeper sense in which we must
strive to know the French Revolution, or, for that matter, anything
else. In Marx the minimal, relatively uncontroversial, interpretations
of what happened in the French Revolution are resignified by the
use of theory so as to produce maximal interpretations. This process
of resignification, on splendid display in Marx, is the essence of the
transition from the minimal to maximal interpretations, and is the
central object of inquiry for this book.
VI
The maximal interpretations that emerge over the course of Marx’s
oeuvre grasp fundamental social realities, and thus produce social
explanations; they anchor themselves in utopian aspirations, and thus
enable critique; and they propose sophisticated historical interpretations
of the twisting of human subjectivity by ideology. Perhaps such
a synthesis of explanation, criticism, and interpretation will always remain
the collective ego-ideal of social research. But there was a certain
disequilibrium to this fusion: “History itself is a real part of natural
32 chapter one
history—of nature’s coming to be man.”18
And so: “The social reality
of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about
man, are identical terms.”19
Thus though Marx exemplified all three
epistemic modes I examine in the chapters that follow, it must also
be admitted that his naturalist ambitions for sociohistorical analysis
tilted his synthesis in a particular direction. I think that because this
tendency—toward a naturalistic approach to social science inflected
by both scientific ambition and materialist sensibilities—is so well
known, well entrenched, and well worked through in contemporary
social thought, it is worth considering from a very general point of
view before delving into the specific problems associated, in each
epistemic mode, with producing maximal interpretations.
For much of the twentieth century—in both academic sociology
and in the more wide-ranging and majestic discourse of Marxist social
research20
—explanation, critique, and interpretation moved backward
from the synthesis proposed by Marx himself to a sheer separation
based on misrecognition. However, there are now significant strands
of intellectual discourse in the social sciences that propose rather
explicitly to synthesize explanation and interpretation, and, in some
cases, to connect this new synthesis to the goal of social critique.
That the explanation of social life is the stated goal of the social
sciences can, in this emergent understanding, be squared with the
18. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The MarxEngels
Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 90.
19. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 91.
20. Many of these issues were debated within the language of Marxism, since Marx
was, to quote Foucault, a “founder of discursivity” (see Michel Foucault, “What Is
an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon Books,
1984], 114). In particular, the problematic of explanation, critique, and interpretation
expressed itself in the work of Georg Lukacs, and was taken up by successive generations
of Marxist theorists. But note the radical disparities that emerge over the course
of the twentieth century—between, for example, Athusserian “science” and E. P.
Thompsons’s approach to history, or between the “explanatory” study of the global
economy (e.g., Wallerstein) and the “interpretive” study of culture (e.g., Jameson).
Despite efforts to bring these aspects of Marxist discourse together (e.g., Harvey), it
remains the case, I would argue, that the Marxist synthesis has been broken apart. See
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Pantheon Books,
1971), E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1978), Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York:
Academic Press, 1974), Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1989).
knowledge 33
idea that the human sciences require the interpretation of subjectivity
to accomplish their explanatory task. Thus John Goldthorpe
argues that the theoretical schemas of rational action theory provide
the most coherent approach to the problem of verstehen, and the
most powerful source of explanations of collective behavior.21
And,
in his foundational writing on the philosophy of social science, Roy
Bhaskar claimed, and other critical realists continue to claim, that the
explanatory program of realism in social science of necessity starts
with the hermeneutic task of interpreting the conceptions of the social
world that actors carry with them; only by moving through this
step can the social investigator ultimately grasp the real structures
of the social that explain why people do what they do.22
Meanwhile
cultural sociology has produced countless investigations into symbolic
structures as one aspect of the social that, supposedly having been
neglected by a century of positivism, and supposedly misunderstood
as ideology by a century and a half of historical materialism, are due
some respect. Hence a new set of debates concerning what people do
with symbols, how symbols intersect social networks and group processes,
and, generally, how the study of symbols and their meanings
for actors can help sociologists explain action. And symbols require
human subjectivity to give them meaning. Add to this all of the talk
about “habitus” and “structuration” in social theory, and we can say
that the subjective element of social life has become a central focus
of analysis for those who work in the human sciences.
However, there is something odd about this turn to subjectivity.
In many cases, it turns out, engagement with the subjective or with
the signs and symbols that humans use to make meaning does not
connect to an engagement with the problem of interpretation and
social knowledge. In rational choice theory, preferences are revealed
and observable. In the formalist strands of semiotics and communication
theory, the depth of meaning provided by human subjects
is eschewed in principle—communication is manifest and thus in
studying it we can avoid the entanglements of deep interpretation.
21. John H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007).
22. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1998); Andrew Collier,
Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (New York: Verso,
1994).
34 chapter one
For much of cultural sociology, it is a question of measuring observable
culture, not interpreting “other minds.”23
And, when the
problem of interpreting others is recognized as part of the goal of
social research, this recognition usually arrives via an argument according
to which interpretation augments, enables, but ultimately
folds into the much more fundamental, and still separate, project of
social scientific explanation.
