Roots of interpretivism

Interpretivism is often linked to the thought of Max Weber (1864— 1920), who suggests that in the human sciences we are concerned with Verstehen (understanding). This has been taken to mean that Weber is contrasting the interpretative approach (Verstehen, understanding) needed in the human and social sciences with the explicative approach (Erklaren, explaining), focused on causality, that is found in the natural sciences. Hence the emphasis on the different methods employed in each, leading to the clear (though arguably exaggerated) distinction found in the textbooks between qualitative research methods and quantitative research methods. However, discussion of whether methods used in the human and social sciences ought to differ from those of the natural sciences predates Weber’s concern with the issue.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) does, indeed, contrast Verstehen and Erklaren. He proposes that natural reality and social reality are in themselves different kinds of reality and their investigation therefore requires different methods.

Neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), while rejecting the notion that there is some kind of real distinction between natural reality and social reality, accept that there is a logical distinction, one posited by the mind, between the two. One implication this bears is that, in studying one and the other, we have different purposes in view. In the case of nature, science is looking for consistencies, regularities, the ‘law’ (nomos) that obtains. In the case of human affairs—in historical studies, for instance —we are concerned with the individual (idios) case. So Windelband talks of natural science seeking what is nomothetic and the human and social sciences seeking what is idiographic. For his part, Rickert talks of a generalising method (in the natural sciences) over against an individualising method (in the human and social sciences). Thus, a distinction is made between the natural sciences, which seek to establish general laws, and the cultural sciences, which isolate individual phenomena in order to trace their unique development.

What about Weber, then? On the one hand, he agrees with Windelband and Rickert in rejecting Dilthey’s real distinction between natural reality and social reality and positing only a logical distinction between them. On the other hand, Weber does not feel that this necessitates the use of different methods in researching these two realms of being.

As Weber sees it, both the natural sciences and the human and social sciences may be concerned at any given time with either the nomothetic or the idiographic Uniqueness and historicity are manifest in nature as well as humanity, while general covering laws may explain human behaviour as well as natural phenomena. Sociology can be found to engage in empirical research to discover what regularly occurs, while biology or astronomy may sometimes study unique aspects of particular phenomena. Weber holds, then, that the one scientific method should apply to these two forms of science and should cater for both nomothetic and idiographic inquiry.

Admittedly, the natural sciences are primarily concerned with the nomothetic and the human or social sciences primarily with the idiographic. This establishes a different orientation in the one area and the other. Our interest in the social world tends to focus on exacdy those aspects that are unique, individual and qualitative, whereas our interest in the natural world focuses on more abstract phenomena, that is, those exhibiting quantifiable, empirical regularities. This, however, is a matter of interest rather than something the nature of the science in question specifically calls for. For his part, Weber looks for empirical validation of any claims made in the social arena and spends the best part of a lifetime attempting to elaborate a methodology that will enable him to verify claims in this way.

To be sure, Weber’s Verstehen sociology locates the study of society in the context of human beings acting and interacting.

Interpretative sociology considers the individual and his action as the basic unit, as its ‘atom’ … In this approach the individual is also the upper limit; and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct… In general, for sociology, such concepts as ‘state’, ‘association’, ‘feudalism’, and the like, designate certain categories of human interaction. Hence it is the task of sociology to reduce these concepts to ‘understandable’ action, that is without exception, to the actions of participating men. (Weber 1970, p.55)

Here Weber is expressing the need to focus social inquiry on the meanings and values of acting persons and therefore on their subjective ‘meaning-complex of action’. Nevertheless, he defines sociology as ‘a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects’ (1968, p. 3). Sociology’s ‘concepts and generalizations are fashioned on the premise that it can claim to make a contribution to the causal explanation of some historically and culturally important phenomenon’ (Weber 1962, p. 51).

Causal! This hardly squares with the position of those who claim to stand in the line of Weber’s Verstehen but take it to have no interest in causality and contrast it with the Erklaren approach that does. ‘Interpretivism’, says Silverman (1990, p. 126), ‘rests on the emphatic denial that we can understand cultural phenomena in causal terms’. If that is the case, the interpretivism Silverman is speaking of is far removed from Weber’s. Weber certainly is interested in causes. He wants to explain as well as understand. He writes (1962, pp. 35, 40) of ‘explanatory understanding’ and a ‘correct causal interpretation of a concrete course of behavior’. Nowak, in fact, goes so far as to claim that, for Weber, ‘Verstehen is a method of explaining and of explaining only’ (in Weiss 1986, p. 68).

