Interpretation and Social Knowledge

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM
Introducing the Symposium

on Interpretation and Social Knowledge
by Isaac Ariail Reed
Explain or understand? This old methodological dilemma has haunted sociology

ever since it emerged out of late 19th-century German philosophy of science and
the latters sharp distinction between natural and human sciences. The choice is
a difcult one indeed: explainers are easilyand most of the time for good rea-
sonsuspected of severely mishandling the meanings operant in social action;
interpreters, for their part, get mired in the endless webs of human subjectiv-
ity. Whats worse, since the early days of sociology both of these concerns have
seemed too central to the disciplines programme to allow one to be sacriced for
the other. As Weber stated, sociology would protest against the assumption that
[interpretive] understanding and causal explanation have no relationship
with another [2012: 279]. Hence the irrepressible impulse to transcend the divide
between understanding and explanation, notwithstanding the danger this entails
of ending up impaled on not just one but both horns of the dilemma. Nowhere
else has this impulse played itself out more palpably than in the development of
social theory in the past few decades. At the height of the interpretive wave of the
1970s1980s it might have seemed that the days of the explanation-addicted posi-
tivists were forever numbered. Yet, to conceive of sociology as a purely interpre-
tive enterprise was not particularly appealing either. It may well be true that tout
comprendre cest tout pardonner; but many social scientists feel that their business
has nothing or very little to do with the forgiveness that understanding imparts,
and everything to do with producing potentially effective social knowledge that
is necessarily explanatory in nature.
Among the recent attempts to tackle the formidable dilemma of explana-
tion and understanding, Isaac Ariail Reeds Interpretation and Social Knowledge
stands out as one of the most remarkable ones. It is a bold and brilliant endeav-
our, deeply Weberian in its conviction that meaning and causality are not to be
treated as two separate substances that like oil and water do not mix in the study
of social life. In this book, Reed proceeds through a sophisticated meta-analysis
of the practice of social research and social theory to develop a new epistemo-
logical perspective, which culminates in the idea of interpretive explanation, the
centrepiece of what is rightly called a synthetic approach to social knowledge
[Reed 2011: 11]. There are multiple syntheses going on on different levels, and the
central but not the sole one is occurring between those old and venerable rivals,
causal explanation and interpretive understanding. No less important is another
mediation that speaks to more contemporary debates in social theory. In what is
arguably one of the major achievements of the book, Reed describesand in so
Sociologick stav AV R, v.v.i., Praha 2015

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Sociologick asopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3
doing lays the foundations for overcoming their separationthree basic epis-
temic modes under which contemporary social (or to use his preferred word,
human) sciences operate: realism, normatively grounded social criticism, and in-
terpretivism. The fact that those three are treated in a deep sense as complemen-
tary appears to be one of the truly bold moves of the book. And also a highly per-
suasive one: I believe that having read Reeds book one can no longer be happy
with explanatory projects that remain ignorant of their political implications or
the embeddedness of social action in the element of meaning; utopian theorising
that is clueless about how things go on in social life and how interpretations add
to it; or the hermeneutics of social texts that are dismissive of social mechanisms
and the dimension of power. At the same time it is beyond dispute that Reed is,
in the rst place, an interpretivist, for it is the interpretation of cultures that in his
account provides the master frame necessary for mechanisms and normativity to
be integrated into fully articulated interpretive explanations.
Perhaps the most tting characterisation of Interpretation and Social Knowl-
edge is that it is an example of social theory that is truly synthetic or multidimen-
sional in ambition, that is out to overcome the deepest epistemological divides
and bring out the unsuspected complementarities among warring modalities of
knowledge. Can there be a more suitable candidate for a book symposium?
I am most grateful to Isaac Reed for his encouraging response to my tenta-
tive bid to get him involved in this project, which, at the time of our initial conver-
sation at the ASA World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama in 2014, was nothing
more than a vague idea. Thanks are due also to the authors who have, despite
their busy schedules, delivered their thought-provoking comments under a very
short deadline: Nelson Arteaga Botello, Dominik Bartmaski and Werner Binder,
Eeva Luhtakallio, Steven Lukes, Hendrik Vollmer, and Stephen Welch. If any in-
dication of the relevance of Reeds book for current debates in social theory were
needed, the readiness of the commentators to contribute to this symposium is
certainly one. Leslie MacColman kindly provided a summary of the books main
arguments.
Marek Skovajsa
Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University Prague
References
Reed, I. A. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human
Sciences. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press,
http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226706726.001.0001.
Weber, M. 2012. Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, edited by H. H. Bruun and
S. Whimster. Transl. by H. H. Bruun. Milton Park: Routledge,
http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203804698.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13060/00380288.2015.51.3.187
474

The Central Arguments of Isaac Ariail Reeds

Interpretation and Social Knowledge
LESLIE MACCOLMAN*
University of Notre Dame
Sociologick asopis/ Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3: 475486
Introduction
Isaac Reeds [2011] book Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in
the Social Sciences responds to the stubborn yet immensely fecund question What
is social knowledge and how can we, as researchers, generate such knowledge?
In doing so, it dissolves the supposed tension between understanding and explana-
tion, arguing that the latter is but one element of the former and that it is towards
understanding that we must strive. This, according to Reed, means transcending
minimal factual claims to construct maximal interpretations, through the art-
ful resignication of evidence within a coherent theoretical bricolage.
Reeds aim, with this book, is to advance a theory of knowing, while re-
maining grounded in the material, empirical stuff of social scientic research. As
such, the book unfolds around two central questions. First, it asks how do theory
and evidence interact? To this question, the author offers a novel epistemological
taxonomy, organising a century of social thought into three epistemic modes
realist, normative, and interpretive. He explains the logic of these modes and
dissects several canonical examples to illustrate how each one operates in action.
Second, the book asks how should theory and evidence interact? In the uncharted
land of post-positivist, post-modern, post-structural, and post-colonial meta-the-
oretical rumination the negation is clear: we all know what were not doing. But
what, then, is the driving force of social scientic research? Is there such thing
as a framework for interpretive knowledge which accommodates the motives
and mechanisms central to explanation while remaining sensitive to the histori-
cally situated, intersubjective landscapes of meaning that guide social action?
In short, yes. [The] interpretation of meaning can, says Reed, form the basis
for the investigator to reach the goals central to both normativism (critique) and
realism (explanation), with a special focus on how precisely the interpretation of
* Direct all correspondence to: Leslie MacColman, Department of Sociology, University

of Notre Dame, 810 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA, e-mail: lmaccolm@nd.edu.

475

meaning can contribute to the causal explanation of social action [Reed 2011: 92].
This move, however, involves loosening the restraints of causal explanationnar-
rowly dened as the search for forcing causesto consider the less tangible but no
less powerful ways in which networks of meaning enable, constrain, delineate,
liberate, and form social action.
In this short piece, my objective is to distil and synthesise the main argu-
ments put forth in Reeds Interpretation and Social Knowledge. This narrative ap-
proximation is accompanied by an even more synthetic chart (Appendix 1). I be-
gin by explaining the difference between minimal and maximal interpretation,
a key conceptual distinction which is leveraged periodically throughout the text.
I then summarise Reeds three epistemic modesrealism, normativism, and in-
terpretivismand discuss the textual exemplars analysed at greater length in the
book. Finally, I discuss the authors main criticisms of the rst two modes, a lead-
in to why (and how) interpretivism offers a way forward. This summary must,
however, be prefaced with a caveat: if the goal is to faithfully render the authors
ideas and arguments, I have undoubtedly fallen short, for it is an impossible task
to resignify such a complex piece without losing many subtleties and nuances.
Nonetheless, I hope this synthetic introduction will pique the readers interest
sufciently to prompt him/her to read the book in its entirety.
From minimal to maximal interpretations
Reed denes maximal interpretation as knowledge claims which transcend the

strict binary of fact and theory, articulating the two in such a way that the ref-
erential functions of evidence and the relational functions of theory are subsumed
under a deeper understanding [ibid: 23; emphasis mine]. Their immediate con-
trast is with minimal interpretations, which remain within the sign-system of
facts, resignifying evidence to show what happened, where, and to whom, independ-
ent of theories that can elucidate motives, mechanisms, or meanings. Maximal
interpretations are built on minimal interpretations and empirically tethered to
social factsthe same facts they organise, explain, and judge. Yet, they supersede
factual claims to achieve greater comprehension of relevant causal relationships.
Maximal interpretations are the goal of all social researchers, regardless of their
epistemological leanings. Nonetheless, the distinct ways of knowing posited by dif-
ferent frameworks belie variable understandings of what theory is and what it
should do, thus yielding different modes of maximal interpretation.
For Reed, the juxtaposition between the referential function of facts and the
relational function of theory is contingent on two things. First, it requires an under-
standing that both are inextricably embedded in systems of meaning. The thick
character and irreducibility of social facts to brute observation renders much of
human behaviour unintelligible except through this interpretive lens. Follow-
ing the authors example, to say that the 1692 Witch Trials in Salem, Massachu-
476

L. MacColman: The Central Arguments of Isaac Ariail Reeds Interpretation and Social Knowledge
setts, USA, were precipitated by a doctors asseveration that a dozen village girls
(witches) were aficted by the evil hand is uncontroversial insofar as written re-
cords testify to this occurrence. But even this factual account demands a minimal
understanding of the historically particular modes of social organisation, religion,
and medicine that imbued the occurrence with meaning. Social facts understood
in this manner can never be fully stated in protocol sentences that are veriable
by literal observation, but must be inferred and understood in a dialogue about
what is happening or has happened, at a certain time, in a certain space, in a given
society. [ibid.: 16] Likewise, social theory cannot exist outside the vast systems of
meaning, wherein scientic terms and the concepts to which they refer allow us to
differentiate between, for example, democratic and authoritarian regimes.
Second, we must recognise that the meaning systems of facts and theories
are governed by distinct logics, with consequences for the pursuit of knowledge.
Theories are, by denition, abstract. They operate relationally, taking as their ref-
erent (1) other theoretical expressions and (2) imagined societies, social actions,
and social relations whose primary existence is in the researchers head [ibid.:
21]. The relational function of theory stands in contrast with the indexical or ref-
erential function of evidence, which is used by researchers to substantiate claims
about actual happenings in the social world. Assemblages of evidencetexts, im-
ages, numbers, and graphssignify social facts and, in doing so, establish the
phenomena of study, for example the abolition of feudal privileges in pre-Rev-
olutionary France. Scholarly consensus about what actually occurred (minimal
interpretation) becomes a minimum common denominator for subsequent inter-
pretations of how, why, and what it meant (maximal interpretation). While agree-
ment on the facts is rarely unproblematic, it is the use of theory to classify, ar-
range, and make sense of them that generally gives rise to the most vitriolic and
productive scholarly polemicshence the terminology of maximal interpretation.
Reed also offers a useful backdoor pathway for understanding what maxi-
mal interpretations are by showing precisely what they are not. Criticisms hailed
at unsatisfying claims are revelatory. By visualising theory and evidence on per-
pendicular axes, we can locate some of the most common criticisms. Along one
axis are evidence-based criticisms in which an author is charged with incorrect fac-
tual claims: the evidence does not accurately represent the phenomenon. Along
the other axis are theory-based criticisms which assert logical or conceptual inco-
herence: the theory is not sound. Where evidence and theory overlap, the most
common criticism is that of disjunction: the theory does not match the evidence or
the evidence begs use of a different theory. Thus, Reed argues, strong knowledge
claims require not just empirical support (referential correctness) and conceptual
coherence (defensible theory) but the effective binding together of the two (fu-
sion). On the rare and celebrated occasions when this alchemy is achieved, the
product is maximal interpretation.
In summary, Reed offers a positive denition of social knowledge as the
seamless weaving together of evidentiary and conceptual strands into a single
477

tapestry. In this way of thinking, minimal interpretations, with their proximity

to empirical facts, are ultimately limited in their power to elucidate the deeper
meanings of human behaviour. But when theory is brought to bear on this web
of factual signication to resignify the evidence it makes possible deeper knowl-
edge of the social actions that happened. When this happens, maximal interpre-
tations are created [ibid.: 39].
On epistemic modes
The authors own scholarship is situated under the broad umbrella of interpre-
tivism and, not surprisingly, the book operates on the same epistemic register. In
fact, it is precisely this self-conscious intellectual commitment that Reed uses to
drive his argument about maximal vs minimal interpretations. He does this by
offering an epistemological taxonomy of social scientic thought, systematically
unpacking the weighty but often implicit ontological baggage associated with
different ways of knowing. Specically, Reed identies three epistemic modes:
realist, normative, and interpretive. These modes, according to Reed, offer dif-
ferent ways of bringing theory and evidence together and serve to structure the
expectations about what such contact can accomplish, and provide more or less
well-formed criteria of validity to evaluate knowledge [ibid.: 7]. These modes are
not clustered within specic subelds of sociology, but instead cut across sub-
stantive programmes, research agendas, levels of analysis, and, to some degree,
methodological camps. Maximal interpretations are present in all three modes,
yet the interpretive mode is best equipped to produce deep understandings and
meaningful social explanations. Thus, the author begins by describing the other
two modes.
The realist epistemic mode
The realist (or naturalist) epistemic mode views the human sciences as an imper-
fect reection of the natural sciences; yet, unlike positivism, it is not bound by the
realm of direct, sensory observation. In the words of Reed, The core ambition of
realism is to take the risk of depth interpretation, or in the terms developed here,
to construct maximal interpretations that use theory to go beyond the facts but re-
main responsible to these facts. [ibid.: 63] In realism, the articulation of abstract,
broadly generalisable causal explanations is achieved by unearthing the (hidden)
mechanisms which account for the clock-like regularity of social life across time
and space. This quest is premised on the existence of a deep social reality, a basic
structure that lies underneath the surface of outcomes, events, and phenomena.
This underlying layer of reality is the ultimate referent to which theory must cor-
respond. In the realist epistemic mode, says Reed, theory creates a picture of the
social world that is expected to apply widely (generality), to be consistent with
478

itself (coherence), and describe directly social reality (reference) [ibid.: 42]. Social
realities are taken as intransitive, but the means for apprehending them remain
transitive, dependent on socially-constructed and hence fallible theoretical inter-
pretations. Scientic discovery is, therefore, understood as a work-in-progress
whichthrough the careful colligation of evidence, retroduction, and the ren-
ing of theoretical claimsmoves us incrementally towards a true account of
causal relationships.
Reed nds examples of the realist epistemic mode is several classic texts,
among them Theda Skocpols [1979] States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative
Analysis of France, Russia, and China and Barrington Moores [1967] Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, as
well as Jack Goldstones more recent comparative-historical work. Skocpol, for ex-
ample, argues that the combination of domestic class structures and international
competition led to the breakdown of old regimes, enabling the crystallisation of
subsequent social revolutions. She does this by amassing evidence to substantiate
a historical narrative (certain events that occurred in a certain order) and show
that the institutions and social transgurations in question bear resemblance to
the theoretical signiers deployed (e.g. the old regime state and the landed up-
per class). Maximal interpretation, in this case, relies on theory to structure and
delimit the real social forces underlying historical processes and verify the causal
relationships between the real social entities represented in their abstract form.
Moore, like Skocpol, weaves together a mixture of factual and theoretical
claims to explain how commercial agriculture (a mechanism) varied in strength
in England, Germany, and Japan, thus producing different political outcomes in
these three countries. In Moores realist account, the claim is, implicitly or ex-
plicitly, that the theoretical signiers used by the researcher point to an essential
aspect of the social as such, and that this world exists underneath the time-space
patch of social life to which their evidence refers [Reed 2011: 49]. In other words,
the relationship between town and country is a real thing which can not only be
said to exist in different (but ultimately commensurable) cases but shown to vary
in the direction of its strength or imbalance, so as to cause distinct outcomes. Fi-
nally, Reed invokes Goldstones writings on comparative-historical analysis as an
exemplar of the realist epistemic mode. Goldstones cross-case comparison and
within-case process tracing are shown to take the form of a series of deductive
moves, aimed at testing the correspondence between social theories and the real
causes of social events.
The normative epistemic mode
The normative epistemic mode emerges as a foil to the realist mode described
above. In contrast to realism, which venerates scientic neutrality (or the illusion
thereof), normativism recognises that the production and curation of knowledge
479

are, at their core, political acts. Normativism is, according to Reed, a way of pro-
ducing maximal theoretical interpretations that speak to the debates of political
theory, but that speak to these debates with an intellectual authority derived from
both theory and fact [ibid.: 68]. Within this mode, research is not a description
of social objects, but a dialogue between social scientists and subjectssubjects
animated by consciousness and prompted by cognitive and instrumental motiva-
tions, as well as normative and ethical considerations. We, as researchers, cannot
fully extract ourselves from the political dialogues that surround, inform, and are
impacted by our knowledge claims, but are compelled to emit value judgements
about the social actions we study, while remaining responsibly grounded in em-
pirical fact. Far from the normative asceticism of mechanistic causality sought
after by realism, the goal of research becomes the resignication of conscious-
ness via theory, the (re)telling of a historical story substantiated by evidence but
attuned to political questions and problematics [ibid.: 81]. The normative epis-
temic mode sustains that comprehension of the social can only be achieved by en-
gaging with the human action, consciousness, morality, and the utopian visions
that push and prod in the unfolding of history. Thus, normativism, like realism,
is built on the foundation of evidentiary claims, represented in the meaning sys-
tem of facts. However, it differs in its use of referents which are not real but ideal.
Utopian (or, in some cases, dystopian) referents are centrepieces, in relation to
which factual and theoretical claims can be evaluated; they are anchor points for
the critical retelling of history, which is, in turn, signied as the tension between
a set of social ideals and their empirical manifestation or lack thereof [ibid.: 87].
The normative epistemic mode is exemplied by Jrgen Habermas [1984]
The Theory of Communicative Action and [1989] The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (among others),
Leela Gandhis [2006] Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-De-Sicle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, and parts of Michel Foucaults extensive
oeuvre. All of these authors rely extensively on empirical evidence to generate
factual truth claims, minimal interpretations about things that happened. How-
ever, they also construct a new manner of maximal interpretations by interlac-
ing factual claims and utopic ideals. In The Theory of Communicative Action, for
example, Habermas argues that understanding normatively-regulated social ac-
tion necessarily involves the moral-practical appraisal of norms. To limit social-
scientic inquiry to objective statements, which can be veried or falsied on the
basis of fact (minimal interpretations), is an ontological fallacy. When it comes to
interpretation, questions of meaning and questions of validity cannot be strictly
separated. [Reed 2011: 71]
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere illustrates the normative
epistemic mode in action. Therein, Habermas analyses the practices of public
deliberation in 18th-century European coffee houses, infusing factual claims
(what was discussed, how, and by whom) with ethically- and morally-oriented
theoretical claims (about the principles of deliberative democracy). Both claims
480

are made in reference topurportedly collectiveideals of democracy and the

good society, and to Habermas (utopic) vision of rational deliberation. In a simi-
lar fashion, Leela Gandhis Affective Communities combines carefully formulated
factual claims about Victorian colonists and colonial subjects (based on the criti-
cal re-reading of historical archives) with theoretical discussions of sociality, pol-
ity, and emotional solidarity. This critical retelling buttresses normative aspira-
tions of emancipatory postcolonial theory and opens new political possibilities
for the modern-day critique of empire.
In Gandhi and Habermas alike, maximal interpretations serve to work out
and work through knowledge of the good society , and the question is not so
much what is the good as how, when, and where the good can be or was made
actual, in actors minds or in social institutions [Reed 2011: 86]. In Foucault, how-
ever, this relationship is inverted: in his biting histories of the present, critiques
are developed not in reference to the glittering utopia, but to a garish dystopia.
This dystopia includes the surveillance society and the expanding reach of power
into the most intimate spheres of the body and the self. But, dystopian visions
aside, aspects of Foucaults work exemplify the normative epistemic mode. He is
attentive to the present-day political implications of his endeavour. He remains
close to the empirical record, but transcends the facts to build a more nuanced
argument (maximal interpretation) about the political problematics of the day.
Not lastly, he disavows any (realist) aspirations of explaining the causes of social
action. Foucault does not reject the possibility of truth in minimal interpreta-
tion, says Reed, What he rejects is the realist program for producing deeper
truths about history, via a general, coherent, and referential theory of society
[ibid.: 83].
The interpretive epistemic mode
If social research is likened to comprehending the inner workings of a clock in the