Thus we find throughout these arguments the idea that, since
explanation uses understanding as one moment in a larger process,
we can ultimately conclude that the logic of social explanation recalls
and relates intimately to the logic of natural scientific explanation. To
paraphrase Thomas Nagel, subjectivity exists as part of the objective
world, and therefore to grasp the world objectively one must grasp,
among other things, the subjective.24
The turn to the subjective,
then, is but an expansion of the “objectivist” point of view, a fuller
comprehension of the social. This is the idea implicit in many of the
most compelling and well-argued social scientific epistemologies of
today: “critical realism”;25
“second-order empiricism”;26
and of course
“the objective limits of objectivism” and “reflexive sociology.”27
This view on social knowledge considers the new, stronger objectivity
to be the dialectical supersession of positivism and its critics.
23. In a move iconic for a whole generation of American cultural sociologists,
Robert Wuthnow argued that by interpreting discourse or communication, one could
avoid interpreting subjectivity. Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations
in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). I discuss
the issue of interpreting talk as opposed to interpreting people’s motivations, with
reference to C. Wright Mills and R. M. MacIver, in chapter 5.
24. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986). This is similar to John Searle’s “one world” thesis. See John R. Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995) and John Searle, “Social
Ontology: Some Basic Principles,” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 1 (2006).
25. For a selection of the key writings of critical realism, see Margaret Archer
et al., eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998). For an
account of its importance for comparative-historical sociology, see George Steinmetz,
“Critical Realism and Historical Sociology. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 40, no. 1 (1998).
26. Geoffrey Brahm Levey, “Theory Choice and the Comparison of Rival Theoretical
Perspectives in Political Sociology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26, no. 1
(1996).
27. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge:
Polity, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu
and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
knowledge 35
And it expects researchers armed with the new, postpositivist epistemology
to arrive at intersubjectively verifiable explanations of why
people do what they do, the premises of which are not, ultimately,
different from those of any other truth-seeking activity whose primary
orientation is empirical. Understanding is thus included in the
project of explanation.
It is my view that this line of thinking—which elevates to a new
level of sophistication and reflexivity our understanding of the social
sciences as sciences—is exactly backward. Explanation, as a goal for
the study of human beings, can only function as a subcategory of
the larger category of understanding. And the strange human trait of
subjectivity has a much deeper effect on the forms of understanding
(including explanation) that are possible in the human sciences than
is granted by the purveyors of “reflexive science.”
Of course, it is the case that human subjects and human societies
exist in a wider world, and that that wider world can to a very
effective degree be comprehended under the schemas of the natural
sciences. No social explanation can be reasonably proposed that, say,
defies physics as we know it. Yet to remain at this level of understanding
is to conflate the manifest fact that humans exist in, are of, and
work upon nature with the philosophical position that the premises
of the human sciences cannot be all that different from the premises
of the natural sciences. I think this is a conflation that does not hold
up under sustained reflection on what, precisely, social researchers
claim when they claim to know something about what other people
are up to. What if, before jumping to the naturalist metaphor, we
took seriously Hegel’s injunction that before getting to the “cognition
of what truly is,” we must first of all develop an understanding
of cognition itself ?28
This proposal brings us directly to the problems of interpretation,
because in examining the process of knowledge production we are
attempting to comprehend a very specific, perhaps in some ways
privileged, form of meaning-making—the attainment and verification
of knowledge. And since all knowledge involves human subjectivity
as its instrument or medium, no form of knowledge can be said to
exist outside of the problem of interpretation.
Thus I begin, here, from a position that recognizes the meaning-
28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraph 73.
36 chapter one
making nature of human endeavors to produce knowledge.29
From
this perspective, rather than seeing natural science as pure and true
knowledge that emerges from the encounter of an unblemished subjectivity
with unmediated Nature, we can see it as a specification of
the interpretive process that, at a more general level, characterizes all
human thought and communication.30
It is a specification, furthermore,
that required for its achievement a remarkable coincidence of
sociohistorical circumstances, and that requires for its continuance a
form of training and social organization whose details are still being
worked out in sociological research, and whose philosophical basis
has become the occupation of post-logical-positivist philosophy of
science.
The interpretive capacities of natural science, that is, are of a specific
kind. In natural science, the human capacity to interpret, to
grasp the meaning of phenomena, is pointed to the reconstruction
of sense-experience and observation in terms of a vast and precise set
of theories and laws about the natural world. These laws themselves
are constructed and justified through the work humans do on and
through nature—the practical interaction of human beings with their
environment, which is disciplined through scientific training.31
If,
29. The critical realists recognize prima facie both the hermeneutic problems
attending the human sciences and the possibilities and contingencies that “history”
introduces to social life. They thus arrive at their version of explanation only after
arguing their way out of the epistemic dilemmas of human knowledge. As I shall argue
below, however, the realist solution is in need of radical reform.