Going so far may be going too far, all the same, and, in citing Nowak, Weiss feels the need for further distinction. ‘Perhaps a better way of saying this would be that Verstehen is “for the purpose of explanation’” (Weiss 1986, p. 68). Certainly, Weiss’s account accords better with Weber’s own definition of sociology. For Weber, as far as human affairs are concerned, any understanding of causation comes through an interpretative understanding of social action and involves an explanation of relevant antecedent phenomena as meaning-complexes. This role ascribed to Verstehen implies a difference in outcome in comparison with the natural sciences. As Weber sees it, the causation that the social scientist seeks to clarify is at best ‘adequate’ rather than ‘necessary’. He is ready to ‘consider an interpretation of a sequence of events to be causally adequate, if on the basis of past experience it appears probable that it will always occur in the same way’ (1962, p. 39).

As already suggested, it is Weber’s contention that, in any scientific study of society, Verstehen has to be substantiated by empirical evidence. He has a passion for empirical knowledge and stresses the need for scientifically valid historical and social data. Weber’s philosophy, Lewis assures us, is ‘an empiricist venture’.

It was as strictly an empirical sociology as academic philosophy was speculative. For it attempted to establish a science of social fact, and to use an appropriate methodology devised for historico-political material rather than for the natural sciences, a methodology which would describe and classify historical and social facts schematically and deduce experimentally the laws-system of society. (Lewis 1975, p. 39)

Weber finds the centrepiece of this ‘appropriate methodology’ in what he calls the ideal type. This is his principal diagnostic tool, a heuristic device for the precise purpose of amassing empirical data. It seeks to subject social behaviour, for all its subjective dimension, to the scientific need for the empirical verification of all knowledge.

Using the word ‘tool’ to describe Weber’s ideal type points up the important fact that it is something the social scientist makes up. It is not something found through an analysis of what is real. Weber (1949, pp. 90-4) calls his ideal types conceptual or mental constructs. They involve imagination, he tells us, and they are Utopian in nature. What the ideal type embodies is the ‘pure case’, with no admixture of fortuitous and confusing features. As such, it never exists in reality, but can serve as a useful model to guide the social inquirer in addressing real-life cases and discerning where and to what extent the real deviates from the ideal. It reveals, Weber tells us (1970, p. 323), what is ‘possible and “adequate”’.

Weber sets strict limits to the use of his ideal types. He believes that ideal-type methodology is applicable only to social behaviour that can be described as ‘rational goal-oriented conduct’ and not to ‘rational value- oriented conduct’, ‘affectual conduct’, or ‘traditionalist conduct’. What is being studied by way of the ideal type is the outcome of persons acting under a common motivation and choosing suitable means to the ends they have in view. It is only in regard to such rational goal-oriented conduct that we can take stock of empirical data according to preconceived rational criteria implicidy accepted by both actor and observer.

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) is very taken with Weber’s ideal-type methodology. Schutz attempts to ground it philosophically and develop it further by way of his own ‘second-order’ constructs, which he refers to as ‘puppets’ or homunculi (1973, p. 255). Like Weber, and the similarly minded scholars who preceded him from Dilthey on, Schutz strives to harmonise the idiographic with the nomothetic and make possible a study of human affairs that can be said to be rigorously scientific. It was this very concern that launched the Verstehen approach in the first place.

In more recent times, interpretivism seems to have largely cut itself loose from these traditional moorings. While continuing to trace its lineage back to Weber and his call for ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’, the Verstehen approach has not maintained his passion for empirical verification or his concern to explain in causal terms. In most instances, it has accepted what Weber refused to accept, that is, that the human and social sciences require methods essentially different from those of the natural sciences. It is usually not easy to discern the basis for this demand of different methods. Often without thematising the issue, interpretative researchers seem to evince either Dilthey’s hard and fast distinction between the subject matter of these two areas of science or at least Windelband’s and Rickert’s ‘distinction of reason’ along with the nomothetic/idiographic divide to which these distinctions lead. Blaikie, for one, writes of the ‘fundamental difference between the subject matters of the natural and social sciences’ (1993, p. 36). Hence the widespread espousal of quantitative research methods in the one and very different qualitative research methods commonly found in the other.

For all that, studies of the natural world and the social world have come closer together. This has been largely due to the development pointed up in Chapter 2, namely, the recognition by many thinkers that positivist science’s age-old claims to certitude and objectivity cannot be sustained and that the findings of natural science are themselves social constructions and human interpretations, albeit a particular form of such constructions and interpretations.

What we understand today as the Verstehen or interpretivist approach to human inquiry has appeared historically in many guises. It will be useful to consider three historical streams that have borne it along. In their historical order of appearance, these are hermeneutics, phenomenology, and symbolic interactionism. It will suit our purposes to reverse the order.

We will consider symbolic interactionism and phenomenology in the remainder of this chapter. These contrast with each other quite sharply in their attitude towards culture as our inherited meaning system. Symbolic interactionism explores the understandings abroad in culture as the meaningful matrix that guides our lives. Phenomenology, however, treats culture with a good measure of caution and suspicion. Our culture may be enabling but, paradoxically, it is also crippling. While it offers us entree to a comprehensive set of meanings, it shuts us off from an abundant font of untapped significance.

For culture and against culture, then. Two very different traditions. As researchers, we learn from both.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.

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