realist mode and to a dialogue between researcher and subject in the normative
mode, the prevailing metaphor for the interpretive epistemic mode is that of a
painting: the interpretive researcher seeks not to uncover the real causes of so-
cial action or pass judgment on the rightness of a set of institutionalised norms,
but to paint a picture that coherently represents local landscapes of meaning.
In the interpretive epistemic mode the work of maximal interpretation makes
claims about the symbolic order and makes these claims in a way that remains
within the orbit of the social actions under scrutiny. [ibid.: 92]
An interpretive approach requires no a priori ideological or methodological
commitment and should not be conated with an ironic anti-essentialist po-
sition which denies the possibility of social knowledge itself. The interpretive
epistemic mode does, however, demand an ontological commitment to the ef-
cacy of social meaning and some notion of the social consequences of collective
481

representation [ibid.: 103], the idea that networks of meaning enable, constrain,
liberate, and ultimately form social action. This leads to a recognition that abstrac-
tionslike agency, structure, solidarity, and rationalitycan only take us so far,
because these abstractions are embodied (and gain causal traction) at specic in-
tersections of time and space. In other words, they can only do things within the
connes of history. Furthermore, they may do different things in different places
or at different times in history, based on dynamic, locally-dened meaning struc-
tures. The interpretive epistemic mode thus calls for a radical re-centring of the
subject within the landscape of meaning within which her actions (and her very
consciousness) can be understood. Indeed, the goal of the interpretivist is to un-
derstand, a nobler and more difcult task, says Reed, than explaining.
Interpretivism does not discard the questions posed by realism (what is the
mechanism?) or normativism (to what extent does it approximate the ideal?) but
sustains that these questions have to be approached indirectly, mediated through
the interpretation of social meaning [ibid.: 90]. More so than competing epis-
temic modes, it is attentive to human subjectivity and to the meaningful worlds
of social life which give rise to human agency. Historically situated systems of
meaning are like water for sh. The human subjects of our research, more often
than not, fail to articulate them consciously in interviews or historical texts. How-
ever, their powerful currents surround and shape everything they say and do, as
well as everything they cant say or do. To ignore the plasticity of meaning across
time, space, and cultural milieus, says Reed, is to generate an impoverished social
knowledge. The intellectual goal of the interpretive epistemic mode is, therefore,
to reconstruct these deep meanings and resignify evidence in relation to them.
The resignication moves from one set of social meanings to another set of social
meanings: from the surface meanings easily inferred from the evidence to the
deep meanings that require much more interpretive work to access. [ibid.: 92]
This deliberate recontexualisation of human consciousness and social ac-
tion leads Reed to the metaphor of landscapes. In any given system of symbolic
representation (or landscape) there are identiable actors and institutions, each
with the motives and means to enact social life. However, ultimately, the actors
and their related social processes are painted with the same paint, and paint-
ed in the same style, as the landscape upon which they move. This landscape
is the concrete instantiation of meanings made by humans, to which humans
become subject, and through which humans must act and interact. [ibid.: 110]
Landscapes are always fragments of larger social, spatial, and temporal panora-
mas, which shade imperceptibly from one to the next. They also look different
depending on the subject-position from which they are viewed, including the
position of the researcher. As interpretive researchers, our texts reconstruct and
resignify landscapes. But, in the same way that there is no universal landscape,
there is no master paintingonly scenes to reconstruct using different brushes
[ibid.: 111]. Thus, in the interpretive epistemic mode, as distinct from realist or
normative modes, coherence is intrinsic to the landscape (the case), not the theo-
482

ry used to represent it. And the validity of truth claims is the degree of accuracy
with which they reect the case at handthrough the lens of a single theory or
an artful theoretical bricolage. So long as we remain responsible to the empirical
evidence (through sound minimal interpretations), we are free to bring different
theories to bear on this evidence to promote fuller comprehension of the land-
scape as awhole.
Reed illustrates the interpretive epistemic mode using two examples: Clif-
ford Geertzs [1973] essay Notes on the Balinese Cockght and Susan Bordos
[1985] essay Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Cul-
ture. The rst is a paradigmatic example of the interpretive search for deep
meaning. Within the complex local landscape of a Balinese village, Geertz seeks
to explain what is going on when men bet on cocks. To answer this question, he
invokes a potpourri of theories, borrowing from utilitarian philosophy the idea
(and the term) deep play to describe the irrationality of betting when economic
stakes are too high. Elsewhere in the text, he borrows from Freud to interpret the
myriad metaphors in Balinese speech that make creative use of the word cock.
Finally, he draws on Durkheim to illustrate how the ritual of the cockght repro-
duces the binary of sacred and profane. Taken as a whole, Geertzs essay offers
a coherent representation (and resignication) of the Balinese cockght, which
remains responsible to surface level phenomena, the material practice of gam-
bling and the local meanings attached to it, and simultaneously renders intelligi-
ble for the reader the deep meanings present within this landscape. Bordos text
operates in a similar manner, borrowing selectively from an array of philosophi-
cal traditions to resignify modern-day eating disorders as bodily manifestations of
the Kantian divide between body and soul, the struggle for control, and the tenu-
ous solution to female self-denition within the connes of a patriarchal system.
The mantra of interpretive analysis, says Reed, is plurality in theory, unity in
meaning [Reed 2011: 100].
Conclusions: explaining and understanding the social world
The author situates his book at the intersection of practice and prescription
[ibid.: 7]. So where does this winding intellectual journey ultimately lead? The
core argument, developed more fully in subsequent chapters, is foreshadowed in
the books introduction, where Reed argues that the interpretive epistemic mode
can offer a synthetic approach to social knowledge, and enable the researcher to
build social explanations and deliver social critique [ibid.: 11].
This claim is substantiated through the careful deconstruction of contend-
ing epistemic modes. In the case of realism, Reed accedes to the importance and
continued utility of mechanisms (or forcing causes) in the development of social
knowledge, but warns that within this mode it is easy (and common) for research-
ers to forget that they, too, are engaged in interpretation and to imagine that
483

what is happening is the verication or falsication of scientic hypotheses and

the linear accumulation of scientic knowledge [ibid.: 52]. More importantly, he
rejects the realist vision of the real as an intellectual short circuit that guaran-
tees, in advance cross-case commensurability. But, in the end, it is the subjective
or concept-dependent character of social life that destabilises the foundations of
realism. Reed also highlights several shortcomings of normativism, including the
same tendency to reach towards a singular organising schema. The equivalent
of the real for normativism is the utopian ideal, in relation to which problems
and possibilities of critique emerge. Yet most normative accounts lack any sys-
tematic explanation of how social life works and how particular events come to
pass, through historical contingency or mechanistic regularity. The discovery of
utopian possibility would be stronger if it was informed not only by fact, but also
by some sort of explanation. [ibid.: 87] Thus, to argue against realism or norma-
tivism is not to deny the possibility of social explanation, but to expand extant
denitions, so as to reintroduce the richly contextual and historically variable
elements of meaning that are inseparable from human action.
Meaning-centred (interpretive) approaches are the only defensible form of
social research because meaning inheres in the ow and process of social life in
such a way that knowledge of social life must be based on its interpretation [ibid.:
138]. It is meaning that intersects structure and agency and mediates facts and
theories. And it is only within specic, historically situated landscapes of mean-
ing that human motivations and mechanisms can be understood. Reed illustrates
this using a well-known example: Webers [1905] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism. Following Webers argument, it is the landscape of meaning of the
early Reformation period within which the motivations of specic actors take
shape: they seek salvation and they are compelled to spread the Gospel. The same
point applies to explanation via mechanisms such as social surveillance and self-
discipline. The mechanisms only make sense as models for social behavior inside
the meaning-system of Calvinist (and, more broadly, Protestant) Christianity
Thus, in Webers explanation, meaning appears as a cause that is not a separate
force in the world, over and against mechanisms and motivations, but rather ap-
pears to inhere in them, to form the shape and direction that mechanisms work,
and give meaning to the thoughts, intentions, and desires of individual agents
[Reed 2011: 140]. Interpretive work can and does generate causal explanations,
says Reed, when it is built upon a solid triad of motives, mechanisms, and mean-
ings. Empirically-responsible interpretive research can elucidate causes that form
rather than force, because social life, as such, is ultimately dependent on meaning
and representation.
484

References
Bordo, S. 1985. Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture.
Philosophical Forum 17 (2): 73104.
Gandhi, L. 2005. Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-De-Sicle Radicalism, and
the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822387657.
Geertz, C. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockght. Pp. 412453 in
The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Moore, B. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making
of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and
China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815805.
Weber, M. 1992. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons.
London: Routledge.
485

Appendix 1. Summary of Reeds [2011] Epistemic Modes
Realist / Naturalist Normative Interpretive

Objective Articulation of abstract, Production of empirical- Understanding-cum-ex-
value-free, and broadly ly-grounded maximal planation. Reconstruction
generalisable causal interpretations that speak of historically situated
explanations focused on to debates of political meaning-scapes, render-
mechanisms. theory, to dene and ing them intelligible to
advance the good. the reader.
Assumptions Theory and evidence Knowledge production Systems of meaning
both refer to a single is a political act. All (discursive complexes)
deeper reality, the under- social life has a norma- are socially-constructed
lying forces that govern tive dimension, so social and, hence, mutable,
social action. Human research cannot escape and they form not force
knowledge is transitive the domain of values. social consequences. Fact
but the real social world Utopia (or dystopia) is and theory interact with
is intransitive. the referent. meaning-to-meaning cor-
respondence.
Role(s) of Theory points to Theory is a dialogue Theory aims to resignify
theory fundamental forces and between investigator and the evidence by recontex-
relations of social life that investigated. Brings to tualizing it into a set of
lie beneath the surface bear the critical force of deeper meanings that are
of phenomena that we well-articulated utopia also socially and histori-
observe, narrate, experi- upon the empirical cally limited [Reed 2011:
ence, and/or measure world [Reed 2011: 9]. 92]. Elucidates different
[Reed 2011: 8]. Good Serves as a bridge be- aspects of the case at
theoretical signiers tween acts and utopian hand, which is unied
reappear among varied possibilities (critical his- and coherent (although
evidentiary signs. Theory tory). Enables normative theory amalgamations
enables hypothesis-test- resignication. may not be).
ing.
Metaphor Disassembling a clock A dialogue or conversa- Painting pictures that
for social to expose inner mecha- tion between two or represent local land-
research nisms. more subjects (including scapes of meaning coher-
the researcher). ently.
Exemplary Theda Skocpol States Jrgen Habermas The Clifford Geertz Deep
authors, and Social Revolutions; Theory of Communicative Play: Notes on the Balinese
oeuvres Barrington Moore The Action; Leela Gandhi Cockght; Susan Bordo
Social Origins of Dictator- Affective Communities: Anorexia Nervosa: Psycho-
ship and Democracy; Jack Anti-Colonial Thought, pathology as the Crystal-
Goldstone; Roy Bhaskar; Fin-De-Sicle Radicalism, lization of Culture.
Karl Marx. and the Politics of Friend-
ship; Michel Foucault.
Criticism(s) Ignores the creativity Sustains the articial Frequently criticised
and dynamism of hu- division between fact for its extreme relativ-
man subjects; Positions and theory; Must either ism and/or negation
itself outside of history; accept the realist claim of of knowledge or truth
Assumes that social a deeper reality (a uto- claims.
meaning-systems can be pia) or risk becoming
likened to intransitive unmoored.
natural systems (stable,
universal).
486

Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning
EEVA LUHTAKALLIO*
University of Tampere
Interpretation and Social Knowledge is one of those books after reading which you
have a wide, silly smile on your face. In the all too often competitive, hard, and
lonely sphere of life that is the one inhabited by social scientists, there are these
instants of connection and recognition, and these sparkles of reminders that one
is not alone in the world (of inquiry), and of gratitude and amusement for this
being so.
Educated at the intersection of Finnish sociology, or Finnish interpretations
of sociology from elsewhere (in the beginning), French sociology and social theo-
ry (largely in terms of whatever inspired me), and American (cultural) sociology
(increasingly for the last ten or so years), I recognise Reeds starting point as a stu-
dent in the era of posts. This certainly looks like a generational issue for sociolo-
gists who entered the profession at the turn of the 2000s or so, albeit not without
contextual differences. The posts that built our curriculum, and the positivisms
they had abandoned but that thence made a come-back, form a battle ground
on which those dealing with dilemmas of the interpretivist kind gain little but
frustration. Reed offers one way off this battleground altogether, and I believe his
readers will nd it a gratifying way to go, the more so as this direction does not
exactly require burning all the bridges.
In addition to my membership in the above generation, I carry with me the
strong division between theory and empirical research that my Finnish cur-
riculum has been marked by, and that perhaps marks the European sociological
scene even more strongly than the American one. (This is the obvious contextual
difference between this books standpoint and my readers one: although diligent
with its references to classical sociology, the current debate Reed mainly takes
part in is pretty US-bound.) There is one specic feature that makes the impact
of the theory-empiria division so strong: how gendered it is. For American soci-
ologists, the overtly gendered and often discriminatory aspects of European aca-
* Direct all correspondence to: Eeva Luhtakallio, School of Social Sciences and Humani-
ties, University of Tampere, FI-33014, Finland, e-mail: eeva.luhtakallio@uta..

487

demia, in particular in terms of the contents of research, areperhaps hypocriti-

cally, perhaps notoften a source of astonishment. But where I was trained, boys
did theory and numbers and girls did qualitative empirical studies, in particular
ethnography. Certainly there were also girlish boys, and perhaps a few boyish
girls as well, but this does not wipe away the tendency, or what it did to our
understanding of theory and epistemics. What followed was, of course, a stark
difference in value, with the former being the heroes of the trade, and the latter
constantly doubted for the wrong or the non-use of theory. The understanding
of theory the above division of labour builds on is good for building (imagined)
categories of researchers, but I doubt it is any good at all for achieving the kind
of category of understanding most social scientists would probably say they are
after. The idea of a plurality of theory that Reed so elegantly argues for is one of
my points of recognition in this book: my own way out of the above-described
impasse was exactly that; the use of theory in plural, the refusal of a monotheistic
theory(-and-positivism) religion, and betting on the consistence of the case.
So, in many ways, I read this book as a sort of liberation, a liberation that
had already taken place, but has now also taken the form of a book. The thoughts
and critiques this reading evoked fall mostly in the category of what more could
we do with this and how to go further from here. I will share some of these
thoughts in what follows.
On the one hand, as recognisable as I nd the idea of theory in plural, I think
it merits being further radicalised. As interpretivists, we ought to respectfully dis-
respect theory, and take down all its glory of singularity, not only in relation to a
case, but in relation to each deep meaning carved out of a set of social facts. In ad-
dition to theory being plural, should it not also belike a verb? Theory that does,
and is being done, through multiple combinations of theories, but also through
the deep meanings of becoming-theory. Thus, a conceptual framework can func-
tion more like a series of adverbs or verbs than nouns with stable denitions.
The interpreters role, then, would be that of a director of improvisation
theatre, who, much like the audience, watches the play happen, while maintain-
ing an idea of where the characters and plot developments came from, and guess-
ing perhaps more and more at every show where the actors are headedand still
always being surprised by the outcome. To be concrete, the worldits actors, its
events, its factsmesses up theory, which in consequence, in a way, never is,
but constantly gets re-written. Hence, theory is a topos, a shared and recognised
area, commonalised by prior social facts, the current goings-on, or a combina-
tion of both, that changes all the time but (mostly) slowly and slightly enough
to remain recognisable [see, e.g., Thvenot 2014]. This is what I believe happens,
for instance, in Nina Eliasophs [2011] Making Volunteers: Civic Life at Welfares
End. The way Eliasoph spells out the empowerment project (the deep meaning
in this case) in the hybrid organisations she studied is an interpretivist operation
in which not only is the use of theories plural and the case consistent, but the
theories get disembarked and converted once exposed to the social facts in ques-
488

E. Luhtakallio: Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning
tion. Our understanding of the theories does not remain intact any more than our
understanding of the case does: a theory-case dynamic is at play. Similarly, when
studying Finnish and French local activists conceptions of democracy, I found
that how the actors themselves dealt with theoretical ideas concerning democ-
racy made the theories of representative, participative, or radical democracy
variate [Luhtakallio 2012]. In sum, Im suggesting adding a few arrows to Reeds
otherwise carefully assembled gures.
On the other hand, I am tempted to meddle with Reeds metaphors. Con-
tinuing the line of thought above, my reections concern in particular relations
of meaning, materiality, and theory from a metaphoric point of view. For Reeds
metaphors are compelling: landscapes of meaning, sailing the theory ship, cast-
ing bronze, to mention but a few. As good metaphors do, they help spell out the
authors thoughts with ease. So they also provide open space for counter-meta-
phors, or, as is more the case here, extensions and recongurations.
First, the landscape. What a great picture! We have the layers of meaning,
we have the coherence of a landscape painting, yet the endless plurality of dif-
ferent landscapes, and we have the painter, the brushes, the colours. And: The
landscapes that surround certain actions are not necessarily similar to, or easily
transformable into, other landscapes that surround other actions A joke made
in one landscape makes no sense in another And nally: the transformation
of landscapes of meaning takes work [Reed 2011: 111]. Our task, then, would
be to disclose the landscape of meaning, to make it intelligible to the reader. This
mental image makes a lot of sense to anyone committed to some form of inter-
pretivist epistemics.
But at the same time, something is perhaps missing. The painting is static, it
is two-dimensional, hung on the wall. There is no smell of paint, or the smell and
the layers of dried paint are not the thing that our attention is rst drawn to in
this mental image. A lot of what makes deep meanings deep is underneath, and a
lot of it is, to begin with, non-verbal. An art historian would not nd these points
incompatible with landscape paintings, and they are not; its just that sociologists
may need a more precise metaphor for the dynamics of meaning. Im thinking of
Paul Ricoeurs [1991] idea of sedimentation. In this mental image, social structure
is like a set of continually moving processes that appear to people as stable and
(almost) invariable. Following the process of sedimentation means, then, to watch
the river ow while simultaneously seeing how it sediments into patterns that
participants (in given historical processes) experience as solid, real, and nearly
incontrovertible [see, e.g., Luhtakallio and Eliasoph 2014]. Of course, there can
be a river owing through our landscape of meaning. But what I would like to
add with the help of Ricoeur here is two-fold. Sedimentation, however slow, is a
process. And thinking of it sends us immediately to thinking three-dimensionally
instead of two. Thus, the landscape is not immobile, the layers are never nalised,
and even if we dont realise it, the river slowly changes course and redirects the
riverbeds through sedimentation, and we can see that it is never still.
489

