Naturalism and Its Inadvertent Defenders

ABSTRACT

The interpretive turn in the social sciences, although much discussed, has effectively stalled and even begun to backslide. With the publication of Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach, we provide a systematic defense of interpretive inquiry intended to help reinvigorate this mode of study across the human sciences. This defense, unfortunately, needs to be deployed not only against social scientists who unwittingly adopt naturalistic philosophical assumptions, but against interpretivist fellow travelers such as Michel Foucault, who occasionally do the same thing; and even against interpretivists who assume that their philosophical position is secured by using only qualitative methods, and that quantitative methods are inherently unsuitable to interpretivist purposes.

Keywords:

• interpretive social science
• hermeneutics
• qualitative methods
• quantitative methods
• survey research