Babette Babich - Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science

Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science

ISBN 978-3-11-052837-4

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055156-3

Set-ISBN 978-3-11-055157-0

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Ren Descartes

Wilhelm Dilthey

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Martin Heidegger

Edmund Husserl

Immanuel Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche

Quotations of Nietzsches writings are from KSA ( Kritische Studienausgabe ). References for English translations are given in the authors reference sections.

Abbreviations of Nietzsches works:

Richard Rorty

Babette Babich

Interpretive philosophical reflection, hermeneutics, is inseparable from any philosophy of social science. Indeed, to the extent that the social sciences include the human subject, reflection on reflection is integral and such reflection constitutes, whether one names it as such, or not, part of the hermeneutic turn.

This collection of essays offers a range of hermeneutically minded philosophies of social science foregrounding understanding and including a specific attention to history as well as a methodological reflection on the notion of reflection but also subjective obstruction: prejudice or pre-judgments as Joseph J. Kockelmans speaks of these in his chapter below. This same approach informs what has been called a humanist by contrast with a naturalistic approach to the social sciences. Currently, although fashions change constantly, some contemporary hermeneutic studies include so-called thing ontology (there are other names), and hermeneutic philosophies of social science also embrace social studies of knowledge as well as social studies of natural science as these latter are themselves, as Bruno Latour has long argued, so many social practices.

Yet there is at the same time a tendency to resist the language of hermeneutics in connection with the philosophy of science. This may be further exacerbated today as part of the quantitative turn in todays university-level human and social sciences. In part, this is due to a certain hard-science anxiety on the part of the social scientists themselves who worry, rather as the title of Bent Flyvbjergs book Making Social Science Matter seems to suggest,

Approaches to hermeneutic philosophies of social science that may be considered hermeneutic, quite in spite of this surprisingly durable constellation of anxiety and suspicion, can be found. Examples include James Bohmans New Philosophy of Social Science (1991) and Harvie Fergusons Phenomenological Sociology as well as Andrea Nyes work on logic, although Nyes loyalties are explicitly analytic and thus historicist, alongside other work in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, both natural and social, although, once again, the great majority of these studies remain analytically rather than continentally minded.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 2002) reflected on hermeneutic philosophies of social science in a series of chapters included in his Reason in the Age of Science .

The task of philosophy in our technoscientific era is to think where, as Heidegger said, science does not think and not less to communicate, needful where, as Gadamer says, science does not really speak a language in the proper sense.

Here, we consider Gadamers observation, inspired by Nietzsches demand that one doubt more profoundly and fundamentally than Descartes), and further amplified by the critique of ideology that

called scientific neutrality into doubt. It questioned not merely the validity of the phenomena of consciousness and of self-consciousness (which was the case with psychoanalysis) but also the purely theoretical validity of scientific objectivity with which the sciences laid claim.

Beginning with Heideggers reflections on the Greek legacy of rationality inspires the new notion of interpretation, whereby

The very idea of a definitive interpretation seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation is always on the way. If, then, the word interpretation points to the finitude of human being and the finitude of human knowing then the experience of interpretation implies something that was no implied by the earlier self-understanding when hermeneutics was coordinated with special fields and applied as a technique for overcoming difficulties in troublesome texts. Then hermeneutics could be understood as a teaching about a technical skillbut no longer.

Thereby we can begin with his invitation to consider

the traditions within which we standand every tradition that we creatively or appropriatively pass onoffer less an objective field for the scientific mastery of a subject matter or for the extension of our domination by knowledge of the unknown than a mediation of ourselves with our real possibilities engulfing uswith what can be and what is capable of happening to and becoming of us.