Generative hermeneutics: proposal for an alliance with critical realism

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the recent interest shown by critical realists in the study of generative mechanisms in sociology and proposes stronger integration of hermeneutics into this theoretical approach. There are important differences between realism and hermeneutics. While realism strives to overcome the extremes of empiricism and interpretivism with a new version of naturalism, hermeneutics bases its explanations of society on research into meanings. The question is whether underlining these differences is useful for social theory. On the one hand, underestimating hermeneutics makes it difficult for realists to recognize fully the role that processes of understanding play in generating social change. On the other hand, hermeneutical arguments in sociology idealistically identify being with interpreted being. The concept of generative hermeneutics is designed to help to build an alliance between realism and hermeneutics, since one-sided overemphasis on mechanistic logic devaluates the study of social interaction pursued by interpretative sociology.

KEYWORDS:

• Hermeneutics
• critical realism
• emergence
• generative mechanisms
• social interaction
• social theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Martin Durdovic is researcher at the Institute of sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czechia. His research centres on social theory and its relationship to philosophy and on sociology of energy. He teaches at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and is editor in chief of the Czech peer review journal Our Society.

ORCID

Martin Durdovic http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1471-662X

Notes

1 In this last part of the quote I have altered the English translation in the cited source, which reads ‘means and ends’, a minor but philosophically significant difference from the original ‘fins et causes’ (Ricoeur 1990).

2 From the perspective of realism Margaret Archer formulated a detailed critique of the idea of the duality of structure, which she refers to as central conflation; however, she only touched marginally on the hermeneutical core of Giddens’s theory (Archer 1995, 93–134).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number 15-03295S] (‘The Application of Philosophical Hermeneutics to the Sociological Theory of Intersubjectivity’) and by the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences [grant number 68378025].