Interpretation & Realism

Interpretation & Realism Gurminder K Bhambra 16th October, 2013

Social Inquiry as Interpretation • Social inquiry is seen to be about understanding rather than explanation • A number of different philosophical movements are associated with the position • German hermeneutics (e.g. Gadamer), • Phenomenological approaches (e.g. Schutz), • 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

Natural Science vs. Social Inquiry • Science is concerned with generalisations and social inquiry is concerned with particulars • We do not think our inquiry is complete until we have understood why something was done • Human beings are constituted in language and therefore, social inquiry is hermeneutic • i.e. understanding society and social action as text • Issue of prediction • Methodological self-alienation • Idea of human behaviour established in conventions and rule-following; the human community is the source of meaning.

Gadamer • ‘Anti-foundationalism’ • Knowledge as the willingness to learn, not as the will to power • Opposed to the Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudice • He does not believe that Reason can provide its own foundations. • I think, therefore I am • Thinking, I cannot not be and be for (and by) others • Science is based in a lifeworld that is not a product of Reason • Rather, what we understand as reason is a product of our lifeworld • Gadamer is not a critic of the products of science, but of its self-understanding and the misuse of that self-understanding

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?

Issues of Interpretation • 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

Realism as Alternative to Positivism • Realists argue that critiques of scientific social inquiry are effective as critiques of positivism and empiricism • But that they have relativist implications or open up the way to anti-naturalist approaches • Realism can avoid these consequences. • Issue for realists, is that anti-naturalism in social inquiry is based upon a false conception of science

Realism • 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

Realism • 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 space-time, 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? • There are ‘real objects’ outside particular theoretical statements of them, even though we may never grasp those objects except in fallible and historically changing constructions

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

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

Interpretation & Realism