Second, sailing the theory ship. True, this metaphor is the grande nale of
the book, and as such needs to be excused for being slightly bombastic, but I can-
not resist the temptation to pick this one up as well. For Reed says it himself: the
actualization of understanding will rely on the travelers sensitivities to idiosyn-
cratic meanings, and not just on her logical brilliance [Reed 2011: 167168]. In-
stead of a sailor setting out heroically to sea, I would like to see a social researcher
as an orienteer. She has maps and a compass, but she needs to also know how to
read the particularities of the marsh, for example (as, for that matter, any good
sailor needs to know the winds and smell the storm coming, of course). She may
twist her ankle on a loose stone or a mole hole, things that are too insignicant
or constantly changing to make it into maps, but very signicant once the ankle
has been twisted. Sometimes it gets really foggy on a marsh. There are mosquitos,
too, and probably moose nearby. This is when a map is unhelpful. Instead, you
need an idea of the ground: what does a tussock rm enough to step on feel like,
what kind of squelch under your boot is alarming (indicating youve stepped in
a quagmire), what type of vegetation tells the orienteer that the edge of the forest
is near. There is a great deal that one needs to know, besides having read books
and possessing maps and compasses, in order to make ones way in a swampy
forest, and yet be able to nd a basketful of mushrooms and cranberries to bring
home. For cranberries, for instance, one sometimes has to tuck ones hand into
the peat tussock and feel aroundthe big ones are not always visible at all. What
does this have to do with theory? I mean to indicate that the travellers sensitivi-
ties indeed form a survival kit when maps fail to help. The skill of orienteering
(or berry-picking) is based on extensive sensitivity to the topography, the soil, the
vegetation, the fauna, the weather, and so on. For those for whom sailing is too
heroic a metaphor, this parallel image is a reminder of the multiple content of the
travellers backpack.
Third, casting bronze: the borrowed metaphor to describe the dynamics of
the force and form of meaning-making. Many thoughtful things get said about the
mould and the casting. But I was struck by how little is said about the bronze
except mainly that it gets poured into the mould. Yet, I have no doubt, a sculp-
tor specialised in bronze sculpting could tell us a lot more about this substance
and about casting it, things that would not be just further details, but things that
actually might change our entire idea of what kind of business casting is, and
how it differs from, say, sculpting marble or carving granite. Indeed, how do the
physical characteristics of bronze affect the act of casting? What kind of precau-
tions do you need to take before you start? How do you treat the bronze? At what
temperature does it melt? What kind of a container do you need? This is not just
a matter of nit-picking. As Erin OConnor [2005] shows in her study of glassblow-
ing, the physicality of the practicethe different elements of glass, the tempera-
tures, the tools, the moves and postures one needs to knoware not a context
to glassblowing, but constitute the meaningfulness of the practice, and thus are
crucial also to what we can say about causality, and how we can come to under-
490

E. Luhtakallio: Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning
stand the deep meanings in this case. Furthermore, our practices are moulded not
only by material substances, but also by the non-human actors we co-exist with.
To take up Reeds favourite example, Colin Jerolmack and Iddo Tavory [2014] note
that what Geertzs analysis of the Balinese cockght omits almost entirely are the
cocks. They are not just reections of the players self-denitions, nor are they
bronze to be cast, for that matter; they are living creatures that someone needs to
take care of, buy food and medicine for, and build shelters for. Discounting ani-
mal protection issues, all this is mandatory if one wishes to have cockghts. Also,
the experience of caring for animals creates attachments to them, and it is hard
to see how this social fact would not be part of the deep meaning of cockghts.
Consider one more example: working out interpretations with the help
of pragmatist theories, notably Laurent Thvenots suggestion of different lev-
els of engagement with the world [see, e.g., Thvenot 2014], Boris Gladarev and
Markku Lonkila [2013] analysed civic activism in the protection of neighbour-
hood green areas [see also Koveneva 2011; Luhtakallio 2012]. They noted that, for
instance, in a St Petersburg neighbourhood threatened by city plans to bulldoze
a small park, the resistance grew inseparably around the non-humans involved.
The birch trees in the park were talked about as friends or children, and the
citys actionsthe city abruptly cut down some of the trees one nightwere met
with a teary and sweaty response: the activists replanted the trees and held vigil
at the plantation at night thenceforth. Without these trees, there would have been
no park, no protest, no action. And with these trees, we grasp a whole case of
deep meaning in the practice of politics in a repressive regime.
In all three metaphors that I have taken up here, the trouble, ultimately, is
with the same thing: materiality, non-humans, and their part in deep meanings,
and in understanding them. The material and the non-human are not just the con-
text or the conditions, but an inherent part of meaningful social action. Meanings
cannot be detached from them, and should not be, or we will miss crucial things.
By this I do not mean to proclaim material sociology, in the Latourian sense or
any other, but to argue that Reeds version of interpretivism omits the meaning of
materiality and non-humans in meaning-making, and that regarding it fully will
render the argument the book presents even more compelling and useful.
Social facts are thick, and in addition, they are sticky, odoriferous, tempered.
Describing and explaining them requires thickness, and, most of the time, meta-
phorical dirty hands and wet boots (sometimes also less metaphorical). In order
to complete maximal interpretations and make the meanings of social life reso-
nate with theory and with peoples understandings of the world, we need a grasp
of the materiality of meaning. We need to make meaning three-dimensional. The
concrete stuff that social facts also are made of does not neatly arrange itself like
the background of a painting, but interferes, messes things up, makes meanings
form and sound and smell andmake sense. This, I believe, we need to take
seriously when pursuing deep meaning and understanding the world from an
interpretivist viewpoint.
491

References
Eliasoph, N. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfares End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400838820.
Gladarev, B. and M. Lonkila. 2013. Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland.
Journal of Civil Society 9 (4): 375390, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2013.844450.
Jerolmack, C. and I. Tavory. 2014. Molds and Totems. Nonhumans and the Constitution
of the Social Self. Sociological Theory 32 (1): 6477,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0735275114523604.
Koveneva, O. 2011. Les communauts politiques en France et en Russie. Annales. Histoire,
Sciences Sociales 3: 787817.
Luhtakallio, E. 2012. Practicing Democracy: Local Activism and Politics in France and Finland.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230363519.
Luhtakallio, E. and N. Eliasoph. 2014. Ethnography of Politics and Political
Communication: Studies in Sociology and Political Science. In The Oxford Handbook
of Political Communication, edited by Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
forthcoming (published online in 2014),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.28.
OConnor, E. 2005. Embodied Knowledge: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle
towards Prociency in Glassblowing. Ethnography 6 (2): 183204,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138105057551.
Ricoeur, P. 1991. Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator. Pp. 482490 in Reection and
Imagination: A Paul Ricoeur Reader, edited by Mario Valds. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Thvenot, L. 2014. Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to
Common-places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1 (1): 734,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749.
492

The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process
NELSON ARTEAGA BOTELLO*

Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Mexico City
Isaac Reeds Interpretation and Social Knowledge displays the effort of cultural so-
ciology to establish an epistemological reection leading to the construction of a
theory of knowledge in which meaning-centred research builds causal explana-
tions. Thus, the author endorses Webers denition of sociology as a science con-
cerning itself with the interpretative understanding of social action and thereby
with a causal explanation of its course and consequences [Weber (1922) 1978: 4].
This means that to the extent that an interpretation includes causal explanations
the multidimensional sociological prole may be more clearly dened. To achieve
this aim, Reed rst carried out a classication that allows one to determine the
extent to which theory and evidence in the social sciences intersect. He arrives as
a result at a denition of what he referred to as the three epistemic modesreal-
istic, normative and interpretativewhich make it possible to understand how
that intersection operates.
Since the intention is to strengthen the capacities of the epistemic interpre-
tive mode, Reed in the second step sought to build a formal model in this regard.
Thus, he suggests using the metaphor of landscapes of meaning to give consist-
ency to the interpretive epistemic mode, and, at the same time, to provide a mod-
el that works as a hinge that articulates the meaning and causes of action. How-
ever, Reed places the accent on considering the social meaning act as forming, as
opposed to forcing, causes, [in order that] the interpretative epistemic mode can
offer a synthetic approach to social knowledge, and enable the researcher to build
social explanations and deliver social critique [Reed 2011: 11]. For Reed forming
causes are the arrangements of signication and representation that their
causes forcing give concrete shape and meaningful character [ibid.: 143]. There-
fore, the metaphor of a landscape of meaning is central to the body of Reeds text,
because it contains the meaning and the resignifying causality with which gener-
ate interpretative explanations.
* Direct all correspondence to: Nelson Arteaga Botello, Facultad Latinoamericana de Cien-
cias Sociales, Carretera al Ajusco 377, Colonia Hroes de Padierna, Delegacin Tlalpan,
Ciudad de Mxico, D.F., C.P. 14200, Mxico, e-mail: nelson.arteaga@acso.edu.mx.

493

Criticism of Reeds book has been directed at the three elements that make
up the textual nervous system. On the one hand, the way in which the three epis-
temic modes have been constructed: Some critics have pointed out that it tends
to simplify the complexity of the encompassing theoretical perspectives. Others
have pointed to the use of the term itself, suggesting it would have been better to
use concepts such as meta-theories or meta-theoretical strategies [Cruickshank
2013; Lizardo 2012]. It is also, however, important to note that some argue that
the epistemic modes help the author to expose his argument and are relevant as a
guide to the books objectives [Glaeser 2013]. On the other hand, some critics have
questioned the approach to forming causes and forcing causes. For some, this is
the aspect that requires the most reworking [Browne 2011; Lizardo 2012]. Finally,
the metaphor of landscapes of meaning has been evaluated based on its ability to
support a theoretical pluralism. It is noted that to some extent this metaphor
possesses a certain pragmatic validity that it is liable to provoke some dissatis-
faction [Browne 2011]. Some argue, moreover, that it fails to show how it operates
in a satisfactory way, which makes it more of an elegant metaphor than a concept
with analytical potential [Cossu 2012; Lizardo 2012; Glaeser 2013].
From my point of view, the landscape of meaning metaphor is a central
element in the book; however, on the one hand, the author does not ultimately
consolidate it, and on the other, his critics do not ascribe it enough importance or
disregard it too quickly. A more complete redrafting would be useful to offer a
hinge to connect interpretation and explanation. At the same time, it could then
serve as a frame for understanding society as a whole and in its totalityan alter-
native, therefore, to addressing the postmodern perspectives that emphasise the
fragmentation or the end of the social.
As Turner [2010] notes, metaphors operate on the level of words/sen-
tencesfor example, the iron cage of Weber and the panopticon of Foucault
and on the level of discoursethe system in Parsons and Luhmann, or the drama
in Goffman. On the rst level, the aim of metaphor is dramatisation and on the
second discursive systematisation. While a metaphor acquires full force when it
says something on two levels, there are some metaphors that only have greater
weight as sentences or as discourses. The metaphor of the landscape of meaning
has been considered elegant and pragmatic but unsatisfactory or without suf-
cient analytical content, and I believe that this is because Reed does not unfold
the dramatic and discursive capacities of his own metaphor. Therefore, it does
not serve as a hinge that articulates the key elements of his argument, and his
model of interpretive explanation does not have enough strength to it.
Reed uses Brueghels painting The Harvesters to reveal the landscape of
meaning that allows maximal interpretation in the interpretive-epistemic mode.
The picture shows a vast and varied landscape with different people in it. Reed
inferred that these gures are motivated to do different activities, sometimes
with references to different institutions: trees, houses, and churches, a city in
the background, and a harvest in the foreground. He interprets each paintings
494

N. Arteaga Botello: The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process
characters as interacting with the environment through various tools, and one
can observe forms of interaction and intimacy that operate by means of certain
mechanisms and social processes. In this way he suggests that this landscape
expresses how individuals act in different places and positions, so that the sub-
jectivity and interpretation of the people varies according to the scenarios that
are positioned.
The painting lets us say that the world looks different from the bell tow-
er than from the elds, the school, or the workplace. For Reed, the landscape
metaphor captures the variety of ways in which meaning and communication
processes provide the basis for, and give form to, actors subjectivities and strate-
gies [Reed 2011: 110]. However, his description of the painting focuses mainly on
the different sub-landscapes, the buildings that establish the construction of the
meaning of space, but only supercially pays attention to the action of the actors.
The landscape that Reed reconstructs rotates around space and only mentions in
passing the characters and the action they are performing. While Reed suggests
that each landscape in the painting involves certain actions and that the actors are
intelligent enough to understand the meaning of their performance in terms of
where they are, he does not develop a profound interpretation of the painting to
force his metaphor to work.
This is due to the fact that Reed interpreted Brueghels painting by taking
into account the overall effect produced, i.e. the weight that the painter wanted to
give to the atmosphere and the landscape itself, and not what the characters do in
a concrete way. While it is true that one of the characteristics of Brueghels work
is the weight that he gives to the landscape, Reed also ignores the care the artist
has taken with the characters that appear in them. (In the case of Landscape with
the Fall of Icarus, for example, the painter has painted a landscape where the fall
of Icarus is irrelevant to the characters that are in the foreground of the painting.
In this way the landscape is signicant, but only to the extent to which one pays
attention to the characters that appear in it, and, depending on the relationship
of meaning that is established, it says that the ploughman, the sherman, and the
pastor are indifferent to the fall of the mythological character, who is faint but
clearly drawn in one corner).
As Burroughs [1921] suggests, both the landscape and the gures are im-
portant in Brueghel. There are over forty gures in The Harvesters that require pri-
mary attention. The farther ones gaze is from the painting, the clearer it becomes
that each of them is doing something and what they are doing. In the case of
Reeds interpretation of The Harvesters, he does not account for this complex sce-
nario, and if he does, it is very quick and supercial. The gures that are closer,
like the man sleeping under the treewhich breaks the balance of the painting
or the gures who are working or eatinglling their mouths even when they
are full of foodsuggests that the actors are expressions of the conuence of dif-
ferent creative, recreational, and passive forces in different parts of the landscape
[Harrison 2009]. Moreover, as Verdonk [2005] suggests, the gures and spaces are
495

exible in themselves, so you can create different relations of gures and spaces
that shift the focus to different details of specic scenes.
Therefore, although Reed denes a particular pictorial space to build his
metaphor, he does not extensively explore the elements that are moving within it.
He directs his gaze at the set of landscapes and, sometimes, at a particular land-
scape without any interpretative connection, which weakens the possibility of
translating the idea of landscape into a pacing mechanism with which to analyse
the social meanings therein. This would have required not only that the scenes
be described, but also that the concrete analysis of the everyday reality that is in
Brueghels painting be transformed into deep symbolic interpretations. This is
precisely what Foucault did, but for another purpose, in his interpretation of Las
Meninas by Velazquez. Foucault assigned particular meanings to the gaze, ac-
tions, and positions of the actors in that painting [dOrmesson 1967]. This allowed
the institutionalisation of an iconic interpretation of the Classical age. It is also
what gave rise to the metaphor of the eld, introducing into the social sciences a
series of analytical elements that are expressed through the rhetoric of battle, the
game, or habitus.
As already stated, to the extent that it can constitute a landscape of mean-
ingsuch as the forming causes of the meaninga metaphor of sufcient
strength can both ensure an effect on the word/sentence level as discursive and
settle like a hinge between analytical and normative elements of the realistic epis-
temic mode. First, it will provide guidelines to be observed in the landscape as
the reasons that force the agents actions and by which the mechanisms exert
their power over the will of the actors and other mechanics processes of social
character. Second, it will help build critical normative models. While the meta-
phor of a landscape of meaning serves to decode a thick descriptionin the sense
that Geertz gives to this conceptthe elements that guide and recreate life in a
painting like The Harvesters can transform a living reality into deep symbolic in-
terpretations, revealing how the meaning (forming causes) intersects the reasons
(nal causes) and mechanisms (efcient causes): when considering social action,
efcient causes [and nal causes] cannot be adequately understood in their caus-
al force without understanding the formal causes that give them shape [Reed
2011: 145]. Its articulation would transform a metaphor into a discourse, which
makes possible a maximal interpretation of the interpretive mode, while ensur-
ing a causal explanation.
One of the challenges of the text is to think of causality in a different way
and base it on the landscape of meaning; Reeds efforts should aim at the lat-
ter route. However, in the years since the publication of Interpretation and Social
Knowledge the author has been working more carefully with the issue of explana-
tion and interpretation, apparently ignoring his metaphor. In a recent article by
Reedco-authored with Paul Lichterman [2014]he tries to transcend, from a
critical review of the ethnographic literature, the distinction between sociology
that seeks understanding and that which pursues explanation. Both authors
496

N. Arteaga Botello: The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process
express their intention to account for building three-way causal claims from eth-
nographic research through a model of interpretive explanation. The text con-
rms the commitment and interest of the author in making sure that the analyti-
cal elements account for how they operate the forming causes.
However, it is noted that there is no intention to connect this reection with
the metaphor of landscapes of meaning, which suggests, perhaps to me, that the
intention behind what is a promising metaphor for the social sciences and hu-
manities has been abandoned. This does not mean, of course, that a theoretical
effort, like that proposed by Reed, depends solely on consolidating one metaphor
or another. Metaphors can certainly serve as a way to describe persuasively a
theoretical device or to speak about reality, but, as Bouveresse [1999] says, they
can be neglected once they have done their job as operators of a new conceptual
synthesis. In Reeds book, however, the metaphor he has proposed has not yet
completed its work; it has barely begun.
Finally, I consider one of the possible virtues of the metaphor of landscape
of meaning is that it might be useful to have an overview of societynot in terms
of a large coherent and totalising systemwherein, despite the apparent pres-
ence of different landscapes, they are linked in some way to a more general one,
thus providing the idea that there are mechanisms and meanings that connect
them. If social actors themselves continually refer to society as something that
refers to a set that includes the different areas of life and meaning, cultural sociol-
ogy has the obligation of establishing what it means to be called society [Cordero
2008], and I think Reeds metaphor can say something about this. This is not an
easy task to perform to the extent that there is a tendency linked to certain post-
modern thought to think of society as fragmented or, from the point of view from
sociology, to consider that society has ceased to exist, as Touraine suggested.
Theoretical work, as Martuccelli [1999] suggests, is based on constantly
making proposals to unite different theories into relatively homogeneous groups
that are subsequently segmented and fractured by other theoretical exercises in
order to build new sets of classication or sociological matrices. In this sense,
Reeds book is a suggestive theoretical proposal, a fresh vision of the thought
of social theoryunderstood as a formal generalisation or an abstraction into
separate individual cases [Joas and Knbl 2009]but also located in a continuum
with an empirical observational environment [Alexander 1982]. It is a signicant
effort of sociological imagination and one that has provided a space for project-
ing new networks of meaning into reading social theory, in addition to opening
up a eld of problems at different levels.
References
Alexander, J. 1982. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Positivism, Presuppositions and Current
Controversies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bouveresse, J. 1999. Prodiges et vertiges de lanalogie. Paris: Broch.
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Browne, C. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge. On the Use of Theory in

the Human Sciences (Review). International Sociology 28 (2): 230233,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0268580913477967b.
Burroughs, B. 1921. The Harvesters by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin 16 (5): 96103.
Cordero, R., F. Carballo and J. Ossandn. 2008. Performing Cultural Sociology.
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Glaeser, A. 2013. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the
Human Sciences (Review). Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 42 (6):
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Harrison, P. 2009. In the Absence of Practice. Environment and Planning D: Society and
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Joas, H. and W. Knbl. 2009. Social Theory. Twenty Introductory Lectures. Cambridge:
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Lichterman, P. and I. Reed. 2014. Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0049124114554458.
Lizardo, O. 2012. Interpretation and Social Knowledge. On the Use of Theory in the
Human Sciences (Review). American Journal of Sociology 118 (2): 497499,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/666312.
Martuccelli, D. 1999. Sociologies de la modernit. Paris: Gallimard.
dOrmesson, J. 1967. Passage de lhomme ou les avatars du savoir. Larchologie des
sciences humaines de Michel Foucault. La Nouvelle Revue franaise 171: 477490.
Reed, I. A. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge. On the Use of Theory in the Human
Sciences. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press,
Turner, C. 2010. Investigating Sociological Theory. London: Sage.
Verdonk, P. 2005. Painting, Poetry, Parallelism: Ekphrasis, Stylistics and Cognitive
Poetics. Language and Literature 14 (3): 231244,
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Weber, M. (1922) 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
498

Being and Knowledge:

On Some Liabilities of Reeds Interpretivism*
DOMINIK BARTMASKI**
Technische Universitaet Berlin
WERNER BINDER
Masaryk University, Brno
The theory of understanding must be preceded

by the recognition of the relation of entrenchment
which anchors the whole linguistic system in something that
is not primordially a phenomenon of articulation in discourse
In knowledge, we posit objects in front of us,
but our feeling of the situation precedes this vis--vis by placing us in a world.
[Ricoeur 2007: 66]
Introduction
Isaac Reed begins his book with the claim that our understanding of social knowl-
edge is due for a massive transformation [2011: 1]. We recognise Interpretation and
Social Knowledge as a genuine and highly readable contribution to such a transfor-
mation. The book is ambitious, yet concise, complex but not overwhelming. How-
ever, the pertinent discussion closely resembles the Methodenstreit, the foundation-
al debate about the epistemic footing of the then emerging social sciences, which
revolved around the pivotal binary of nomothetic science (Naturwissenschaften)
and idiographic humanities (Geisteswissenschaften). Reed indicates a dialectical
way out of the seemingly inescapable either/or dilemma of causal explanation vs
hermeneutic interpretation [ibid.: 88]. He claries how interpretation may count
* This work was supported by the project Employment of Newly Graduated Doctors of
Science for Scientic Excellence (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009) co-nanced from the European
Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.
** Direct all correspondence to: Dominik Bartmaski, Technische Universitt Berlin,
Strasse des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany, e-mail: dominik.bartmanski@aya.yale.edu;
Werner Binder, Masaryk University erotnovo nm. 617/9, 601 77 Brno, Czech Republic,
e-mail: binder@fss.muni.cz.