30. Kurt Hübner in Critique of Scientific Reason argues that Weber’s ideal types—
and, more generally, work in the human sciences—in fact exemplify the relationship
between a priori principles and facts that obtain in all of the sciences, both social and
natural. Thus he argues that “the so-called hermeneutic circle, which is discussed so
often today, does not really exist . . . this erroneously named ‘circle’ comes up not only
in the historical and human sciences, but in every empirical science, since the relation
between a priori assumptions and facts interpreted with their help is principally the
same everywhere. Hence we are not dealing with something inherent to the historical
and human sciences alone.” My goal here is, by examining closely truth claims
in the human sciences, to show that Hübner was wrong to find essentially the same
“interpretive” operation at work when theory is used in natural science and in the
human sciences. It is not clear (to me at least) how Hübner’s philosophical account
of scientific reasoning would change what natural scientists do and write; I hope to
show that the peculiarities of interpretation for the human sciences are in fact of great
consequence for how we imagine and practice social research. Kurt Hübner, Critique
of Scientific Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 189.
31. Ian Hacking has considered these issues with extreme care, writing at the
intersection of realist philosophies of natural science, pragmatist-influenced epistemology,
and Foucauldian-historical studies of the human sciences. See in particular
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
knowledge 37
indeed, this specific sort of interpretation has managed to achieve a
certain kind of universality—to create forms of knowledge that can
be explicated and compellingly communicated to humans (or perhaps
one day, nonhumans!) who share very little linguistically, socially and
culturally, and psychologically with the communicators, this is a remarkable
achievement, but not one that belies the way that, at a very
general level, the enterprise is interpretive. It suggests, rather, that in
so far as the grammar of science is mathematics, and mathematics is
a human creation whose intersubjective validity can be established
with a remarkable amount of abstract certainty, science can have an
objectivist outlook as its working format for making and criticizing
knowledge claims, and a pragmatic-realist justification as its working
format of philosophical self-reflection.32
This speaks to an essential
hermeneutic truth about science often ignored by positivists and antipositivists
alike, but grasped in some philosophies of natural science
and certain social-theoretical traditions: that the “scientific mindset”
is just that—a specific manipulation of the human ability to assign
meaning to certain manifest signifiers—and that scientific objectivity
is something earned through labor and social organization, rather
than something philosophically guaranteed. Certainly most natural
scientists would agree that they work for their objectivity.
For social research, it is not at all clear that the interpretive capacities
of the investigator can be channeled in the same way, and I will
ultimately argue in this book that the epistemic synthesis that can be
traced to Marx’s naturalist inclination must be countered. Metaphors
of standing on head or feet notwithstanding, this argument will not
ultimately hinge on an inversion, but rather on a differentiation between
ways of using theory, and a recognition of the limits, as well
as the capacities, of social knowledge. To preview the anti-antirealist
Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Hacking, The
Social Construction of What?
32. The issues raised by the rather astounding way in which mathematics can serve
as the language for physics and some other natural sciences are outlined in Eugene
Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,”
Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960). But the larger issue
here is the development of a sociological approach to natural scientific knowledge that
does not associate “rationality” with individual knowers or philosophical certainty, and
as a result oppose social determinants of knowledge to rational determinants of knowledge.
This I take to be the central project of Helen Longino’s philosophy/sociology of
science, which she traces to C. S. Peirce’s meditations on communities of inquiry and
the attainment of truth. Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 4 –5, 77–96.
38 chapter one
argument that follows: I think realism is correct that social investigation
must reach beyond the surface of colligated facts to grasp causal
explanations of action, and I will follow the critical realists in suggesting
a connection between explanation and critique—I too hold
that the critique of social life and its cultural products requires, at least
implicitly, some sort of approach to social explanation. But I doubt
whether these connections can be adequately established via the mode
of theoretical resignification that is at the core of the realist epistemic
mode. But to fully articulate both realism and its alternatives, we have
to look at how theoretical resignification actually works.
How, in other words, does the use of the language game of social
theory enable the construction of compelling historical narratives
of cause, critique, and meaning? Let us pull apart these different
conceptual methods. For we now work without the fetters—and
thus without the supports—of the Marxian philosophy of history,
which could connect in one compelling logical circle the explanation
of society, the interpretation of culture, and the critique of systematically
distorted communication. We have not yet fully understood
the ways in which these intellectual tasks have become so radically
different from each other.
It may in fact be that the synthesis of these modes will not—or not
yet—be possible: that we live in an epistemically fallen age, yearning
for the ultimate whole that once was guaranteed by the metanarratives
of communism or modernization. However, consider this: the most
outstanding versions of that synthesis were based upon an illusory
equation of materiality and scientificity, the critique of which is by
no means complete, and thus it might be a mistake to wager the possibility
of synthetic social knowledge on their success.