Professional Documents
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Introduction
Interpretivism
It is essential to a science of
interpretation that these are subjective but not individualistic. Meanings must be
shared, intersubjective and not private, belonging to a cultural whole, so there is
a practice of indoctrination to them. Taylor contends that man is a selfinterpreting animal, and what he interprets himself in accordance with are these
publicly shared meanings. These meanings are thus constitutive of his selfunderstanding (p.48). Our actions are embedded with a purpose sought and
explains by feelings and desires interpreted as something from within the whole
in which we belong. By interpretivist standards, not only then can we only
understand others by getting into their circle but we only understand ourselves
from within our own. Taylor stresses however that these meanings are not
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One way to think about this is taking the concern with coherence as necessary
but not sufficient. As Little (1991) points out, coherence in itself is too weak: We
want reasons to believe that our interpretation is true, and there might of course
be conflicting coherent interpretations. This prompts further questioning,
assessing what material supports which interpretation, and what conflicts with it.
Geertz (1973) on the other hand makes of aware of a danger awaiting in the
opposite direction: Cultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence,
else we would not call them systems; and, by observation, they normally have a
great deal more. But there is nothing so coherent as a paranoids delusion or a
swindlers story. (p.10). Here the problem is in the craft of construing a more
intricate system of order than is really the case.
publicly shared opinions, but rather the ground or basis on which we understand
each other so as to be capable of agreeing and disagreeing with each other,
holding different opinions, in the first place.
The other line of criticism takes the form of a demand for a level of certainty
which can only be attained by breaking beyond the hermeneutic circle. The
respective opposition is not only dissatisfied with the degree of difficulty involved
in a hermeneutical approach, but rejects the nature of the object of study. In
Taylors terms this line of thought stems from rationalist and empiricist strains of
thought harbouring an epistemological bias. They do not recognize a social
reality of interactively relational network of meanings constitutive and
constituted by practices, but enters the discussion with an idea of what reality is
and how it is to be characterized, taking the cue from the natural sciences
themselves. A social phenomenon should be studied in the same way as natural
phenomena. Taylor writes that for these theorists what is objectively real is
brute data identifiable (p.21). By brute data it is meant data whose validity
cannot be questioned by offering another interpretation, such as natural
description of events (i.e. the rapidly contracting eyelids in Geertzs thin
desctipions), biological correlates of behaviour, propositional attitudes (to which
I will return later), or information capable of being registered by instruments of
measurement. With respect to this picture Taylor writes:
The context from which the suggestion about the contradiction is made, the context of our
scientific culture, is not on the same level as the context in which the beliefs about witchcraft
operate. Zande notions of witchcraft do not constitute a theoretical system in terms of which
Azande try to gain a quasi-scientific understanding of the world.
The idea is that if we interpret the concept of Witch and its interrelations to the whole of
behaviours, rituals, and ordinary life of the Azande, it becomes more intelligible not
irrational. If we apply the interpretivist method we open the concept up and appreciate it in
terms of the role it plays in the Azande culture, such that the superficial irrationality of
Witches gives way to its being appreciated as immersed in a cultural order with its own
internal logic of sorts. As I see it (though I think I see it differently than Winch), it is not that
that the concept of witch then all of a sudden shows itself as rational, but that he model of
rationality we impose upon the culture to begin with fail to appreciate the shared meanings of
witches or witchcraft within the culture, by construing them at once as irrational.
Lukes intend to attack Winches solution to the problem. First he distinguishes between two
kinds of criteria for rationality, universal (i) and context dependent (ii).
Let us assume we are discussing the beliefs of a society S. One can then draw a distinction
between two sets of questions. One can ask, in the first place: (i) what for society S are the
criteria of rationality in general? And, second, one can ask: (ii) what are the appropriate
criteria to apply to a given class of beliefs within that society?
Lukes writes:
In so far as Winch seems to be saying that the answer to the first question is culturedependent, he must be wrong, or at least we could never know if he were right; indeed we
cannot even conceive what it could be for him to be right. In the first place, the existence of a
common reality is a necessary precondition of our understanding S's language. () What
must be the case is that S must have our distinction between truth and falsity if we are to
understand its language, for, if per impossibile it did not, we would be unable even to agree
about what counts as the successful identification of public (spatio-temporally locations).
I will go on to claim that there is an important gap between asserting that first-order logical
criteria of evaluating a set of propositional states such as belief constitutes universal criteria
for rationality to 1. that belief in the existence of an independent reality depends on accepting
such criteria, and 2. that the role played by a certain concept in a given culture could be best
formulated in terms of such propositional attitudes. If that is so, there is little sense to claim
that the interpretivist must hold a universal criterion of rationality (and then neither a context
dependent criteria), that is, go on in applying the notion of rational or irrational behaviour to
the culture they study. To illuminate this I will discuss the principle of charity and
translation manuals. These also directly impact the question of epistemological relativism.
Relativism
The objection to anti relativism is not that it rejects an it is all how you look at it approach
to knowledge, but that they imagine this can only be defeated by placing morality beyond
culture and knowledge beyond both. (Geertz)
The failure lies in thinking that we need conditions such as rationality to secure our
epistemological or moral beliefs. If it was such that interpretivist had to reject universal
criteria for rationality in favour of contextual dependent versions, and if this was an antirealist adherence, then the road from interpretivism to normative relativism could be a short
one (but it is not the case).
Epistemological relativism and Interpretivism
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One does not have to equate the lived world with natural reality to the extent that one
would relativize reality in terms of many different worlds. Nor does one have to
separate them so that the natural reality is out of plausible contact with the lived.
Science for instance seems to operate by decontextualizing, it purports to remove the
Moral relativism
prejudice.
Emphasizing that actions must be understood in relation to the context within which it
figures, is an attempt at understanding the action in question, not legislating it. In fact
it is just as much improving the grounds for sensible critique of the action in question
as it is a defence of it. Interpretivism is an attempt at letting what is there be seen as it
is for those at a certain distance from it. Getting clear of a phenomena seems
References
Little, Daniel. Varieties of Social Explanation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991)
Clifford Geertz, Thick Description (1971)
Dagfinn Fllesdal, Hermeneutics and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method