499

as explanation in a post-positivist era. It is this basic and in our view legitimate

intention that directly evokes Webers denition of sociology as a science con-
cerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with
a causal explanation of its course and consequences [1978: 4; emphasis added].
What does this compact book add to Webers foundational statements? How can
it advance the human sciences after a centurys worth of relevant debates?
It is no accident that an American sociologist revisits this epistemic task.
Our discipline is fragmented and riven by the methodological split between
quantitative and qualitative research. To the extent that these tensions may be
more divisive in the US academia than elsewhere, Reeds intervention has an air
of urgency. However, his ambition is to affect the entirety of human sciences, i.e.
the wider spectrum of Geisteswissenschaften, which in Reeds hands means sev-
eral things. First, it allows him to address specic historical and anthropological
cases that buttress his perspective but belong to the humanities rather than to
the social sciences. This is crucial because, as we shall see, while Reeds argu-
ment is in principle transdisciplinary, it ts best a research eld at the intersec-
tion of ethnography, history, and cultural sociology. Second, going beyond the
connes of sociology proper enables Reed to question disciplinary parochialism
bemoaned by other American cultural sociologists [Seidman 1998: 12]. Finally,
the concept of human sciences allows Reed to legibly straddle the two worlds,
i.e. to combine the subjective element of humans (Geist) whose basic nature can
never be fully specied [2011: 162] with the exactitude that science (Wissenschaft)
aspires to. It is within this context that Reed pursues his main goal: eshing out
a new conceptual method for the interpretive production of social knowledge
[ibid.: 159]. The resulting book can play an invaluable role of a systematic orient-
ing device for cultural researchers. Yet the highly focused illumination it offers
comes at a price of leaving too many things in the dark.
The books argument: interpretation and semiological constructivism
Let us briey recapitulate the main points of the book. First of all, Reed complexi-
es the relation between social knowledge and social phenomena. Much of the ac-
tually existing social research, including interpretively and normatively inclined
schools, glosses over such complexity, assuming that social science constitutes an
interpretation of social reality that at once reects this social reality and affects it
[Wallerstein 2004: 33; emphasis added]. To problematise this simplication, Reed
relies on a semiotic model and splits scientic representation into fact and theory.
Like Richard Rorty [1979], he maintains that social knowledge is not a mirror of
social life because social phenomena are not accessible as such, which ultimate-
ly vitiates the adequacy of the very metaphor of reecting. Instead, real social
phenomena (social actions in Reeds vocabulary) are not observed but inferred
from evidential signs. What Reed designates as fact is a referential signication
whose linguistic representation he calls minimal interpretation. In other words,
500

D. Bartmaski, W. Binder: Being and Knowledge
fact is a meaning system. Theory is also a meaning system, yet one based on
relational and conceptual signication. Bringing so understood facts and theory
together means to perform explanatory resignication that he calls maximal in-
terpretation. Here, Reed combines the semiotics of Peirce, according to whom
all signs are referential with a Saussurean understanding of sign systems as re-
lational systems. How the two t remains somewhat unclear, but the analytic
weight is placed on the latter.
Reed further distinguishes what he calls three different epistemic modes:
realist, normativist, and interpretivist. The distinction is based on how theory
is brought to bear on facts. In realism, the boundary between fact and theory in
Reeds sense is blurred and theoretical representation is understood as referenc-
ing reality, i.e. something that is. Realism is thus primarily concerned with ques-
tions of the actual society. In Reeds eyes, this means to unduly hypostatise human
action. He then distinguishes normativism as a mode in which theory typically
references utopia, i.e. something that is not but should be, and in this sense func-
tions as social critique with regard to questions of the good society. Alternatively,
within this mode one can use dystopia as theoretical anchor, i.e. something that
is not (yet) but could be, and therefore can guide possible critique too. In the nor-
mative epistemic mode, knowledge itself has a politics [Reed 2011: 68].
Finally, Reed elaborates his understanding of interpretivism, which marks
a shift from ontology and politics to epistemology. Interpretivism deals with soci-
ety as it is for the actors, the collectively imagined society. Reed proposes a concep-
tion of knowledge as interpretation based on the master metaphor of landscapes
of meaning illustrated with Brueghels painting The Harvesters. A maximal in-
terpretation reconstructs a landscape of meaning and projects an explanatory
picture that constitutes deep social knowledge. The so conceived landscapes
of meaning are explanatory because they are causal, yet not in a forcing but in
a forming sense. They form actors motivations and mechanisms of action that
act in turn as forcing causes [ibid.: 160]. Reed makes an important point that al-
though in some way essential to social research, forceful causes in themselves
do not get us very far, because they can explain social life only when given con-
crete form by forming causes of meaning which according to Reed resides in
the arrangements of signication and representation [ibid.: 142143]. To clarify
this semiological conception, Reed employs another artistic metaphor, the Aristo-
telian gure of sculpting in which the plaster cast gives shape to the liquid bronze
poured into it. He insists, however, that the plasters shape itself derives from
meaningful practices, i.e. it takes the shape that it does in relation to the shapes
of other statues [ibid.: 145]. Ultimately, then, the basic nature of this forming
causal power of meaning is reduced to a set of principles of Saussurean semiol-
ogy in which aesthetic/material form is subordinated to the epistemic model
of arbitrary language-like signication [cf. Keane 2005: 185]. This constructivist
presupposition inspires Reed to claim that the possibilities of how meaning can
construe or form social life are innite because the meanings of symbols are
501

arbitrary and conventional [Reed 2011: 161]. We nd it to be a key aw in Reeds

theory because it means triple conation: it equates meaning with the meaning
of symbols [cf. Castoriadis 1998: 147], symbols with arbitrary signs, and signs
with linguistic signiers. The latter two fallacies were cautioned against even by
masters of structuralism, Saussure [1959: 68] and Lvi-Strauss respectively. Even
to Ricoeur who considered social action as text, the linguistic system is only a
species within the semiotic genre and its paradigmatic applicability is restricted
[Ricoeur 1973: 114115]. In short, there is much more to meaning, symbols and
signs than classic linguistics allows for [Keane 2005; Bartmaski forthcoming].
Consequently, the possibilities of meaning construction are by no means innite
or arbitrary [Mannheim 1964: 55; Simmel 2008]. Materiality and its corporeal,
phenomenological and aesthetic correlates co-constitute and thus form meaning-
making in patterned ways. It is precisely this realisation that can explain variabil-
ity of meaning and power of social performances. Reed seems to realise that at
times but the constructivist model of meaning as text makes him bracket out the
ontological as well as the experiential dimension of social knowledge and deal
with them only through various residual categories [Alexander 1987: 1516; Joas
1996: 45]. In what follows, we show how Reeds semiological model (de)forms
his arguments and forces them to untenable positions.
The constitutive other: realism and the problem of ontology
The sharp distinction between theory and fact is of crucial importance for Reeds
argument. Only if we accept that theory and fact as sign-systems operate accord-
ing to distinct logics (referential vs relational), Reeds arguments against realism
are efcient. There are alternatives to such a clear-cut distinction, for example in
Jeffrey Alexanders early work: The differences between what are perceived as
sharply contrasting kinds of scientic arguments should be understood rather as
representing different positions on the same epistemological continuum [1982:
2; cf. Joas and Knbl 2009: 9ff.]. Only in footnotes does Reed concede that the
distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation is a matter of degree
[Reed 2011: 23, fn. 29] and acknowledges the theory-ladenness of truth claims
[ibid.: 25, fn. 11].
In this regard, we see a major problem with the meaning system of fact.
Reed wants to dissociate the construction of facts from theories [ibid.: 18], but
if social facts are also dissociated from experiential phenomena, then on which
grounds can we establish their existence? In order to maintain the distinction
of fact and theory as referential and relational signication respectively, Reed
neglects that facts qua signs must be established relationally too, and that theory
must somehow reference them. The use of social actions as ultimate referent
would face objections from theorists claiming that practices are ontologically
more fundamental than actions [Schatzki 1997: 285; cf. Reckwitz 2002]. Reed
seems trapped between the requirement of consistency with his constructivist in-
502

terpretation of Saussurean presuppositions, which force him to treat evidential

signs as mere linguistic signiers in the text of the human scientist [2011: 20], and
the implications of what even theorists like Judith Butler [1993] acknowledge as
irrefutable facts of life. Reed himself admits in passing that our most fundamen-
tal experiences of cause derive from our ability to manipulate physical objects
[2011: 141]. However, the book gives no indication that he is prepared to alter his
account based on this fundamental intuition. Since the importance of materiality
and corporeality as meaning-making factors has been established by a number of
post-positivist sociologists, anthropologists and archaeologists, this is a striking
omission to which we return later.
Reeds conception of theory as a system of meaning resignifying rather than
establishing facts is by no means without alternative. After all, the question is
which conception is more useful in what context? Discussing Reeds interpreta-
tive mode, Gabe Ignatow [2014], a cognitive culturalist, endorses realism. Even
historical sociologists like Philip Gorski understand theory as a symbolic con-
struct, stated in ordinary or mathematical language, which denes certain classes
of objects and species their key properties. The objects are assumed to refer to
real entities in the world and the properties to actual qualities of these entities.
A theory, in other words, is a set of ontological assumptions that are used, explicit-
ly or implicitly, in the construction of a causal model or models [Gorski 2004: 18].
According to Gorskis constructivist realism, theory, despite being a symbolic
representation, works foremost as ontology, explicitly or implicitly. And indeed,
in Reeds case we nd constant references to empirical categories he deems un-
problematic, such as social actions, actors and their capabilities, social world and
social life, and once even to physical limits and biophysical conditions [Reed
2011: 144]. Although he seems to have worked under the strict prohibition of the
r-word, the reality of bodies and things is always in the background. What kind
of ontological status do they have? Are they just arrangements of signs in the
text of the human scientist? We fear that Reed runs a risk of textual-semiotic sol-
ipsism, a specic sociological danger of Berkeleian vision systematically prob-
lematised as the logocentric predicament of intellectuals by Bourdieu [1984: 474,
483]. Taken descriptively, the distinction between theory and fact makes sense in
so far as minimal interpretations or facts are statements to which researchers in a
given discourse can agree, whereas maximal or deep interpretations are always
contested and uncertain [Seidman 1998]. However, Reed makes also a normative
use of this distinction because it allows him to attack realism which conceptualis-
es theories as referential. Ultimately then, Reeds argument against the reication
of meaning systems comes at the prize of reifying the purely analytic distinction
between fact and theory. Why does Reed allow this to happen? We think it is the
case because what he dubs realism serves him as the stereotypical constitutive
other of his version of interpretivism. Specically, he attacks Roy Bhaskar, the
most inuential advocate of contemporary realism in social sciences. According
to Reed, the naturalistic ambition of realists like Bhaskar leads them to wrong-
503

ly transpose categories from the natural sciences into the human sciences. For
Bhaskar, the criterion of intransitivity, the observer-independent status of real-
ity, is the touchstone of realism. Reed argues that social life is not intransitive,
because it does not exist independently of its observers [2011: 6162]. Money has
not the same existence as gold and the state is not a building that houses parlia-
ment; money and state are social facts that only exist as long as people believe
in their existence. However, this specicity of human sciences is recognised by
Bhaskar [2005: 51] who sees the necessity to qualify but no reason to reject the
notion of intransitivity. He acknowledges the causal interdependency between
subjectivities and social facts and arrives at a recalibrated conception of existen-
tial intransitivity. Here, intransitivity means that money exists independently of
the individual researcher or community of researchers. Trying to leave the state
without passport will quickly remind us of its hard existence. The state, in par-
ticular, is an all-too-real social fact. Crucially, the status of something as based on
belief does not make it ctional or immaterial. On the contrary, it is precisely the
sociological power of the Thomas theorem which famously found that if men
dene situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Reed claims that this
is not enough to speak of intransitivity [ibid.: 61, fn. 43]. Subjectivity and historic-
ity, he wants us to believe, preclude the possibility of social facts as intransitive.
Bhaskar acknowledges the fact that societies are open systems subject to histori-
cal change but that doesnt make them dependent on researchers beliefs or any
less real.
In the end, Reeds arguments against Bhaskar seem to boil down to the in-
sistence that nature and culture constitute fundamentally different realms that
renders any naturalism impossible. However, Bhaskar did not so much assimilate
the human sciences to the natural sciences as the other way around: He concep-
tualises physical reality as open system and rejects the very notion of universal
laws in favour of tendencies and mechanisms [Bhaskar 2008]. Social tendencies
like class reproduction and related mechanisms like habitus would exist even if
there were no sociologists employing these concepts. Not only gravity was the
same for Henry II as it is for Obama [Reed 2011: 61], but also the routinisation
of charisma [Weber 1978: 246]. Reed is correct to note that the semiotic sources of
legitimate domination are not the same for Henry II and Barack Obama, but this
by no means denies the existence of generalisable cultural mechanisms [Norton
2014]. Last but not least, the all-too-real material (re)sources of power remain in-
sidiously similar in both cases.
In short, we see no reason why the concepts of existential intransitivity
and open system would not be sufciently plausible to ground social expla-
nation. Moreover, we surmise that Reed himself may have reconsidered in the
course of criticism and collaborations that promptly followed the publication of
his book. In a recent article (co-authored with Daniel Hirschman), Reed seems
to concede that ontology must be reckoned with: Our point here is not just that
objects are constructed. Rather, our point is that existing social kinds are
504

real entities with real consequences, but also with real histories, and that these
histories are twisted and varied [Hirschman and Reed 2013: 267]. Furthermore,
the authors embrace various realist categories, including variable ontology of
the social taken straight from Latours parlance [e.g. 2010: 43]. Human scientists
must recognise that there are different classes of phenomena whose existence
belongs to different but intimately entangled ontological levels and their distinct
affordances and temporalities [Hodder 2012]. Likewise, they have to recognise
different orders of semiosis [Keane 2005: 199] and the variability of signication
relative to the ontological status of signiers [Bartmaski forthcoming]. It is in
fact Bhaskars realism which advocates a stratied world and ontology [2008],
something conspicuously missing from Reeds book.
It is clear that instead of eschewing ontology, as sociologists we should ask
what ontological level(s) we look at. Being implicit about ontology enables Reed
to bracket the hardest questions of the object-sign nexus and proceed within his
semiological zone of comfort, claiming that everything is in fact just different
registers of interchangeable conventional signs. While we appreciate the skilful
manner in which Reed shows that every forceful cause that helps produce the
social outcome is infused with, and formed by, meaning [2011: 140], we deem it a
distortion to posit that every such infusion and form is based on a (rather mecha-
nistic) conception of conventional and arbitrary discursive attribution. Meaning
is too complex, and too important, to be left to structuralist linguistics.
This conation of hermeneutic interpretivism with linguistic constructiv-
ism should be avoided if we wish to keep the category of interpretation from being
monopolized by a rigid conception of meaning-making where there are many
others. It is instructive to revisit the classics and note that Heidegger regarded
Verstehen as an existential faculty, Gadamer [2006] spoke of a hermeneutic on-
tology, and even Ricoeur went so far as to claim that the epistemological concerns
of hermeneutics are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby un-
derstanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way
of being and a way to relate to beings and being [2007: 54; emphasis in the origi-
nal]. If these three authors are not hermneutes extraordinaires, who is?
The realisation that meaning is not just conventionally attached but can
also be afforded by and derived from our experiential entanglements with ob-
jects [Hodder 2012] is even hinted at in the agship cultural writings of Roland
Barthes [2009]. Fast-forward to contemporary cultural anthropology, and we can
see that on both sides of the Atlantic social researchers operate with far more
elaborate conceptions of signication, where convention and textuality is treated
as an explanandum rather than the explanans [Keane 2005; Miller 2005]. To quote
Latour [2010: 94], do we really have to spend another century alternating vio-
lently between constructivism and realism? Science deserves better than nave
worship and nave contempt.
We think that seeing realism and interpretivism as distinct and mutually ex-
clusive epistemic modes means mistaking Weberian ideal types of theorising for
505

competing regulative paradigms of scientic practice. The actual theoretical prac-

tice in the human sciences strikes us as pragmatically hybrid. Reeds sophisticated
eye discerns that, for example when he talks about Marxs work being an embodi-
ment of all three [Reed 2011: 32]. Likewise, it would be a mistake to reduce Fouc-
ault to a dystopian public intellectual. Such examples could easily be multiplied.
For this reason, we maintain that these theoretical archetypes refer to dimensions
that are always combined in practice. This makes a real difference in doing social
theory and grounding the possibility of valid social critique. Reeds conception
makes him identify normativism with criticism mediated by utopianism/dysto-
pianism, i.e. related primarily to counterfactual signication. Once a more ontologi-
cally sound understanding of theoretical meaning structure is adopted, we can
recognise that normativism can take different forms. What Reed describes sounds
to us like an interpretivist variant of normativism, where social critique is based on
meaning systems called utopia or dystopia. But there are multiple examples of so-
ciological theories that develop a factual rather than counterfactual critique of the
misrepresentation of reality [cf. Bhaskar 1998: 415], for example Marxs critique
of commodity fetishism. This form of Ideologiekritik could be described as a real-
ist variant of normativism. Similarly, Reeds interpretive mode entails a normative
claim how the human sciences should proceed as well as a certain understanding
of social reality, which he argues is misrepresented by realists.
The scholar and the artist: conicting metaphors and landscapes of meaning
Reed schematically identies realism with the logic of the lab, normativism
with the logic of the democratic meeting or social movement, and interpretiv-
ism with the logic of reading and disputing different readings of a text [2011:
11]. Nevertheless, it is the landscape painting, not the text, that serves as Reeds
master metaphor. The pictorial logic of the painting is at odds with the linguis-
tic framework employed by Reed, for text/language and picture/perception
constitute different modes of meaning making [Turner 2003; Bartmaski 2015].
There are various other semiotic conceptions that are more visually and materi-
ally conscious. Already Peirce distinguished between symbols based on con-
vention, indices based on physical (!) connection, and icons based on likeness
[1998]. Employing Peirce, Webb Keane notes that not all in culture is conventional
and highlights the role of indexical and iconic signication in cultural meaning-
making [2005]. Castoriadis, who developed the concept of the social imaginary,
strikingly similar to Reeds notion of landscapes of meaning, states that the im-
aginary requires a new ontology that dees the logic of the symbolic associated
with linguistic structuralism [1998].
While we nd the scheme of combined forcing and forming causes to be
well articulated and perhaps the most important contribution of the book, it in
fact says very little about the causality of forms beyond what our standard knowl-
edge of linguistic signication already offers us. This constitutes another irony of
506

the book. While Reed devotes quite some space and energy to theorising different
forming causes, we learn next to nothing about the meaning of forms, for exam-
ple about the content of the form (White), the message of the medium (McLuhan),
or the agency and vibrancy of images and things [Bennett 2010; Latour 2010;
Mitchell 1994]. His semiological and linguistic bias makes him portray ethnog-
raphers observing interaction and talk, historians embedded in archival details,
cultural sociologists pouring over newspapers [Reed 2011: 159]. There is nothing
phenomenologically, affectively, and aesthetically sensitive in this vision, which
is formed, if not forced, by the abstract Saussurean approach. And when he elab-
orates the landscape metaphor, he deprives it of material objects, quickly replac-
ing them with institutions [ibid.: 110]. Yet landscapes of meaning are populated
by a variety of such objects inescapably intertwined with human sensorium.
Mannheim clearly realised that when he distinguished sign-meaning and form-
meaning and noted that objective aesthetic meaning, is yet essentially related to
the sensual medium from which it cannot be detached and to which it belongs as
its own visual meaning or form [Mannheim 1964: 51]. Likewise, Simmel noted
that even in the eld governed by fashion, all forms are not equally suited to
become fashion This may be compared with the unequal relation that the ob-
jects of external perception bear to the possibility of their being transformed into
works of art. It is a very enticing opinion, but one that cannot hold water, that eve-
ry real object is equally suited to become the object of a work of art [2008: 384].
In short, Reed does a lot to elaborate sign-meaning but ignores form-meaning,
which can be intellectually enticing but not convincing.
In our own research we have shown that material objects and their affor-
dances are a constitutive part of landscapes of meaning [Bartmaski 2011]. The
material properties of the Berlin wall were crucial for its success as a cultural icon
[Bartmaski 2012b], which is also true for the revival of the analogue record in the
digital age [Bartmaski and Woodward 2015a, 2015b]. Similarly, visual meanings
are important to explain the iconic status of particular photographs and their ef-
fects on public discourses [Binder 2012, 2013]. Landscapes of meaningrightly
understooddo not only exist between humans, but emerge out of complex en-
tanglements of human beings, texts and things [Bartmaski and Alexander 2012;
Hodder 2012].
Even though we nd the metaphor of landscapes of meaning compelling,
we recognise a wide spectrum of more specic concepts like atmosphere [Lw
2008, 2013] and mood [Silver 2011] that might be better suited to capture the con-
stitutive expressive and affective dimensions of the social. Without experiential
and phenomenological categories such as materiality [Miller 2005], object-setting
and affordance [McDonnell 2010], body and perception [Merleau-Ponty 2014],
icon [Peirce 1998; Bartmaski and Alexander 2012], and picture [Turner 2003;
Boehm 2012], landscape of meaning is merely a skeletal bloodless description.
And there are concepts like background and background causality [Searle 1995:
127147], or habitus (Bourdieu), that are perhaps less colourful, but offer sound
507

understandings of forming causality as efcient cause. While many quantita-

tive social scientists might eschew the vagueness of forming causality, we rec-
ognise in Reeds constructivism an opposite danger, that of impoverishing cul-
turalist vocabulary. A much wider palette of such categories as condition, frame,
affordance, informing, favouring, inviting, occasioning, seducing, beckoning, fa-
vouring, driving, orienting, and directing provides a more nuanced repertoire of
causal language. Owing to their cartographic and visual connotations, some of
these categories t the metaphor of landscape of meaning even better. In an ex-
emplary passage, even Bhaskar himself identies a variety of different causal no-
tions, such as pressure, propelled, direction, hindered, and so on [2008: 112].
Conclusion
We sympathise with Reeds ambition, but we are unconvinced by his arguments.

