Understanding In Human Science

Abstract

A HE ISSUE about hermeneutics in modern philosophy and social sci ence goes back to Dilthey and to his claim that we must distinguish between what we could call the natural and human sciences (Natur and Geisteswissenschaften). The claim is that there is something special about the subject matter of the latter which forbids us simply to carry over the method elaborated in natural science to the study of man. But to many, this distinction has seemed unjustified, even ob scurantist. One of the important traits of modern science has been its concern about method, ever since Descartes' great discourse on the subject. To put the sciences of man outside the ban of the methods of natural science seems to be to put them outside the range of science itself. On this view, science must be in principle a unity; or at least it must involve a set o? d?marches which are the same without discrimination as to the object studied. For some time the battle lines were clearly drawn between pro ponents of the special nature of the sciences of man, which could only proceed by interpretation, and defenders of the unity of science. By far the most influential in the latter camp were the logical empiricists, for whom the unity of science was almost a sacred cause. Logical em piricists elaborated a canonical account of scientific explanation, often called the theory, according to which ex plaining some phenomenon amounted to showing how the statement describing it could be deduced from some true general law together with some statement of initial conditions. Debates raged, for in stance, on the question whether historical explanations could be ade quately understood on this model. In those days, defenders of hermeneutics had a clear map of the philosophical universe. They knew who the enemy was, and they knew where to direct their dialectical artillery. But in the last dec ade things have changed in a disconcerting way. Suddenly, logical empiricism is under attack from all directions. Many philosophers who have been formed in its ethos have turned against its cherished doctrines. In particular the deductive-nomological theory comes in for a lot of abuse. And out of the confusion, a new alignment ap pears.

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