INTERPRETATION & REALISM
M. Kremakova & E. Page
Philosophies of social
science research
Week 9, 4th March, 2015
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RESPONSE TO LAST WEEK’S LECTURE:
REPORTS OF THE DEATH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
• Big Data are cool, but they are just a tool: data don't speak for
themselves. Danger of rampant reductionist rationality
• Role of social science? >>> Interpretivist and realist approaches:
• Good social science goes beyond method:
• explain and understand through theories, vocabularies, conceptual framework,
lenses, viewpoints, but also:
• Provoke, disrupt, dismantle: find surprising comparisons, show big picture, deeper
and long-term (in-depth, longitudinal) research, create brand new concepts, new
ways of seeing the world, expose hidden inequalities, open up new horizons, discuss
new possibilities. Role for both “blue skies" or "useless" social research (e.g. IAS) and
empirical, even with smaller datasets.
•No rigid division between commercial and academic. Instead:
collaboration; flow of researchers; mutual learning; competition;
power struggle; public debate. [downsides]
2
RESPONSE TO LAST WEEK’S LECTURE:
REPORTS OF THE DEATH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
Source: Wikimedia Commons
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The Hollis Matrix
Explanation
Understanding
Holism
Systems
'Games’
Individualism
Agents
Actors
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
4
The Hollis Matrix: Explanation
Explanation
Holism
Function
-alism
Individualism
Rational
Choice
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Understanding
5
The Hollis Matrix: Understanding
Explanation
Holism
Individualism
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Understanding
Social
rules
Hermeneutics
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The Hollis Matrix: Atomism
Explanation
Understanding
Holism
Individualism
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Rational
Choice
Hermeneutics
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The Hollis Matrix: Holism
Explanation
Understanding
Holism
Structuralism
Social
rulefollowing
Individualism
Agents
Actors
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
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The Hollis Matrix
Explanation
Understanding
Holism
Systems
'Games’
Individualism
Agents
Actors
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
9
For seminar discussion…
“Does the way in which you think about
your discipline place it near to, or far
from, the natural sciences?”
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
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POSITIVISM>…
Positivism
Hermeneutics/Interpretivism Realism, Rationalism
Scientist: Legislator
Monologue
Objectivity
Explanation
Observation
Objective observer
Knowledge as Truth
Discovering facts
Truth: Singular
(universal)
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POSITIVISM>HERMENEUTICS>…
Positivism
Hermeneutics/Interpretivism Realism, Rationalism
Scientist: Legislator
Scientist: Interpreter
Monologue
Dialogue
Objectivity
Valid Subjectivities
Explanation
Understanding
Observation
Embodiment
Objective observer
Partial participant
Knowledge as Truth
Knowledge as Power
Discovering facts
Creating interpretations
Truth: Singular
(universal)
Truth: Plural (multiple aspects)
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HERMENEUTICS (1):
SOCIAL INQUIRY AS INTERPRETATION
Social inquiry is seen to be about understanding rather than explanation
(Weber, Winch)
 "Social relations really exist only in and through the ideas which are current in society; or
alternatively, that social relations fall into the same logical category as do relations
between ideas." (Winch 1988)
 “the social sciences are concerned with the nature of meaningful behaviour, that is, that
behaviour that is "specifically human“ (Winch 1988)
A number of different philosophical movements are associated with the
position
 German hermeneutics (e.g. Gadamer),
 Phenomenological approaches (e.g. Schütz),
 Ordinary language analysis (associated with Wittgenstein)
Gadamer deepens interpretative inquiry with his emphasis upon the
historicity of understanding
 Focuses on prejudice and the unification of science and hermeneutics
Attention to language as a tool of interpretation
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HERMENEUTICS (1):
SOCIAL INQUIRY AS INTERPRETATION
Hans-Georg Gadamer
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HERMENEUTICS (2):
SOCIAL INQUIRY ≠ NATURAL SCIENCE
 Science is about generalisations; social inquiry is about particulars, but it can
access regularities by investigating “the nature of the rule according to which
judgements of identity are made […] Such judgements are intelligible only
relatively to a given mode of human behaviour, governed by its own rules." Winch
1988:84
 Human behaviour governed by conventions and rule-following (neither laws,
nor chaos). Human community is source of meaning. Science studies a domain of
objects lacking intrinsic meaning – but in social science, the actors’ own meanings
and understandings are important
 Social inquiry is NOT complete until we have understood WHY something was
done; (causes, reasons, motives, imperfect logic, false consciousness, adaptive
preferences, beliefs, ultimate concerns, duty, obligation, love, power structures…)
 Human beings are constituted in language => all social inquiry has a
hermeneutic aspect (i.e. understand society and social action “as text”)
 Prediction: never fully deterministic. Falsification doesn't work the same way as
it does in the natural sciences. Rules have exceptions.
 “Trying too hard to be objective” is bad: methodological self-alienation
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HERMENEUTICS (3): GADAMER
 ‘Anti-foundationalism’ (favours historical/genealogical explanations)
 inter-subjective nature of understanding, inter-subjectivity,
Being, authenticity, fore-structure, presuppositions, prejudice,
temporality and history
 Knowledge as the willingness to learn, not as the will to power
 Opposed to the Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudice
 He did not believe that Reason can provide its own foundations.
 “I think, therefore I am” – not really.