Despite his explicit rejection of social ontology [2011: 41ff.], Reeds epistemology
is not free of ontological presuppositions. The master metaphor of the human sci-
entist as a painter of landscapes of meaning seems at odds with the linguistic
bias of the book. We support Reeds plea for deep interpretation, but we nd it
inadequate to conne depth to the discursive dimension; questions of mean-
ing probe further, pointing towards the deepest aspects of sensuality [Classen
2012], feeling and form [Sandelands 1998], and seemingly mundane materialities
[Miller 2005]. What, then, is the use of Isaac Reeds book for sociologists and hu-
man scientists? We dont believe that this book will settle the Methodenstreit in
social sciences. It is clear from history that such disputes cannot be settled on a
purely theoretical or epistemological level. The usefulness of theories depends
at least partially on their pragmatic assets and the temperament and aesthetic
preferences of the researcher. As Wittgenstein once noted, a mans philosophy
is a matter of temperament. A preference for certain similes could be called a
matter of temperament and it underlies far more disagreement than you might
think [1980: 20]. Reed distinguishes consistency and adequacy as suitable criteria
for interpretations disregarding parsimony and elegance [2011: 116]. We think
it is not possible to dismiss the pragmatic and aesthetic criteria of interpreta-
tion and explanation. The content already resides in the form, as Reeds own
book exemplies. There are good reasons to think that legitimate intellectual per-
formance is always a creative aesthetic act, not mere cogent resignication [Joas
1996; Bartmaski 2012a]. As human scientists, our job is not just to remain faithful
to the subjects (and objects) that we are trying to understand and depict (Sin-
nverstehen), but to transform them into gures of deeper meaning endowed with
logical, aesthetic, and existential sense (Sinnstiftung).
Echoing the American creed e pluribus unum, Reed embraces a somewhat
utopian vision of a united pluralistic interpretivism while painting a dystopian
picture of the destruction of meaning by realists. Treating a form of realism as his
constitutive other [cf. Bartmaski 2012a], the author exhibits the academic pen-
508

chant for overdramatizing that he himself cautions against [Reed 2011: 4]. In the
end, when the reworks are over and the smoke clears, Reeds pluralism appears
to be based on a limited and conated understanding of meaning. It effectively
excludes the other qualitative research traditions we summoned in our critique.
Interpretation and Social Knowledge cant bring about the intellectual revolution it
ostensibly aims for. There have been many profound turns in human sciences
since the linguistic turn. Thus, treating a semiological species of the interpretive
genre as its key paradigm looks threateningly like an evolutionary dead end.
Nevertheless, even if it were to be the last grand sociological narrative of its kind,
Reeds work would be valuable because it provokes the eternal return of big hu-
man questions, including how we know what we know. True, social knowledge is
deep but language is not the bottom line. Causal understanding is hermeneutic,
but understanding too must be described initially, not in terms of discourse, but
in terms of the power-to-be So understanding is not concerned with grasp-
ing a fact but with apprehending possibility of being [Ricoeur 2007: 67].
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511

Meaning, Commensuration, and General Theory
HENDRIK VOLLMER*
Bielefeld University and University of Leicester
Isaac A. Reeds Interpretation and Social Knowledge presents a wide-reaching case

for what he calls the interpretive epistemic mode of social science. This epis-
temic mode is contrasted with normativism and realism as alternative orienta-
tions for the production of social-scientic knowledge. Reeds exploration of the
characteristics of each mode is elegant and often enlightening, mostly by virtue
of the ingenious use of the concept of maximal interpretation [Reed 2011: 2325],
employed to great effect in demonstrating how the different epistemic modes
are active in a number of well-known pieces of research. The book offers nu-
merous perceptive observations from the most general (ontology as the mission
statement of much sociological theorizing [ibid.: 42]) to the more specic (Bayes-
ian reasoning in comparative historical analysis [ibid.: 5254]) and very specic
(Foucault as normativist dystopian [ibid.: 84]). Throughout, Reed is quite frank in
making a partisan interpretivist case, a case that for him is all about getting to the
richness of meaning in our social universe at the expense of the status enjoyed by
general theory in both realism and normativism [ibid.: 88].
Reeds case combines the elevation of interpretivism into a kind of general
epistemological foundation for social science with the denial that having a simi-
larly general theory of the social is possible. As such, it is certainly congenial to
how many interpretive researchers would formulate their position with respect
to the epistemology of social science. The foundational argument for this position
offered by Reed, however, begins to appear somewhat forced just about when it
is considered with respect to the relationship between meaning and theory that
is at the heart of his understanding of maximal interpretation: If meaning is
truly general and theory is ultimately about meaning, if exploring the relation-
ship between theory and meaning allows making very general statements about
the epistemology of social knowledge and about how its different manifestations
* Direct all correspondence to: Hendrik Vollmer, Bielefeld University, Postfach 10 01 31,
D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany; University of Leicester, School of Management, Ken Edwards
Building, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK, e-mail: hen-
drik.vollmer@uni-bielefeld.de.
512

H. Vollmer: Meaning, Commensuration, and General Theory
characterise particular pieces of research, it is hard not to consider all this as im-
plying certain investments into a general theory of the social that has to be, in its
very generality, intimately connected to Reeds broad epistemological statements
about how the social world can be known. One may also wonder whether, as Reed
denies the possibility of producing and holding on to a general theory of the so-
cial, his argument regresses to some extent into the postmodern scepticism he
repeatedly wishes to overcome [ibid.: 3f., 93, 169]. In fact, he is led to claim that
the meaningful constitution of social reality involves an element of incommen-
surability between different manifestations of socio-historic events, activities and
contexts, and that the existence of such elementary incommensurability is the
very reason why, in the end, there cannot be one generally meaningful social real-
ity per seand no general theory of it [ibid.: 88, 104, 113, 117]. Where there cannot
be one such theory, there apparently need to be many, and Reeds concludes his
essay, despite his subscription to the interpretive credo of reducing researchers
theoretical baggage, with a recommendation to bring as many books and maps
as you can [ibid.: 171] when embarking on social-scientic explorations.
Another indication that Reeds case against the possibility of general the-
ory is not quite stable is that he rehearses a move that is all too familiar from
both realist and normativist epistemologiesthe move of broadening ones own
core concepts in an attempt to subsume alternative analytical orientations. This
move involves a generalisation of theoretical terms that, as far as the epistemol-
ogy of social science is concerned, is close to totalising its respective epistemic
mode. Whereas for the realist (or naturalist), all research may come down to the
material play of the forces of production or, perhaps, the distribution of prefer-
ences and incentives, and whilst for the normativist all knowledge just has to be
based on some value, ideology etc., for Reeds interpretivism all things social and
all knowledge of these things have to become a matter of meaning. When Reed
writes about facts, evidence, theory, data, and interpretation, meaning therefore
has to be the common denominator. The difference between theories and em-
pirical facts is explored as a difference between different meaning-systems [ibid.:
1922] and the social universe is addressed as a texture of meaning in multiple
layers [ibid.: 89] to be investigated in its landscapes of meaning [ibid.: 109ff.].
According to Reed every social scientist needs to consistently refer to these
landscapes of meaning in order to offer explanations of social phenomena. In
this perspective, Webers Protestant Ethic, for example, is successful just to the
extent that it discloses the landscape of meaning of early modern Protestant life
in articulating the causes and mechanisms active among the capitalistically spir-
ited by virtue of Calvinism as a distinct system of meaning [ibid.: 139141]. Reed
is careful to point out that the preoccupation with such meaning in interpretive
epistemic mode is by no means a retreat from the scientic project of explana-
tion in favour of mere interpretation or re-description [ibid.: 123f.]. He argues
against the postmodern as well as against the hermeneutical scepticism towards
sociological explanation [ibid.: 93, 169], against epistemic relativism [ibid.: 170]
513

as programmatically as against the the posts per se [ibid.: 11ff.]. Reed therefore
does not pit meaning against analysis or interpretation against explanation or
normative evaluation: interpretivism is meant to accommodate realism and nor-
mativism. It is hard to imagine how such a position could avoid the implication
that meaning in an important sense is itself a truly general aspect of the social,
and it is unfortunate that, despite the ubiquity with which the notion of meaning
is employed throughout the text, meaning is not discussed as a concept of social
theory.
If one looks more closely at Reeds metaphor of landscapes of meaning
and the rationale for introducing it at least one qualication of meaning is im-
plied. This qualication, however, is entirely negative with respect to the gener-
ality of meaning. As landscapes of meaning are inaugurated as the theoretical
expression of choice for the structured background of meaning against which
social life is taking place [ibid.: 105f.] the notion of elds is briey considered as a
laudable alternative and as already such a tremendous theoretical advance over
various ontological dualisms in social theory [ibid.: 108]. What Reed does not
like about the notion of elds is what he considers to be the main implication of a
topological approach: the idea that elds if bent or stretched would look very
similar to each other [ibid.: 108], which to him suggest an isomorphism of elds
that goes against the interpretivists taste for thick socio-historical contextualisa-
tion [ibid.: 109]. The metaphorical connotation which Reed would like to bring
out is that sociological research should be more painter and brush [ibid.: 110] and
less surveyor and measuring stick. The issue of commensurability for him is the
key point here, as there must be no master brush and no master painting, only
scenes to reconstruct using different brushes [ibid.: 111]. Getting the painting
right ultimately has to bolster the claim that particular landscapes cannot rep-
resent general features of the social per se [ibid.: 113], and this is why different
scenes and contexts allegedly must not be treated as in any way isomorphic or in
some general way commensurable.
One cannot exaggerate the epistemological consequences of such state-
ments that are meant to characterise a source of meaning to which any kind of
effective sociological explanation will need to refer [ibid.: 137ff.]. Reed intends to
place a constraint on the very possibility of social theoryincluding any under-
standing of meaning. Postmodern scepticism is criticised that it would merely
rewrite in reverse the overcondence of a scientistic sociology [ibid.: 93], but how
does Reeds general argument against commensuration not imply exactly such a
reverse?
In order to square the universality with the non-generality of meaning, Reed
has to turn the ubiquity of meaning into something negative with respect to the
possibility of social knowledge with any claim of generality. Meaning, ubiquitous
as it is, is accordingly made out to hinder the understanding of the basic nature
of social life [ibid.: 162], making the social impossible to theorise and making
us use theory to interpret meanings instead [ibid.]. Against this background,
514

it might appear somewhat ironic to advise researchers to conjure up as much

meaning from a given case as they possibly can in order to produce maximal
interpretations in interpretive epistemic mode. His examples are Geertzs analy-
sis of deep play [ibid.: 93ff.] and Bordos study of anorexia in US culture [ibid.:
98ff.]. These maximal interpretations resignify meaning generously and widely
but refrain, in Reeds reading, from submitting to their readers a general theory
of culture, meaning or the social [ibid.: 103f.]. These studies are not bound by and
move beyond what their subjects in respective landscapes of meaning would
identify as meaningful [ibid.: 105]but they allegedly do not do so in the name
of some general theory of the social. This understanding of maximal interpreta-
tion in interpretive epistemic mode is consistent with discarding the possibility
of commensuration and also with Reeds stance against parsimony [ibid.: 116].
It misses, however, the very reason why many people nd the works of Geertz
and Bordo truly engaging: These works do indeed theorize, i.e. resignify with
some generality, certain aspects of culture, social structure or process, and read-
ers can relate to these resignications just to the extent to which they nd them in
some consequential aspect very much commensurable with their own exposure
to landscapes of meaning. Meaning thus resignied can hardly be an obstacle
for getting the similarities across diverse experiences and contextsinterpretive
resignication is effective because it offers a glimpse of general and commensura-
ble aspects of the social [e.g. Steinmetz 2004].
Meaning, in any case, is clearly out there in the world, whether investiga-
tors are surgical and economic in addressing it or go to great lengths in teasing
more and more of it out of their subject matter. It is hard to imagine how any of
this could put social science at odds with the possibility of a general theory of the
socialor, for that matter, how it would put social science at odds with natural
science as that straw-man positivist [Reed 2011: 64f.] that deals with an allegedly
per se much less meaningful universe. That confronting meaning should be a
social, or, even more narrowly, a human privilege, at times appears to be implied
by Reed but a respective qualication is not discussed. I suspect that a defence of
any qualication will be unavailable without positing some very general theory
about the genesis and constitution of meaning in the world, as that offered by
Alfred Schutz [1962: 5f.] in delineating the realm of the social against the facts,
events, and data of the natural scientist. Then again, perhaps Reeds silence
about meaning as a concept of social theory implies a much broader canvas for
his social epistemology. Interestingly, just as meaning is used as a kind of com-
mon denominator of all species of facts, data, and theory, Reed sometimes omits
the respective qualier. If we follow suit, consider people in a landscape and
wonder how the landscape gives form to the motive [Reed 2011: 152], in what
sense exactly is that different from seeing deer in a landscape running up a hill or
water running down that hill? Furthermore, would any such difference in how a
landscape turns a motive (tendency, mass, etc.) into an active force be specic to
that landscape under consideration or concern a greater set of landscapes, or all
515

landscapes roamed by people, deer, or water? If the push and pull of landscapes
are necessary points of reference in understanding the genesis of formal causes
[ibid.: 158], the metaphor of landscapes could be employed in a similar manner
with reference to any single animal, to herds and ocks, to molecules and elec-
trons, buildings, streets, or cities.
If all of this is a matter of meaning, exposure to such meaning can hardly be
a human prerogative. But then neither could commensurability be a prerogative
of landscapes within a parallel or super-imposed non-human universe. That a
landscape, once disclosed, is not immediately generalizable [ibid.: 117] may of-
ten be true if taken as a statement about substantial differences between particu-
lar landscapes and their specic, perhaps very peculiar, distribution of human or
non-human forces. However, Reed is prepared to make very general statements
about the effect of landscapes on motives and mechanisms [ibid.: 137ff.], which
implies at least some immediate generalisability with respect to the generality of
the forces in play and how they act on people, animals, or molecules. Immedi-
ate generalisability in this sense has to be a pervasive aspect of a universe that
is (contra Schutz and others) meaningful for all kinds of species, particles, and
people [cf. Khler (1938) 1966: 280ff.].
Exploring such a universe perhaps after all does not require as many books
and maps as we can pull up from our libraries. In Reeds tour de force across
long-standing and materially quite prolic sociological discourses, his book is
in a pleasant way not quite level with the thickness we will occasionally nd
in our libraries. His good ship onto which he would now like to load all the
books and maps [ibid.: 171] is in fact a conspicuously small vessel. The books
nal metaphor of the ship built and loaded up for social-scientic exploration
somewhat improves, I think, on the image of landscape, painter and brush, not at
least because it allows for some movement. Now the captain of the ship has to be
persuaded that some maps and books can in fact be safely left behind when leav-
ing the harbour, that there is little chance the ship will fall of the edge of the world
and that it is unlikely to run against a screen of incommensurability. Any such
screen is likely to be a book or map held up by the captain. It need not impair the
movement of the ship.
If the meaning of the world is much more diverse than what any single
book or map could offer in terms of minimal or maximal interpretations, maybe
we are wise to trust our own intuitions of such meaning and our own small ves-
sel into which our intuitive capacities have (probably not quite inappropriately)
been invested [cf. Martin 2011: 236238]. In the end, it would appear to be the
very generality of meaning that invigorates our motives and mechanisms and,
in the process, commensurates elds, landscapes, and, perhaps not at least, our
epistemic modes. In Reeds meaningful universe, as in anybody elses, meaning
commensurates motives and mechanisms such as to be causes and forces, or in-
terpretivism such as to accommodate realism and normativism. In a meaning-
ful universe of interconnected landscapes across which people, deer, and water
516

travel widely and drag along baggage of all sorts, commensuration and commen-
surability have to be ubiquitous. With respect to the possibility of general theory,
this universe is not harsh and constraining but inviting and generous.
References
Khler, W. (1938) 1966. The Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York: Liveright.
Martin, J. L. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773312.001.0001.
Schutz, A. 1962. Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff.
Steinmetz, G. 2004. Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and
Small Ns in Sociology. Sociological Theory 22 (3): 371400,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2751.2004.00225.x.
517

Deation and Construction:

Rendering Social Causes Meaningful
STEVEN LUKES*
New York University
In commenting upon Isaac Ariail Reeds interesting book, I shall rst indicate
what seems to me especially valuable in its approach and style of argument. Sec-
ond, I set out what I take to be the gist of that argument. And third, I shall pose
two questions that that argument raises.
Reeds book revisits, in a fresh and insightful way, the old question of the
relations between the natural and social, or human, sciences. Reed makes no dis-
tinction between the human and the social (thereby embracing psychology as so-
cial) and he does not discuss what might be special to particular disciplines. He
proceeds throughout by citing, with just sufcient detail, some telling examples
of sociological and anthropological studies, to support both what he criticises and
what he advocates. He criticises, at a general level, the kind of scientism that
presumes that social or human, like natural, science is engaged in reconstructing
sense experience and observation in terms of a vast and precise set of theories and
laws. [Reed 2011: 36]. More specically, within the social sciences he criticises
what he calls realism for presuming that their goal is to reveal underlying layers
of social life, underlying mechanisms or structures that are taken to exist in all
sorts of times and places [ibid.: 40], and that bring together disparate cases under
the same general scheme. In particular, he rejects the idea, spelled out by Jack
Goldstone, that social scientic explanation involves making deductions about
how events are linked over time, drawing on general principles of economics, so-
ciology, psychology, and political science regarding human behavior [Goldstone
2003: 48]. He also criticises the anti-scientistic, but also anti-explanatory rhetoric
of post-modern hermeneutics and the philosophers, notably Richard Rorty, who
encourage and endorse it. He advocates seeing both natural and the human sci-
ences as interpretive all the way down, though in signicantly different ways, the
* Direct all correspondence to: Steven Lukes, New York University, Department of Sociol-
ogy, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012-9605, USA, e-mail:
sl53@nyu.edu.
518

