Analytical Hermeneutics: Interpretative social enquiry after Wittgenstein

Abstract

Positivism in social enquiry may be characterised in terms of three tenets: a determination to achieve causal laws, drawn on observable social phenomena, and arrived at by value-free procedures. In this paper 1 distinguish three varieties of behaviourism in sociology and psychology radical, analytical and descriptive behaviourism by the different ways in which they claim to satisfy the first two tenets, and argue that they evidently and necessarily fail. Then I outline an alternative foundation for social enquiry, analytical hermeneutics, which repudiates these two tenets, in a manner consonant with phenomenological hermeneutics but incorporating the interpretative philosophy of Wittgenstein rather than Husserl. I complement Winch's well-known account of the conventional aspect of action with an account of its intentional aspect provided by G.H. von Wright's schema of practical inference. Finally, by discerning an adumbration of the methodology of Habermas's critical theory in Winch's allusions to psychoanalysis, I show how analytical hermeneutics has an intrinsic interest, and thereby also repudiates the third tenet of positivism. The outcome is a conception of enquiry as a social process in which, ultimately, the unfolding expectations of both theorists and subjects are guided by contextually specific conceptual interpretations which are validated to the extent that the conclusion of the process is emancipation.