 Thinking, I cannot not be and be for (and by) others
 Science is based in a lifeworld that is not a product of Reason: what
we understand as reason is a product of our lifeworld
 Gadamer is not a critic of the products of science, but of its selfunderstanding and the misuse of that self-understanding
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HERMENEUTICS (4):
CRITICISMS OF GADAMER
General conservatism of interpretation
The model of science and methodology
The problem of power.
If actors could have done otherwise, how do we know when they are
doing otherwise (as an aspect of will) or merely appearing to do so
as a consequence of our failures to understand the rules they are
following?
What is the role of an explanatory undertaking in the social sciences?
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CRITIQUES OF HERMENEUTICAL/
INTERPRETATIVE APPROACHES
Limits of hermeneutical understanding?
Systematically distorted communication and failures of understanding
Aim of critical theory is emancipation
But, who is to educate the educators?
Gadamer’s critique of science is naive, but his critique of positivism as
alienation is profound
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REALISM (1): A THIRD WAY?
Critical realists:
•acknowledge similarities with the natural sciences, but try to retain the
grasp on interpretation of meanings. They oppose both positivism and
naïve empiricism on the one side, and relativism and anti-naturalism,
on the other.
•acknowledge that the existence of human agency and the limited
possibilities for experiment in social science make it difficult to locate
and identify these structures.
• believe that anti-naturalism in social inquiry is based upon a false
conception of science.
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POSITIVISM>HERMENEUTICS >REALISM
Positivism
Hermeneutics/Interpretivis
m
Realism, Rationalism
Scientist: Legislator
Scientist: Interpreter
Monologue
Dialogue
Objectivity
Valid Subjectivities
Explanation
Understanding
Observation
Embodiment
Combines both, but
Objective observer
Partial participant
opposes both extremes
Knowledge as Truth
Knowledge as Power
(not as easy as it sounds)
Discovering facts
Creating interpretations
Truth: Singular
(universal)
Truth: Plural (Multiple
aspects)
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REALISM (2)
“Neither positivism nor hermeneutics can offer rational criteria for the
choice of concepts”. (Outhwaite 1983 Concept formation in social
science)
Realism is a transcendental project concerned to establish how the
world must be for science as an activity to be possible
Philosophy is the self-understanding of science concerned with the
conditions for the production of knowledge.
Distinction between epistemological and ontological realism.
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REALISM (3)
 Epistemological
 “A natural account of the way in which scientific theories succeed each other say, the way in which Einstein’s Relativity succeeded Newton’s Universal
Gravitation - is that a partially correct/ partially incorrect account of a
theoretical object - say the gravitational field, or the metric structure of spacetime, or both - is replaced by a better account of the same object or objects. But
if these objects don’t really exist at all, then it is a miracle that a theory which
speaks of gravitational action at a distance successfully predicts phenomena; it is
a miracle that a theory which speaks of curved space-time successfully predicts
phenomena.” (Putnam 1978: 19)
 Ontological
 How must the world of physical objects be, for science to be possible?Or:since we
know science is possible, what does this fact tell us about the world we live in?
 There DO exist ‘real objects’ outside particular theoretical statements of them,
even though we may never grasp those objects except in fallible and historically
changing constructions
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REALISM (4)
 “strong programme” of realism: Roy Bhaskar
 Rationalism and realism both accept that truth exists; but diverge in the way truth
is to be found: rationalists have an a priory theory e.g. mechanisms, structures,
naturalist worldview; realists seek “explanatory power”
 Differences between rationalism and realism: rationalism has an uneasy
relationship with agency (Hollis: “rational action is its own explanation”, doesn’t
explain how there can be competing rational alternatives to a given situation)
 Realism vs ‘empirical realism’ (Bhaskar) (emphasis on sense experiences) and
‘transcendental realism’ ( no systematic connection between science and the
world)
 What is “The Real”? Includes mechanisms, events and experiences. Not the same
as “the actual” (events and experiences) or “the empirical” (experiences alone)
 Experimental intervention greatly restricted in the social sciences
 Do we abandon empirical testability? No.
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REALISM (4)
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REALISM (5): REALIST CRITIQUES OF
POSITIVISM
 Empiricists, it is argued, are concerned with the mere association of
events.
 We want to know how the events are associated; that is, to identify causal
mechanisms that operate as real forces with the character of necessity
 Realists make a distinction between the real and the actual
 Real effects need not be actualised
 Realism as a philosophy of science is unstable between
epistemological realism and more pragmatic approaches
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REALISM (6): IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL
SCIENCE
Realism is concerned to establish that scientists act by intervening in the
world and manipulating the operation of its structures to make a
difference in the production of their effects.
This implies that social science is about objects which are also actors
and this must distinguish social inquiry from natural science.
Realism in the social sciences offers no means of establishing the
reality of social structures
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REALISM (6): IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL
SCIENCE
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhaskar, Roy (1999). The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical
Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Routledge, London and
New York, third edition.
Big Data. Wikipedia (consulted 3/3/2015)
Outhwaite, William (1983) Concept formation in social science.
Routledge, London.
Outhwaite, William. (1986) Understanding social life: The method
called Verstehen. Jean Stroud, East Sussex.
Winch, Peter (1990) The idea of a social science and its relation to
philosophy. Routledge, London.
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