S. Lukes: Deation and Construction
former affording, via the language of mathematics, a degree of abstract certainty

unavailable to the latter. He rightly presents explanation as auxiliary to the larger
category of understanding [Reed 2011: 35], thereby, as we shall see, raising the
central question of what it is to explain. And he pursues the suggestion of the ear-
ly Habermas that there are distinct interest-driven epistemic modes: one seeking
prediction and control of the natural and social world, and another, commonly
called critique, guided by emancipatory or utopian aspirations, seeking to an-
swer the normative question of how, when and where the good can be or was made
actual, in actors minds or in social institutions [ibid.: 86].
Reeds distinctive argument, as I understand it, is both deationary and
constructive. He seeks to undermine the plausibility of the approachstill he-
gemonic in American sociologythat posits a probabilistic law-based and hy-
per-generalized model of explanation and relies on quantitative methods and an
often quite explicit commitment to the idea that the unity of the sciences derives
from the unity of their methods [ibid.: 133]. His positive suggestion, distinguish-
ing him from standard anti-positivist advocates of interpretive approaches, is to
propose an alternative method for the human sciences that retains the idea that
explanation is causal but promises to offer the rudiments of a distinctive account
of social causation. His idea is that social causes operate within what he calls
landscapes of meaning, as in a Brueghel painting: that meaning intersects with
such causes by giving their force concrete form, and thus that the interpretation
of meaning is central to constructing causal explanations in the human sciences
[ibid.: 135].
This sounds remarkably close to Max Weber on meaning and causality.
Reed quotes Weber on the uniqueness of the reality in which we move and his
wish to
understand on the one hand the relationships of the cultural signicance of indi-
vidual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of
their being historically so and not otherwise [Weber 1949: 72].
What Reed offers, in deploying this approach, is the suggestion that social mech-
anisms, viewed as efcient causes in the social realm [Reed 2011: 144], become
explanatory when, and only when, rendered meaningful (given form) by ref-
erence to the context (the landscape) in which they operate. Thus, in Webers
account in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the mechanism of salva-
tion anxiety only makes sense inside the meaning-system of Calvinist (and, more
broadly, Protestant) Christianity [ibid.: 140] Thus the Putnam-led social capital
format of analysis is empty until grounded in an ethnographically specied con-
text, such as revealed by the study of volunteer church groups in the American
Midwest by Paul Lichterman in his book Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Try-
ing to Bridge Americas Divisions: otherwise, network analysis without interpreta-
tion remains blind [ibid.: 128]. Thus the ritual of the confession, as described by
519

Foucault, is given its lifeblood, its shape and effectiveness, by the discursive for-
mation through which it takes place [ibid.: 159] Thus the comparative historical
sociology of Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol errs in making realist causal
claims that purportedly dismiss ideological content as non-explanatory (though
he rightly questions whether they succeed in doing so).
The deationary aspect of Reeds argument is, then, best seen as making
a case against what Jon Elster has called excessive ambitions in the practice of
social science. Elster, like Reed, embraces the concept of mechanisms as a way
of identifying efcient causes and, also like Reed, distinguishes between explana-
tory and normative theories, deploring excessive ambitiousness in both [see
Elster 2009a, 2013]. Unlike Reed, however, Elster sets out in some detail the ways
in which currently dominant approachesrational choice theory that prevails
in economics and political science, behavioural economics, and statistical data
analysis, widely practiced in sociologyare, in his view, remarkably unsuccess-
ful in the business of explanation.
Rational choice theory, according to Elster, fails for two reasons: rst, it fails
to deliver determinate predictions, and, second, agents are widely irrational, fail-
ing to conform to the predictions of the theory. Beliefs are indeterminate and
behaviour cannot be uniquely predicted, for people generally lack the capacity
to make the calculations that occupy many pages of mathematical appendices in
the leading journals [Elster 2009a: 7] and imputing as-if or bounded rationality
fails to solve the problem. In short, except in a rough-and-ready sense, the so-
phisticated models that are the pride of the profession fail to explain, predict or
shape behavior [ibid.: 9]. As for behavioural economics, its undoubted successes
are mainly found in the laboratory, and what it reveals is that human behaviour
seems to be guided by a number of unrelated quirks rather than by consistent maxi-

mization of utility. In fact, there are so many quirks that one suspects that for any
observed behavior, there would be a quirk that ts it [ibid.: 12].
And as for data analysis, Elster suggests that, being subject to an almost innite
number of potential temptations, pitfalls and fallacies [ibid.: 16], it is neither a
science nor an art but a craft, governed by informal norms shared by elite schol-
ars. He quotes Chris Achen, author of the signicantly titled Interpreting and Us-
ing Regression, writing that wise investigators know far more about true variabil-
ity across observations and samples than any statistical calculation can tell them
and that the process of testing and eliminating counterhypotheses is a subtle skill
that cannot be reduced to rote [Achen 1982: 40, 52]. On which Elster comments
that substantive knowledge is often indispensable and that deep familiarity
with the eld in question may be needed to distinguish causal from spurious
correlations [Elster 2009a: 16]. But what is the nature of this substantive knowl-
edge based on skill and yielding wisdom? Is it knowledge of meaningsinter-
pretive but not yet causal? These suggestions of Elster seem very close to Reeds
520

suggestion that we need in-depth knowledge of cases, that in the interpretive

epistemic mode the counterfactuals of a given case or set of cases emerge from
the holistic knowledge of the meanings active in a case [Reed 2011: 156] What
Elster calls a eld Reed prefers to call a landscape (disliking the agonistic con-
notations of the former and the idea that elds are formally isomorphic), but both
appear to agree (with one another and with Achen) that the interpretation of sta-
tistical data cannot dispense with context-relative substantive knowledge, whose
acquisition depends on wisdom, skill and the following of informal norms.
Elsters case is essentially a plea for modesty, even humility. The future, or
at least the hope, for social science, he concludes, lies not in looking for general
laws, but rather in the cumulative generation of mechanisms and their applica-
tion to individual cases [Elster 2009a: 24] and in replacing the aim of prediction
with that of retrodiction. We should just accept that mechanisms are frequent-
ly occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under
generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences [ibid.: 23;
emphasis removed]. That is why he calls Alexis de Tocqueville the First Social
Scientist [Elster 2009b]. And he makes a similar plea for modesty and humility
with respect to normative theorising [see Elster 2013]. How should democratic
institutions, such as trial juries, political assemblies and electoral systems, be de-
signed in order to produce good outcomes? To answer this, we need to know
what counts as a good outcome, about which legal and political philosophers
notoriously disagree, without prospect of rationally-based resolution. And we
need, with respect to any chosen conception of goodness, a causal theory. Elsters
view is that we have a double indeterminacy hereof plausible-sounding but
unprovable normative views, and of plausible-sounding but unprovable causal
theories, leading to a deep disillusionment in public debates [Elster 2013: 4]. He
concludes by arguing against positive institutional design that aims at producing
good decisions, selecting good decision-makers or creating good decision-mak-
ing bodies, and in favour of designing institutions that insulate decision-makers
as much as possible from the inuences of self-interest, passion (emotion or in-
toxication), prejudice and cognitive bias [Elster 2013: 5]. In making this case, his
guiding spirit is Jeremy Bentham. What he takes from Bentham is not the familiar
maximising, aggregative utilitarianism but rather a conservative, practical melio-
rism that can, however, have radical implications for institutional reform.
Reed has relatively little to say about the normative epistemic mode, though
his writing of maximal interpretations in the normative epistemic mode does
suggest something more ambitious than Elsters cautious Benthamism. It is
Reeds attempt to unite explanation via causal mechanisms with the interpreta-
tion of meaning through forming causes that suggests an agenda more ambi-
tious than Elsters, constituting only the very beginning of a project of histori-
cized social explanation and theoretical pluralism [Reed 2011: 169].
This raises questions for his readers, and so I shall conclude by briey in-
dicating two. Not surprisingly, given the immense scope of the topicare the
521

human sciences a branch of natural science?addressed by Reeds slim volume,

these are, indeed, large and difcult questions.
First, on what account of causation does he rely in writing of motivation
and mechanism as the forcing causes of social life? His interesting foray into
the exegesis of Aristotle on causation, his introduction of formal causes in order
to introduce interpretation and his endorsement of reasons as causes do not re-
ally help to answer this question. We have, as Brian Epstein has recently written,
scads of examples of events that stand in causal relations to one another, but
there is basic disagreement about the characteristics of causation, and yet that
does not prevent the term causation from picking out a particular metaphysical
relation, even though we do not quite know what it is [Epstein 2015: 81]. What is
clear is that Reed wants to reject law-based accounts of causality. My suggestion
is that he could usefully help himself to John Mackies so-called INUS account
according to which a cause is an insufcient but necessary part of a condition
which is itself unnecessary but sufcient for the result [see Mackie 1980].
Second, given his rejection for the human sciences of the search for laws
and of the notion of general principles regarding human behavior, on the
one hand, and his acceptance of the need for in-depth knowledge of cases and
their peculiarities [Reed 2011: 109], on the other, the question arises of the level
at which explanatory mechanisms are to be sought. Here the metaphor of land-
scapes and the reference to a Brueghel painting, as opposed to that of elds,
suggests a context, or regime of signication [ibid.: 109], that looks very local.
On what scale are such contexts or regimes to be conceived and thus how ab-
stract or general are the mechanisms that social scientists should seek in their ex-
planatory quest? How are we to determine where the boundaries of landscapes
of meaning lie? And how does the human science of political economy t into
Reeds scheme in our ever-more globalised capitalist world?
References
Achen, C. H. 1982. Interpreting and Using Regression. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Elster, J. 2009a. Excessive Ambitions. Capitalism and Society 4 (2), Article 1,
http://dx.doi.org/10.2202/1932-0213.1055.
Elster, J. 2009b. Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511800429.
Elster, J. 2013 Excessive Ambitions (II). Capitalism and Society 8 (1), Article 1.
Epstein, B. 2015. The Ant Trap. Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press,
Goldstone, J. A. 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions. Pp. 4190 in Comparative Historical Analysis in the
Social Sciences, edited by J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer. New York: Cambridge
University Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803963.003.
522

Mackie, J. L. 1980. The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0198246420.001.0001.
Weber, M. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press.
523

Meanings as Mechanisms
STEPHEN WELCH*
Durham University
In his ambitious, wide-ranging, provocative and informative book, Isaac Reed

[2011] seeks to reintroduce causal explanation into social science, and particularly
sociology, where a succession of post arguments, notably post-positivism, have
left causality in a marginal and neglected state. I agree wholeheartedly with this
aim. Indeed, alas without the benet of Reeds work, I tried to advance the same
goal in my recent book on political culture [Welch 2013]. The question, of course,
is whether Reed succeeds in his aim. I believe that, while numerous incisive criti-
cal points are made along the way, he does not; and the reason is that he has not
sufciently liberated himself from the assumptions of post-positivism.
In the following, I will rst say a bit more about Reeds starting point and its
effect on his arguments, including his choice of positions to oppose; then investi-
gate and criticise his preferred option, to insert causation into interpretivism; and
nally briey sketch a view of what is both wrong and right about much-derid-
ed positivism and its approach to causality, thereby suggesting a route towards
Reeds admirable goal more clearly than his starting point allows him to do.
Reeds post-positivist starting point
Reed alludes at the outset to the training received by his cohort of social scien-
tists, and his task is evidently to escape from this training while retaining some
loyalty to it. The scene is set for an intellectual psychodrama! He says [Reed 2011:
1], A generations worth of arguments about postmodernism and science, rela-
tivism and objectivism, have obscured our view; a repeated disavowal of the
possibility of causal explanation has crippled the interpretation of cultures .
But despite a rather sarcastic description of post-positivism as heroic, as a break
with certain taken-for-granted assumptions about the unity of the natural and
* Direct all correspondence to: Stephen Welch, Durham University, School of Government
and International Affairs, The Al-Qasimi Building, Elvet Hill Road, Durham DH1 3TU,
UK, e-mail: s.e.welch@durham.ac.uk.
524

S. Welch: Meanings as Mechanisms
social sciences that, like so many other breaks, happened sometime in the six-
ties, as deploying positivism merely as a pejorative signier [ibid.: 4], Reed is
clear that he has no refurbishment of positivism in mind. It is dead and buried as
far as he is concerned. Thus Reeds revolt against his cohorts training is limited
from the outset. The limitation shows in two ways in the remainder of the book.
In the rst place, and more generally, Reeds post-positivist training gives
him an acute aversion to criteria such as truth, validity or correctness. I assume
he shares the disposition of his cohort to see a slippery slope connecting the use
of these criteria with imperialism, racial science and other horrors. Some circum-
locutions result: theories are commended for being exciting and valuable [ibid.:
19]; they involve successful resignication [ibid.: 29]; Bourdieus eld meta-
phor is a tremendous theoretical advance even though its assumption of the iso-
morphism of elds is problematic [ibid.: 108109]. But these aversions to speak-
ing of truth and falsehood, rightness and error are not of course mere reexes:
the referentialism on which these old concepts depend is explicitly denied. Yet
if the Kuhnian precept that what counts as the correctness of a theory is its wide
acceptance by a community of researchers is guiding, it is hard to see any point
in identifying problems with widely employed approaches such as Bourdieus.
Unfortunately, success of this kind has become quite easy to achieve, and if
the fruitfulness of a theory equals its capacity to be referenced as a theoretical
framework by students who have been told that they must above all else have
one, the social scientic cornucopia simply becomes ever vaster, and critique of
any of its contents more futile.
Secondly, and more specically, Reed considers as the naturalist alternative
to interpretation only the approach to causal explanation offered by realism (with
emphasis on the critical realism advanced by Roy Bhaskar). Realism has presented
itself as the great re-discoverer of causality in the social, as well as the natural, sci-
ences. I think that realism found causality before it was lost, but I will defer that
argument to the last section. For now my point is that the identication of realism
as his naturalism of choice (not by any means an unusual move in recent years) is
a selection that already does some of Reeds argumentative work for him.
Realisms characteristic claim is that causation is a matter of underlying
mechanisms or causal powers, whose existence, it says, positivism, and in par-
ticular Humes theory of causation, denies. For instance, we cannot see gravity,
but we know it exists, and can use this knowledge to explain empirical events
[ibid.: 40]. As Reed [ibid.: 41] says, realism proposes a framework in which go-
ing beyond evidence is warranted and indeed necessary; it use[s] theory to go
beyond the facts, but remain responsible to those facts [ibid.: 63].
Questionable though this argument is, since there is an obvious differ-
ence between saying we cannot see gravity and denying we have evidence for it,
I agree with Reed that it is indeed realisms presentation of itself. For example,
realist Colin Hay [2002: 92] recommends to political scientists: we must decide
what exists out there to know about (ontology) before we might go about acquir-
525

ing knowledge of it (epistemology). In International Relations, where matters

are complicated by the fact that realism already has an established and very dif-
ferent meaning, a scientic realist position has been advocated in similar terms.
Mearsheimer and Walt [2013] argue that the overwhelmingly positivist [ibid.:
431] character of American IR lends it an instrumentalism which neglects theory
in favour of simplistic hypothesis testing [ibid.: 437]. They propose turning to
theoretical mechanisms, which while often unobservable, reect what is actu-
ally happening in the real world [ibid.: 432].
Yet this self-presentation of realism, as replacing surface by depth (always
an appealing move in purely rhetorical terms) and departing from evidence in do-
ing so, allows Reed to locate it in close proximity to the interpretivism he favours.
Close, but not identical, because Reeds point is to deny that the underlying mech-
anisms realism posits really exist. A realist would, I think, be unlikely to accept
Reeds [2011: 5052] way of putting her achievement: according to realism, the
knowledge of social reality embedded in the theoretical sign-system completes
the hermeneutic circle for the investigator. But since evidence has already been
set aside, what is to prevent this reformulation in the language of interpretation?
Thus Reeds choice of realism as his naturalist interlocutor makes his anti-
naturalist task a good deal easier. The possibility that realisms account of posi-
tivism might be something of a caricature is not canvassed, thanks to the t of
this caricature with Reeds and his cohorts training. Evidence loses by default its
staunchest defender.
Causation and interpretation
After a fairly brief chapter on normative theory (also seen as producing interpre-
tations), Reed turns to his main topic: interpretivism, its causal decit, and how
to make good this decit. Like realism, interpretivism aims at a reading of the
evidence that goes beyond the evidence and yet remains responsible to it [ibid.:
91]. (This formulation, now occurring for the second time, is a crux of Reeds ar-
gument, and I will return to it.) The going beyond is more radical than realisms,
because the commitment to referentiality is abandoned, but like realism, inter-
pretivism aims at exposing hidden depths. Thus Reeds interpretivism is not just
the variety espoused by Peter Winch, which argues that local meanings have to
be adequately understood by the exogenous researcher. Beyond this, something
that motivates and unies these meanings is sought.
Reed [2011: 92] responds with the concept of landscapes of meaning, which
are historically particular and yet can, in some cases, extend through large
swaths of time and place, thus making them discursive formations with tremen-
dous inertia and power. Geertzs [1975a] ethnography of the Balinese cockght
provides an example [Reed 2011: 9396]. Successive interpretive frameworks are
introduced by GeertzBenthams concept of deep play, play in which the stakes
526

are irrationally high; the issues of masculinity implied by the Balinese (analogous
to the English) multivalence of the word cock; and the distinction of human
and animal, interpreted as the sacred and the profane. Reed comments: As each
theory illuminates an aspect of this context, a fuller comprehension of the context
as a whole is developed [ibid.: 96]; Balinese cockghting makes sense to the
reader, because it has been adequately contextualized [ibid.].
Here one wants to know what is the criterion of adequacy. New ways of
thinking about the cockght are successively added, a pluralisation that Reed ex-
plicitly recommends. When are they adequate? Decidedly not, for either Reed or
Geertz, when they reect Balinese self-understanding: this would be the Winchi-
an rule-interpreting method, from which Geertz differs radically [ibid.: 98].1 It
seems they are adequate when they add up to a landscape, whose criterion is
that it is coherent. [L]andscapes cannot be radically incoherent. [ibid.]
Now this is indeed true of real landscapes (provided one accepts that the
notion of coherence is applicable to them at all) in that they form a continuous
surface in three-dimensional space. If mountain abuts contradictory plain there
is at least a transition between them. But Reed [2011: 110] also invokes the concept
of landscape as it appears in pictorial art: the analogy for social investigation
is the painting of a landscape. When an investigator reconstructs the layers of
meaning in which the social actions under scrutiny are embedded, what she does
is paint a picture of the meaningshistorically located, fabricated by the human
imaginationupon which social life proceeds.
One might think that nothing but further obscurity has been added by the
idea of landscape to Geertzs [1975b: 448] own metaphor, whereby cultural inter-
pretation is an activity in general parallel with penetrating a literary text. But
the change of metaphor is of considerable importance to Reeds project, as it al-
lows, he thinks, the reintroduction of causation.
Unlike most commentators on Geertz, Reed does not let the anthropologists
causal avoidance go unchallenged. He describes as at best evasive Geertzs
suggestion that the purpose of anthropology is not to answer our deepest ques-
tions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in
other valleys, have given [Reed 2011: 98]. Quoting Geertzs iconic sentence,
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of signicance
he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be the-
refore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search
of meaning[,]
1
Geertzs interpretivism differs rather less radically from Winchs in the essay that intro-
duces The Interpretation of Cultures [Geertz 1975b], which presents thick description as
the description of action in terms of explicit local understandings. Reed favours the more
radical Geertz.
527

