Dimitri Ginev - Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices: Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory

Recent methodological debates have shown that practice theory can either be developed by combining and slightly extending established theoretical concepts of inter-subjectivity, social normativity, collective behavior, interaction between agents and environment, habits, learning, collective intentionality, and human agency; or by following a strategy that promotes the quest for completely autonomous concepts. In the latter case, one defends a thesis of irreducibility.

Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices advocates this thesis by approaching the interrelational dynamic of social practices in terms of existential analytic. Indeed, this insightful volume outlines a methodology of the double hermeneutics that allows the study of the entanglement of agential plans, beliefs, and intentions with configured practices, while also demonstrating how interrelated social practices with which agency is entangled articulate cultural forms of life.

Suggesting a framework for studying the cultural forms of life within the scope of practice theory, this book will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory, Philosophy of Social Science, and Research Methods for Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Dimitri Ginev is Professor for Continental Philosophy and Hermeneutic Philosophy of Culture at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

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Edited by John Rundell and Jonathan Pickle

Social and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media

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Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices

Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory

Dimitri Ginev

Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory

Dimitri Ginev

First published 2018

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2018 Dimitri Ginev

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In the course of dealing with various issues of the hermeneutic-phenomenological theory of culture in the last three decades, it has become a firm conviction of mine that the program of existential analytic developed in Being and Time can be reconstructed as a program composed by several theories with empirical and semi-empirical character. Needless to say that my positivistic conviction is at odds not only with the doctrines of Heideggerian orthodoxy, but also with the way in which existential analytic has been constructed so that it can be protected against any attempt of its reformulation in terms of a quasi-scientific (anthropological, socio-psychological, ethological, etc.) program. The protective mechanism can be schematically depicted as follows.

One should attribute an ontic mode of being to all entities which are identifiable by performing epistemic procedures. Let me cite four examples. (1) Deriving a theorem within an axiomatic system by implementing a derivation rule allows one to identify a certain mathematical entity. (2) Performing an experiment that under laboratory conditions verifies a prediction made within a theoretical scenario identifies a physically existing event. (3) The proper reading and contextualizing of a historical document conveys a message about entities that have been existing. (4) Procedurally depicting rhetorical tools for expressing feelings is a step in identifying a literary work in its generic specificity. Heideggers existential analytic admits that there is a mode of being that eludes any kind of identification by means of (objectifying or non-objectifying) epistemic procedures. The presumption behind this view is that all epistemic procedures take place within practices and contexts of human existence, but the latter as a mode of being remains unfathomable to any procedure of positive (ontic) identification. The ontological mode of being that is, the mode of being-toward-death is only amenable to a hermeneutic analysis that reveals the basic phenomena of human existence. Hermeneutic phenomenology is the method which can capture what eludes and withdraws from any epistemic procedure. Accordingly, hermeneutic phenomenology promises an ontology of what the procedural conceptualizations of the ontic modes of being indispensably presuppose, but are unable to thematize. Moreover, they presuppose this unfathomable entity in a twofold manner: On the one hand, it is a presupposition of the strategy of conceptualization, and on the other, it is a hidden dimension of what becomes conceptualized.

Against the background of these considerations, the protective mechanism I mentioned is implied by the famous ontic-ontological difference. Since the latter is a dichotomous difference, it also provides a decisive argument for the incompatibility between (any kind of) scientific conceptualization and the analytic launched by hermeneutic phenomenology. My positivistic reading of existential analytic led me, over the years, to the idea that this argument can be turned around: The ontic-ontological difference should be integrated within scientific theories whereby it will be transformed into a non-dichotomous difference that ought to be instrumental in the constitution of the theories objects of inquiry. It is in this way that existential analytic becomes reconstructed within empirical research programs. Yet the integration of the ontic-ontological difference within scientific theorizing has a dramatic impact on what should be counted as an empirical basis of conceptualization. Scientificated existential analytic constitutes empirical objects of inquiry that cannot be recast in terms of structurally invariant manifolds of discrete facts. The empirical can no longer be seen as a static presence waiting to be conceptualized. In the present study, the expression the interrelatedness of social practices stands for existing within the work-world in which actors are humans and various kinds of nonhumans. The hermeneutic theory of practices is built around several non-dichotomous differences that resonate and revise the ontic-ontological difference of existential analytic. It is these differences through which the interrelatedness of practices becomes constituted as an immanently interpretive empirical object of inquiry.