Reed [2011: 130] correctly notes that this stark antithesis and the exclusion of cau-
sation was not Webers actual proposal. He might also have noted that both the
suspending and the spinning referred to in Geertzs denition are causal rela-
tions. At any rate, Reed is right that we should not leave things where Geertz (in
this anti-causal mood) leaves them.2
The idea of landscape of meaning provides Reeds answer to this lack,
in conjunction with the idea of forming, as opposed to forcing, causation. Of
course, we can understand easily how a real landscape exerts effects on its inhab-
itants. If they ascend a hill, this causes their altitude to change; if they fall in a
river, they may drown. I suspect that some intimation, provided it remains only
that, of this forcing causation is quite welcome in the economy of Reeds argu-
ment. For the forming cause provided by a landscape of meaning in the sense
of a construct painted by the analyst is much harder to make sense of. Yet that
is, in the end, what Reeds introduction of causation into interpretation comes
down to.3
A landscape of meaning is a coherent semiotic background which works
causally on people not by creating their wants, but by connecting their wants to
their behaviour. [M]otivations are like melted bronze before it is poured into a
cast and allowed to harden into a real statue. The cast is the meaningful context
in which amorphous motives become effectively performed actions. [Reed 2011:
158] It is the job of the analyst to paint this contextas we have seen, to paint it
adequately by multiplying theoretical frameworks until the background is rich-
ly semiotically populated (perhaps far beyond anything the participants would
recognise). The constructed landscapes give motivations and mechanisms shape
and color, concreteness and character [ibid.].
Are you confused yet as to the causal relationships involved? I dont think it
is my fault! A culture is described by multiplying theoretical interpretive frame-
works, always maintaining coherence, though with no obvious limit to complex-
ity. This construct is called a landscape and is said to constrain behaviour not in
the material way a real landscape controls the behaviour of its inhabitants, but in
some kind of semiotic analogue of that. Reed [2011: 135136] seeks to get round
the seeming disjuncture between the causal and the semiotic by invoking Don-
ald Davidsons argument that reasons may be causes, but he neglects the crucial
point that for a reason to be a cause it must be a reason psychologically possessed
(if perhaps unconsciously) by the actornot one that merely seems plausible to
2
Large changes in Geertzs view of causal explanation can be traced throughout the es-
says gathered in Interpretation of Cultures, some of which are quite sympathetic to causa-
tion, and into the later collection Local Knowledge [Geertz 1993], in which the anti-causal
position is consolidated. See Welch [2013: 5559].
3
Forming causation is itself illustrated by a metaphor that is parasitic upon the more fa-
miliar idea of cause: Aristotles metaphor of the forming of a bronze statue by the mould it
is cast in [Reed 2011: 145146]. The imperviousness of the mould to the solidifying bronze
is a straightforward forcing causal notion.
528

an observer in the context of a coherent cultural interpretation. My reasons can-

not be your causes; what I nd plausible as a global explanation of your behav-
iour need not be the actual explanation.
I lack space to discuss properly the idea of unconscious motivations invoked
by Reed in support of his account. These (though not necessarily the ones de-
scribed by Freud) certainly exist,4 and complicate any account of social causation,
implying among other things that administering an attitude survey would not be
a sufcient means of ascertaining motivations concretelythough it would not
thereby become completely useless. But this falls well short of licensing cultural
interpretation (the divining, that is, of a collective unconsciousness) from a dis-
tance, or even on the psychoanalysts couch.
Positivism, causation and evidence
In conclusion, I want to say something positive by saying something about posi-

tivism. Post-positivism is, as I noted, the starting point that Reed shares with his
cohort, as he conceives it. There is certainly a case against positivism that needs
to be answered, but answering it would rst involve clearing away a number of
misrepresentations. In the context of Reeds argument, the main one is that posi-
tivism has no plausible account of causation. But Humes claim, to which this al-
leged defect is usually traced, that causation is nothing but constant conjunction
needs to be properly understood, as it seems not to have been by his realist critics.
Given his knowledge of and enthusiasm for natural science, thus his awareness
of its use of instruments such as the microscope and the telescope, it is absurd
to imagine Hume as insisting that causal explanation stops with the ndings of
the naked eye. If a mechanism is a deep one that can be observed only with the
use of a microscope or other measuring instrument, that mechanism is still al-
lowed by Humes theory. What he insists on is that observation, however minute,
will reveal only further constant conjunction. For Hume, it is not legitimate to go
beyond this, but it does not follow that he could not countenance mechanisms
hidden from our casual observation but revealed by science.
It is the desire to go beyond not only observation but the observable that char-
acterises all of the theoretical approaches Reed discusses. Here is the break from
positivism. But can we accept Reeds precept, going beyond the evidence yet remain-
ing responsible to it? Evidence is a warrant to make an assertion; do we then remain
responsible to that warrant when we go beyond it and make a different assertion?
Do the police remain responsible to an arrest warrant, or even to the principle of
an arrest warrant, if they arrest a person not named in it? Of course, positivism in
practice does go beyond evidence frequently, by oating causal hypotheses. (I say
in practice so as to set aside the extreme philosophical position of logical posi-
4
See, for example, Wilson [2002].
529

tivism, whose verication principle, with its implication that science consisted
purely of observation sentences plus logical connectors, was soon recognized as
self-refuting.) Moreover, it is not always clear when a hypothesis is formulated
how the needed observations will be obtained, as in the case of some of Einsteins
theories, or the Big Bang theory. But it is the permanent impossibility of observa-
tional evidence that is both excluded by positivism and embraced by Reeds vari-
ous forms of post-positivism.
Positivist social science, for reasons other than its philosophical basis in Hu-
mean empiricism (I discuss these reasons in Welch [2013]), has struggled to de-
liver much by way of causal explanation. Often it has been looking in the wrong
placefor instance, in the macroscopic comparisons of social structures which
Reed [2011: 4550] criticises in the work of Skocpol and Moore. Covering laws
applied to large, composite and complex phenomena like these are bound to fail.
It might be more protable to look microscopically at just what Reed is inter-
ested inmeanings as mechanisms. Thisestablishing empirically how mean-
ings change and get accepted in a populationis likely to be painstaking work
(certainly having an ethnographic dimension, as well perhaps as an experimental
one), and positivist social scientists have usually preferred to measure what is
more easily measurable, especially if other people have done the measurements,
on the basis that, as Ian Shapiro [2002: 598] put it, if the only tool you have is a
hammer, everything around you starts to look like a nail.
My view is that the proper course is to try to nd new tools, appropriate
to the empirical investigation of the causal mechanisms Reed sketches in the dis-
tracting hues of an interpretive landscape. That at any rate would be the scien-
tic course, betting causal explanation. Reeds book is acutely interesting for
the good reasons he gives us to think it is worth attempting it. As to the progress
he has made so farwell, perhaps with an eye on disapproving members of his
post-positivist cohort, Reed [2011: 161] deantly says of his own argument: If to
engage in this process of truth-making is going to be labeled a new sort of sci-
ence, so be it. I have tried to indicate why, as yet, he has nothing to worry about.
References
Geertz, C. 1975a. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockght. Pp. 412453 in
The Interpretation of Cultures, C. Geertz. London: Hutchinson.
Geertz, C. 1975b. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. Pp. 330
in The Interpretation of Cultures, C. Geertz. London: Hutchinson.
Geertz, C. 1993. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. London:
Fontana Press.
Hay, C. 2002. Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave.
Mearsheimer, J. J. and S. M. Walt. 2013. Leaving Theory Behind: Why Simplistic
Hypothesis Testing Is Bad for International Relations. European Journal of International
Relations 19 (3): 427457, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066113494320.
530

Sciences. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press,
Shapiro, I. 2002. Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or Whats
Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It. Political Theory 30 (4) (Special
Issue: What Is Political Theory?): 596619,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0090591702030004008.
Welch, S. 2013. The Theory of Political Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553334.001.0001.
Wilson, T. D. 2002. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.
Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
531

Interpretive Explanation and Its Discontents:

Authors Reply to Commentaries
ISAAC ARIAIL REED*

University of Colorado at Boulder
I can only begin by thanking the contributors to this symposium, and its editor,
Marek Skovajsa. Particularly after the latest work speedup in academic produc-
tion (circa 2008, for rather obvious reasons), it is gratifying in the extreme to see
ones interlocutors and editor treat ones efforts with such care and attention, at-
tention that goes far beyond any reasonable instrumental rationality. Whether or
not it deserves it, my book has been gifted a set of critiques, some sympathetic,
others deeply sceptical, that together are hermeneutic in the original sense of
careful attention to (and attempts to correct) a text. This is wonderful stuff, in-
deed, and I only hope the following reply does justice to the essays to which it
responds. Certainly, for me, reading the critiques and writing this reply has clari-
ed the implications of the argument of Interpretation and Social Knowledge [Reed
2011] (hereafter ISK) for the practice of social research today.
Landscapes
Nelson Arteaga Botello and Eeva Luhtakallio both develop immanent critiques of
the landscape metaphor, noting its relative underdevelopment in the text. Their
arguments are evocative, and constitute creative interpretations of the original
statement of the metaphor and thus conceptual innovations. I afrm these lines
of development, and only wish to clarify what should be retained as a point of
focus.
Luhtakallio notes that the metaphor is static and emphasises the visual. As
a remedy to the rst problem, she proposes sedimentation as a way to think
about shifting landscapes. As a remedy to the second, she proposes getting even
further into the muck of social life, and thus pulls the metaphor in a specically
* Direct all correspondence to: Isaac Ariail Reed, University of Colorado at Boulder, De-
partment of Sociology, UCB 327 Ketchum 219, Boulder, CO 80309, USA, e-mail: Isaac.
Reed@colorado.edu.
532

I. A. Reed: Interpretive Explanation and Its Discontents
ethnographic direction. I certainly agree with the need for a temporal metaphor
to accompany the landscape metaphor, and sedimentation is promising, though
I would argue it should be paired with a metaphor that captures the potentially
abrupt and perhaps violent transformation of certain landscapes of meaning. For
example, beginning with the French Revolution and through Napoleons reign,
the people of France witnessed several attempts to radically overhaulone might
say terraformcertain meanings that attended everyday life, including religious
symbols, calendars, and clocks. Whether or not such attempts at terraforming
fail, they are surely part of social life we should examine.
Interestingly, however, Luhtakallios second suggestion with regard to land-
scapesthat we get into smell and touchis somewhat at odds with Arteagas
critique, since for him the metaphor is insufciently discursive in its proposed
reach and signicance for social theory. For Arteaga, the potential utility of the
metaphor rests with its ability to grasp how society as a whole is imagined, both
by the actors we study and by sociologists themselves. He thus urges its use to
transcend an opposition, in social theory, between systems theory and postmod-
ernism. Arteaga wants to replace a notion of interlocking subsystems, for exam-
ple, with overlapping landscapes, and, as such, his suggestion is at odds with a
more strictly interactionist focus.
However the metaphor develops, I want to keep in mind that it was intend-
ed to enable the analyst to use the concept of subject position in a more precise
and subtle way. We are exceedingly familiar, in social theory, with the idea that
individual human actors confront a world that is both made and yet not up to
them to remake; and that, in so far as they are formed by their social world, said
world forms their perspective on that world as well. The long arc of social theory
from Karl Marx to Pierre Bourdieu is the dominant trend here. The central goal
of introducing the landscape metaphor was to suggest how this insight could be
rendered in a way that allows the comprehension of the aesthetic, complex, and
sometimes subtle ways in which the construed worlds into which actors walk
vary, because I felt that, in the interests of parsimony, the sociology of subject
position often sacriced its ability to interpret complex variation.
In eld theory, a subject position, and thus the view of the eld contained in
the subjectivity of the actor, is computed in terms of two or three axesusually
concerning autonomous and heteronomous poles, and different sources of capi-
tal. These are simultaneously symbolic and social, and thus Bourdieus model is
not acultural. But when I read empirical studies of elds, and more broadly argu-
ments about subject-position and symbolic power, I am always struck by the way
in which the principles of vision and division subscribed to by subjects seem to
have much more to do with context-bound and content-full distinctions of mean-
ing, and specically the ambiguous meanings of certain signs, than they do with
the positionings that so concerned Bourdieu. So, I thought that landscape might
be a good addition to the theoretical toolkit. The question, then, is what is elded,
and why, as a subset of a larger category of landscapes of meaning.
533

The primary way landscapes vary is in the meanings that objects, words,
and bodies signify to humans who are in the (metaphorical) landscape, both in
the sense of long chains of associated signiers and signieds, and in the sense of
referents. What it means to occupy part of a landscape, as an actor, thenthat is,
to take up a subject positionis that one inherits both a viewpoint and a capac-
ity for action that varies from that of others within the landscape, and also varies
in terms of the subjects position on other landscapes. In this sense, Arteaga is
exactly correct that I should have emphasised the way in which gures in the
landscape express or embody the conuence of different creative, recreational
and passive forces in different parts of the landscape.
The underdevelopment of the landscape metaphor qua metaphor provided
a meeting point for critics who, like Luhtakallio and Arteaga, were inclined to
take the humanist-interpretive leap with me (and perhaps ended up feeling that
I did not leap far enough), and those who were much more reticent to turn social
science into human science, for a variety of well-articulated reasons. In Welchs
frustration with the rendering of causal imagery in the text and in Vollmers point
that there are actual physical landscapes, we see a much more sceptical take on
the riot of metaphor that makes up chapter ve of ISK. In addition to providing a
nice dovetail between the scientic and humanist critiques of the book, the meta-
phorical and literal meanings of the term landscape raise, in turn, the difcult
issue of materiality.
Materiality and semiotics
Materialin the form of bodies, the natural environment, the built environ-
ment, and technologyappears in many of the critiques of the book. This indi-
cates that the issue of materiality is central to understanding both the limitations
of the text, but also the way in which it can open on to a more elaborated, subtle,
and effective approach to the use of theory to construct interpretive explanations.
How should interpretivism comprehend the material?
Iconicity is certainly an excellent possibility, but unfortunately, beyond this,
Bartmaski and Binder appear so outraged at the Saussureanism in ISK that they
will throw anything at it (the real, the body, the spectre of Bishop Berkeley).
They thus miss an opportunity to engage the Peircean themes in the book, and,
despite their ritualised citation of Judith Butler, do not articulate how key ques-
tions concerning bodies and social research intersect with the kind of historicised,
contextually sensitive explanations advocated in ISK. After all, the text took Susan
Bordos [2003] classic interrogation of the female body, discourse, and anorexia
as an exemplar of the interpretive epistemic mode. Bodies, and their movement
in space, can and should be central for the interpretive epistemic mode precisely
because of the way they are a crossroads for different dimensions of signication.
First of all, bodies and the imagination of and desire for bodies, tend to enter the
534

world simultaneously as signiers, signieds, and referents, thus making them

a semiotic hotbed for power and action. Second of all, the tendency of bodies to
messily exceed signication is a source of constant dynamism in human life pre-
cisely because in so doing they spur people to impose interpretations upon them
nonetheless; these interpretations can strive for singularity or work via multiplic-
ity, as in Annemarie Mols The Body Multiple [2002]. Thus bodies matter indeed,
but Bartmaski and Binder do not consider that this demands even more analysis
of representation, not less.
Meanwhile, Luhtakallio and Vollmer raise a much more disturbing and
complex issue for interpretivism when they discuss non-humans and the mate-
rial more generally. Here the reference is clearly (for Luhtakallio, at least) Actor
Network Theory, and in raising this issue, she has surely identied the central
omission of the text. I can only briey enact an engagement with ANT here, and
beg the readers indulgence with an issue that clearly needs a much longer treat-
ment and awaits the completion of work in progress.
I am compelled to begin with the admission that ISK participates in and ad-
vances a format of humanistic discourse that is at odds with the rhetoric of ANT.
This is evident in the books use of Aristotle and the reliance upon Alastair Mac-
Intyre and Michael Walzer; in its obsessive inquiry into subjectivity, motive, and
reasons as causes; in its attempts to salvage certain aspects of Michel Foucaults
work as interpretive despite his attack on hermeneutics; in its use of certain
insights from the American ethnographic tradition; and, most obviously, in the
framing of its overall argument in terms of a distinction between human and
natural science.
However, when we look closely at what is really at stake in ANTs engage-
ment with and reformulations of social research (rather than its attacks on the
philosophy of science), we nd a clear alliance between the project of ANT and
the interpretive epistemic mode as I explicated it. This is true, rst, at the level of
epistemic values: both are interested in careful, historically bounded investiga-
tions (with some dispute about interpretive explanation, thick description and
description lingering), and both take the multiplicity of signication as primary
to these investigations. Furthermore, both express scepticism about the ontologi-
cal unity of objects that are posited, without much investigation, as parsimoni-
ously explaining vast reaches of social life in a more social realist tradition. In
ISK, I objected to the realist short circuit of interpretation via ontological social
theory; in many of its key statements, ANT erodes foundational distinctions in
remaking research and thus reassembling the social.
This commonality becomes even more fulsome when we move to ANTs
desire to avoid determining, in advance, the scope and scale of the heterogeneous
networks and co-produced materiality and sociality that it studies. Instead, ANT
wants to trace empirical variation in the spread of networks and their capacity to
impose and enact their realities upon the rest of the world. If they are useful for
anything, macro and micro are, for ANT, not to be understood as foundational
535

categories, but rather as the effects of getting something to hold together (the clas-
sic here is clearly Callon and Latours Unscrewing the Big Leviathan [1981]). ISK
argues something similar about meaning and signication as a formal cause, in
the sense that it too wants the socio-temporal expanse of discursive formations to
be a point of empirical investigation, and thus suggests we write theory in such a
way that we can allow this expanse to vary. Thus, ISK also resists the tendency of
social theory to jam the world into a layer-cake ontology,1 and argues instead that
we should develop tools with which to trace the scope, depth, and variable power
of different discursive formations, meaningful tropes, etc.
All of which leaves the controversy over ANTs treatment of non-humans.
Although I suspect that my use of Aristotle would count as the kind of special
treatment of the human actor that ANT criticises,2 I do not see the allowance of
causality to non-humans as problematic to the interpretive epistemic mode; what
is required is a reinterpretation of the category of material cause (as Luhtakallio
argues in discussing the bronze in the statue). There is no reason an interpre-
tive explanation cannot recognise the particular materiality of a newly designed
prison wall as part of what holds together the state as a heterogeneous assem-
blage, and it seems equally clear that in creating a material semiotics, ANT has
provided a corrective to, rather than a total overhaul of, the analysis of discourse,
eld, practice and landscape. In other words, humans indeed need tools and train
tracks to hold together the Leviathan. But they also need fear in the population,
the myth of the state, and the institutionalisation of different formats of legiti-
mate domination. The comprehension of materiality pushed by ANT, then, can be
thought of as a needed extension and revision of, rather than a fundamental chal-
lenge to, the Weberian semiotics at the core of the interpretive epistemic mode.
Modesty, comparison, and causality
ISK also attempted to apply a semiotic analysis to social research itself, and in so
doing criticised the Kuhn-inspired notion of theory-laden data and its opposite,
the supposed empiricists that Kuhn supposedly unseated. The well-worn philo-
sophical opposition between empiricist and post-Kuhnian approaches to science
does not grasp what is going on in social research, which is in fact a spectrum
of interpretation, neither positivist nor relativist. This is to say thatto put it
in Kuhns termsthe laden-ness of facts in concepts is quite different, in most
instances, from the laden-ness of explanations, normative arguments, etc. in
concepts, and it is usually the latter concepts that we identify as part of social
1
Bartmaski and Binder note that a stratied ontology is conspicuously missing from
the book. Im not sure if it was conspicuous, but it was denitely intentional.
2
Law writes that, in ANT, as with Foucault, there is a powerful if controversial non-
humanist relational and semiotic logic at work quite unlike that of humanist sociology
[2007: 8].
536

theory. The difference between minimal and maximal interpretation is indeed a

difference of degree in the indexicality and relationality of the signs involved, but
the difference of degree matters a great deal. For, we are able to go on in social
research, in the pursuit of truth, precisely because our always tenuous maximal
interpretations can rely upon and marshal minimal ones in making their case to
a given community of inquiry.
Thus my point in distinguishing minimal and maximal interpretationand
indeed in choosing language that indicates a spectrum and differences of de-
gree (from min to max)was to suggest that the overlapping communities of
inquiry in social research tend to have certain points of agreement, usually cen-
tred on thin descriptions of phenomena, and then more and more disagreement
as theoretically-driven interpretations of the evidence emerge, offering causal
explanations, normative critique, etc. To quote one sociologist who has grasped
precisely what is at stake here, maximal interpretation is related to what empiri-
cists tend to call generalization, but without the epistemological baggage that
allows a sample to represent (darstellen) the whole The important move here is
to argue that maximalist interpretation is always tenuous, that is, always requires
the active interpretation of the analyst [Perrin 2012].
The results of looking at social research in this way seem to have unnerved
a positivist (Welch), infuriated two realists (Bartmaski and Binder), and disap-
pointed a supporter of general theory (Vollmer). The clear point of contention is
that I do not nd, in social research today, anything that does, can or should look
like normal science in the Kuhnian sense, or even a revolutionary science con-
stituted by paradigm wars, whereas an image of normal science and paradigms
grounded in ontology appears to unite my critics in their doubts, whatever their
differences with each other may be. Welch suggests that I reject evidence-based
practices in human science in the name of anti-imperialism, which is clearly not
true, and that I unnecessarily limited the capacity of the text to address the theo-
ry-evidence nexus by choosing realism as an opponent, which is clearly true. Per-
haps this latter point is what Bartmaski and Binder mean by saying that realism
is the constitutive other of interpretivism in the text.3
When Vollmer discusses commensurability and incommensurability, he
identies a key point, though the argument is unfortunately merged with his
arguments about ontology. Nonetheless, an implication of his argument is both
true and important as a description of a key epistemic problem in the human
sciences: between the inviting commensurability of the world to general com-
prehension that he advocates, and the emphasis on particularity that I argued
for, lies the vexing question of the comparison of cases. Finally, Lukes reading
3
In this regard, perhaps a discussion of the Peircean dimensions of the text, and the devel-
opment of a conformist theory of truth in the philosophy of knowledge, based in a reading
of C. S. Peirce [Longino 2002], which informs both the text and its diagrams, could be an
instructive way forward for the interpretivism/realism debate.
537

is in some ways the most sensitive of those that address the issue of naturalism/
science, for he identies a diffuse but important feature of the text as a whole,
namely the idea that we should continue to develop abstract, even grand theories,
but should adopt a deep modesty and humility in how we use them. Modesty
to me here signies several different aspects of good practice: attention to the
various meanings in a case, extreme care about the prospects for and conditions
of generalisation, and a willingness to sacrice adherence to a paradigm (re-
ally, overvaluation of coherence in the abstract theoretical architecture brought
to bear on the case) so as to make sense of the case itself. This last point is what
Luhtakallio nds liberating about the book. Thus Lukes is correct to nd common
ground between ISK and Elsters substantive knowledge. Lukes then asks: what
understanding of causality we should develop?
Put together, Vollmers and Lukes critiques hit upon what is perhaps the
central conceptual problem for the interpretive epistemic mode going forward:
what, given the emphasis on theoretical pluralism in the pursuit of in-depth case knowl-
edge, is the role of comparison? And thus: how does the problem of comparison relate
to the reconceptualisation of causality proposed in ISK? For, note that Lukes ges-
tures towards J.L. Mackies Cement of the Universe, which has become the founda-
tional philosophical tract for comparative-historical methodology as it has moved
beyond the positivism and Millsianism of the opening chapter of Skocpols States
and Social Revolutions. Nowhere, in other words, are INUS causes taken more seri-
ously in social science today than in my own subeld of comparative-historical
sociology! And thus Lukes and Vollmer reveal the fundamental tension between
ISK and the methodology debates in American comparative-historical work. For,
the books argument sits outside of the Tale of Two Cultures told by Goertz and
Mahoney [2012], wherein they distinguish social science concerned with average
effects and grounded in the mathematics of regression (quantitative) from social
science concerned with comparative case studies grounded in the mathematics
of set theory (qualitative). In other words, to answer Lukes question, I am not
happy with the Mackie-reliant rebuilding of social science constituted by fuzzy
set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA); he may, however, have had a differ-
ent route out from Mackies text in mind.
Rather, in contrast to the age of regression, grounded theory ethnography,
and the more recent fsQCA, the argument of ISK suggests that it is the complexity
of theoretical interpretation that makes a case into a case. Nonetheless, Vollmer
is right that I did not provide a sufcient account of comparison in my efforts to
push hard (perhaps too hard) for historically-bound interpretive explanation. In
particular, my exemplars are not comparisons, at least not explicitly so. Let me,
then, try to say here how I imagine comparison working in the interpretive epis-
temic mode.
First of all, although I view abstract theoretical coherence as something
that should be sacriced to make sense of a case while retaining veriability in
the piece-by-piece interpretation of groups of evidentiary signs with theory [see
538

Reed 2011: chapter four, 114115], I retain a commitmentas should be clear from
the analyses of Bordo and Geertzto case-based knowledge as deeply theoreti-
cally mediated. Indeed, it is this that marks the departure of the text from certain
ethnographic traditions in the USA that eschew theory (which I would criticise
as unwilling to take the risk of maximal interpretation), and from the deation-
ary rhetoric of ANT that rejects explanation for description. So, a case is a case
because of theoretical interpretation.
This means that a comparison of cases will, rst and foremost, have theo-
retical interpretation as a mediating intellectual process. This will take place in
relation to the concerns of a given community of inquiry grounded in certain
clearly articulated questions that demand, as answers, maximal interpretations.
This is already implicit in the subeld of comparative-historical sociology, where-
in, for some questions, the French Revolution should be compared to the Ameri-
can, whereas for others it should be compared to the Iranian or the Nicaraguan.
But then a difcult problem arises: what is the point of these comparisons, given
that in interpretivism, explanation actually happens at the much more concrete,
historically bounded level of the case itself?
In my view, theoretically mediated interpretations of other cases provide a route to
good counterfactuals in the interpretive analysis of a case.4 That is to say, if we have an
explanatory problem about, say, the role of charismatic authority in the Bacons
Rebellion, then a complex, theory-laden interpretation of charismatic authority
(or, perhaps, its non-importance) in the Whiskey Rebellion may provide an es-
sential difference to be explained in the rst case.5 That is, out of the innity
of counterfactuals that exist for a chain of occurrences under scrutiny, the good
counterfactuals are chosen, not only from detailed knowledge of the case itself
which is the route preferred by historians and certain ethnographers who eschew
theorybut also via the theoretical interpretation of other cases, which provide
maps of other ways things could have gone. Note, of course, that there is a great
deal of fore-knowledge that has to be developed and reasonably established to
set up a comparison in this way, including the meaning and appropriateness of
a theoretical term like charismatic authority. In other words, comparison exists
within, and not as a brake on, the hermeneutic circle. In this sense, I imagine com-
parison as something that becomes possible neither because of a kind of immedi-
ate, de facto commensurability, nor because of a single theoretical language that
unites all cases, but rather through the work of theoretical interpretation to link
certain cases to one another, piece by piece, in relationship to a given research
question. The result of this is a better specication of the explanatory problem
that is dened and bounded historically in the original case study.
4
This was somewhat adumbrated, in ISK, in footnotes 37 and 77 in chapter ve, which
dealt with Fritz Ringers work on Weber and made reference to Geoffrey Hawthorns Plau-
sible Worlds [1991] as inspiration.
5
All of the usual caveats about cases not having to be dened nationally apply.
539

Clearly, this kind of intensive comparative work requires serious, in-depth,

interpretive knowledge of the other case or cases as well, and thus I imagine this
as a model for how and why we should pursue small-N comparison in historical
sociology; in contrast, the formalisation of INUS causality via set theory cannot
easily account for the massive theoretical relevance we frequently attribute to
studies of just 2 or 3 social movements or revolutions. Indeed, I think that there is
a deep continuity between INUS causality and the sorts of commensurable com-
parisons that Vollmer wants, which I would contrast with the route that we could
take in the interpretive epistemic mode. For the latter, I would point to thick
causal concepts and the dappled world, both ideas drawn from the work of the
philosopher Nancy Cartwright [1999, 2007]. For Cartwright, the world is dap-
pled into overlapping zones wherein different causal concepts provide the torque
necessary for explanation. Without explicating her perspective here,6 let me just
say her argument that we should not seek to make cause mean one and only one
thing in a very precise, analytic sense certainly inspired my turn to Aristotle in
ISK, even if my reading of Aristotle differs signicantly from hers [see Reed 2011:
143, fn. 42]. Having arrived at this description of explanation and comparison as
I see it, I can now return to the issue of naturalism.
Nature and society
Several commentators critique the anti-naturalism of ISK, but this is done via two
different tendencies of argument. The rst argues that the text underestimates
the utility of general theory and, in a broad sense, positivism for moving social
research forward. The second defends realism by arguing that sociological real-
isms strengths are the way it has been or can be amended or retooled to suit the
human sciences (usually via engagement with, e.g., agency, concept-dependence,
open systems and historical variation). So, in a certain way the objections, though
they run together in many of the texts, are in fact mirror images of each other: for
one, the science is there to be done, and ISK is to be grouped in with a larger set
of distractions, including postmodernism and critical realism; for the other, the
brilliance of realism in social science is precisely that it has already satisfactorily
adjusted to all of the objections ISK raises. Somewhere in middle of this is the
problem of ontology.7
6
Cartwrights notion of the dappled world was originally developed in relationship to
the natural sciences, and thus her causal pluralism rests on an Aristotelean concept of
natures which does not, in my view, work for social research. But the concept can be de-
veloped in a hermeneutic direction. See Nordman [2008].
7
Note, however, that the way in which these arguments developwe need to leave her-
meneutics behind and build a general positive science already versus we need to be her-
meneutic, and, voil, critical realism already isimplicitly vindicates the utility of expli-
cating an interpretive epistemic mode separate from either realism or positivism.
540

Bartmaski and Binder write that I fail to recognise the way in which critical
realism (CR) articulates important differences between the natural and social sci-
ences, citing the usual litany of CR terms including open systems and existential
intransitivity. The only thing missing is the ritualised invocation of the story that
Roy Bhaskar could have named his second book The Impossibility of Naturalism.
However, in their hurry to defend CR and attack the semiotics in ISK, they missed
entirely the essence of my critique of CR (and they missed, indeed, my careful
consideration of precisely the adjustments they laud in Bhaskar). My critique has
little to do with the existence or non-existence of human bodies (I think they exist
and should be part of explanation), or the existence of the state and the utility of
having a passport (I agree territorially-dened states structure ows of human
travel, in many or perhaps most places in the globe).
Rather than going down the rabbit hole of trying to determine what really,
really, really exists, in ISK I tried to analyse the structure of arguments in social
science, and this led me to a criticism of a fundamental mistake made by Bhaskar
concerning how the use of theory in explanation works in social research. That
mistake was to suggest that the inference to structure that enables sociological ex-
planation of a certain sortMarxs explanation of action within and actors un-
derstandings of the dynamic socio-economics of capitalism, for exampleis a
transcendental argument, equivalent to the classic transcendental arguments of
Immanuel Kant, and Bhaskars own earlier derivation of the necessary existence
of a natural world and the rationality of science from the existence and success
of scientic experiments. My contention is that to suggest that Marxs argument
is transcendental is to reveal a deep misunderstanding of the nexus of theory
and evidence that produces explanations, and more broadly, maximal interpreta-
tions, in the human sciences.
This mistake is important beyond CR and debates in the philosophy of so-
cial science because it is an incorrect philosophical justication for, and I would
hazard a symptom of, an unfortunate tendency that is quite common in social
theory and sociological research, whether those who make it are proponents of
CR or not. That is the tendency to short-circuit the pursuit of explanations, or
more generally, maximal interpretations, via the following manoeuvre: elaborate
a theory of how society or the social works, make sure it is internally consistent,
then take the theory as general and as directly referential (though perhaps in
need of revisions at its edges), and thus nally posit those theoretical workings
as the underlying explanation of an incredibly wide variety of minimally inves-
tigated actions. (Side note: this critique resonates deeply with Elsters critique
of rational choice theory, as explicated by Lukes in his comment). This tendency
misrecognises itself as providing a ground for science and rationality, whereas in
fact what it does is conate ontology and explanation into an elaborate theoretical
architecture that serves as both the premise and the outcome of analysis. Another
way of saying this is that misrecognising the hermeneutic nature of social science
leads CR to pursue vicious as opposed to virtuous hermeneutic circles or spirals.
541

And this is further evidenced by the ambiguity in the critical realism around
ontology, captured so well in the criticisms of CR written by Justin Cruickshank
[2004] and Anthony King [2004].
Vollmer is right that ISK has an ontology, and it is one that features mean-
ing prominently. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the Aristotelean schema
presented in chapter ve, which was motivated by a desire to escape the domi-
nance of certain causal images in social research, while retaining ratio via machina
as one potential route to explanation. What is Aristotles schema of four causes
if not an ontology, and thus a primer for thinking about action? Vollmer thus
points out that the books argument for particularity is underwritten by the im-
plication that meaning in an important sense is itself a truly general aspect of the
social. For Vollmer this is a performative contradiction, and thus indicates that,
in criticising general theory, I have thrown myself unknowingly into the arms of
postmodernism. This latter claim is not correct.
To see why, I insist that we hesitate before breezily moving from ontology
to theory to explanation. In my view, ontology is preliminary, and exists at
some distance from concrete explanatory problems and their solution. When we
do get into ontology, we are confronted with the radical malleability of human
social forms by the construal of meaning. In reaction to this, we should inten-
tionally design our ontology as weak in the sense of opening conceptually onto
the vast variety of human experience and construals of the world (including the
way in which these construals can harden into institutional routines). As such,
ontology is necessary and debating it is useful, but it is a mistake to think that
it contains within itself answers to well-dened explanatory questions, whether
those questions concern the origins of revolutions, the origins of the French Revo-
lution, the inuence of imperial ventures on state formation, gaps in educational
achievement between different demographically dened groups, or myriad other
problems in sociology or other afliated human sciences.
If we want, we can include the work of ontology in the conceptual work
we term theory. But it is a terrible mistake to either reduce theory to the work of
ontology, or to misrecognise theoretical work as always already and only ontologi-
cal debate. For when we look at the vast world of concept development in the
human sciences, we see constructs designed to colligate evidence, render coher-
ent models, and enable interpretation in response to well-dened why-questions
concerning substantive topics. Much of this conceptual work relies, perhaps, on
ontology in a weak sense of the term relies, but it is not ontology itself. It is,
rather, concept formation at varying levels of generality.
Vollmer wants to defend general theory; it may surprise him that I do too.
But in the human sciences, I see theoretical constructssome of them, indeed,
developed in extremely abstract intellectual settings and with an eye towards
highly general formulationsbeing used to construct answers to explanatory
questions that are not at the level of generality that Vollmer wants, and not onto-
logical in their implications. Do we really want to say that a typology of different
542

kinds of postcolonial states, a categorisation and conceptual model of three dif-

ferent causal pathways to open rebellion, and the specication of the mechanism
of the self-fullling prophecy need, somehow, to come together to be ordered in
perfect coherence to constitute the ontology of the social? My point is that not
only should we avoid this, but that in avoiding it, we do not magically become
postmodernists with no standards of evidence, no way to tell a better explanation
from a worse one, etc.
This, then, connects to my specic interest, in ISK, in historically bounded,
contextually-sensitive, and meaning-dependent explanation, which I differenti-
ate from theory. For, interpretive explanation, as a kind of maximal interpreta-
tion, results from the successful fusion of theoretical signs and evidentiary signs.
Thus, my argument is that, in imitating various images of natural sciencefrom
Popper, from Lakatos, or even from Kuhnwe have, in social research, missed
something fundamental about how theory works to help us build good interpre-
tations. For the Lakatosians, for example, there is a hard core of general theoreti-
cal axioms, and an outer belt of auxiliary concepts, which are then revised and
developed in the theorys encounters with various empirical cases (the French
revolution, say, or the industrial development of a postcolonial African country).
But to me this model of a research program, made famous for sociology via two
brilliant papers written by Michael Burawoy [1989, 1990], has misconstrued the
location of rationality in the human sciences. To me, it seems very difcult to
answer questions such as: Is Marxist theory true? Is Marxism a progressive or
degenerative research programme? And yet, it seems quite clear that we are good
at answering questions such as: Is the Marxist explanation of the French Revolu-
tion the best one? Hence, for me, theory has to be used in a particular way to get
at explanation, and our judgmental rationality in the human sciences will be at
this, more concrete, level.
There is perhaps no better example of this than in Stephen Welchs own ex-
cellent work on political culture, which both shows the utility of working on pre-
liminary ontology to get things clear and the relative distance of ontology from
explanation. Welch [2013] articulates an ontology of culture as dualisticthat is,
both discursive and practicalbased on a careful reading of Wittgenstein and a
simultaneous critique of both practice theory and its opposite (those for whom
culture is propositional). Culture, for Welch, is bifurcated into public/social dis-
course, on the one hand, and embodied practical skills, on the other. But, given
this ontology, I would hazard that we are still a long way from compelling expla-
nations in response to well-dened research questions. Welch wants to say that
skills are involved in the adaptive inertia of culture, and that discourse, as public
signs, is subject to wild market-like uctuations. Yet when we actually look at any
of the explanations that he proposes embody his ontology of culture, what we
nd is that the cultural difference that makes the difference concerns the content
of the meanings that emerge in either the skills or the discourse or both, not the
ontological distinction between skills and discourse itself. The dualistic ontology
543

does not really do the work of comparison, explanation, causal difference mak-
ing, etc. So, for example, Welch reconstructs a paper that skilfully offers a partial
account for the differential fates of Chinese and Russian capitalism by pointing to
inertial, implicit, adaptive skills around social network formation and the subtle
meanings that differentiate two versions of these skills: that is, the difference be-
tween Russian blat and Chinese guanxi [2013: 176177; see Hsu 2005]. The torque,
in such an explanation, comes not from the ontology that underwrites it, but from
the key difference in meaning that shapes and guides the development of social
relations.
In so far as explanation, in the human sciences, requires this sort of ferret-
ing out of meanings, as well as how they interact with mechanisms, motives,
and material, then I think that the conation of any two of ontology, theory, and
explanation is a mistake. Perhaps it should be left for the intellectual historians of
future generations to decide if this conation was a result of the anxiety of non-
inuence that social researchers felt vis--vis natural science when they ventured
into the messiness and muck of human signication. But whatever those histo-
rians decide about how and why a certain set of actors came to act in a certain
way, surely in making their claims they will be making an interpretation, and in
making an interpretation they will be using theory. This, it seems to me, is the
very condition of possibility for a truly human science.
References
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545

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Source: Sociologick asopis / Czech Sociological Review

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Location: Czech Republic

Introducing the Symposium

Explain or understand? This old methodological dilemma has haunted sociology

Sociologick stav AV R, v.v.i., Praha 2015

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Sociologick asopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3

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The Central Arguments of Isaac Ariail Reeds

* Direct all correspondence to: Leslie MacColman, Department of Sociology, University

Sociologick stav AV R, v.v.i., Praha 2015

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Sociologick asopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3

From minimal to maximal interpretations

Reed denes maximal interpretation as knowledge claims which transcend the

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tapestry. In this way of thinking, minimal interpretations, with their proximity

The realist epistemic mode

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The normative epistemic mode

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are made in reference topurportedly collectiveideals of democracy and the

The interpretive epistemic mode

If social research is likened to comprehending the inner workings of a clock in the

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Conclusions: explaining and understanding the social world

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what is happening is the verication or falsication of scientic hypotheses and

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Appendix 1. Summary of Reeds [2011] Epistemic Modes

Realist / Naturalist Normative Interpretive

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Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning

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demia, in particular in terms of the contents of research, areperhaps hypocriti-

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E. Luhtakallio: Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning

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E. Luhtakallio: Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning

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The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process

NELSON ARTEAGA BOTELLO*

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