40982666

Hermeneutics
Author(s): DAVID COUZENS HOY

Source: Social Research, Vol. 47, No. 4, Philosophy: An Assessment (WINTER 1980), pp. 649-
671
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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HermeneuticS/'BY DAVID COUZENS HOY
In the nineteenth century hermeneutics was a branch of

philosophy concerned principally with methodological ques-
tions about how to acquire correct understanding and in-
terpretation of texts. In the twentieth century hermeneutics
grew into a broader philosophical field as a result of its resist-
ance to tendencies in philosophy toward objectivism, scientism,
or positivism. When used for polemical purposes, these latter
terms do not necessarily identify specific philosophical posi-
tions. In one of the most recent hermeneutical works in this
polemical genre, Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human
Interests,1 these labels indicate a tendency of philosophers as
diverse as Comte, Mach, Marx, Peirce, and even Dilthey to
exempt their own theories from the need for critical self-
reflection. In other words, philosophies that construe them-
selves as investigating or even supplying the foundations or
rational grounds for the sciences often fail to question and to
account for their own theoretical and epistemological status.
This failure may be built into the very conception of
philosophy as foundationalist, since the philosophy that thinks
of itself as foundation or ground thereby assumes for itself the
achievement of a timeless and unconditionally valid perspec-
tive. Despite the rejection especially by the early positivists of
absolutist metaphysics, their own theories of knowledge and
explanation are set out as if methodologically absolute. From
such an absolutist standpoint, of course, the hermeneutical
self-reflection that takes seriously the likelihood of any scien-
tific or philosophical theory being supplanted by another looks
like historicism (or historical relativism). What otherwise quite
diverse philosophers like Husserl and Carnap have in com-
mon is the view that philosophy should itself be "rigorous
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
650 SOCIAL RESEARCH
science," to use Husserl's phrase, a

short of this is irrational.
A target for Husserl's critique is Dilthey, or at least Dilthey-
like philosophers who maintain history to be a succession of
incommensurable Weltanschauungen. Dilthey's related attempt
to distinguish the Natur- from the Geisteswissenschaften
eventually puts hermeneutics in opposition to logical empiri-
cism, which insists on the essential unity of science and on a
univocal conception of knowledge and explanation in all the
sciences. In contrast, hermeneutics insists that understanding
(Verstehen) cannot be reduced to explanation, or at least to the
deductive-nomological model of explanation in the physical
sciences. Just as understanding a person or a text seems dif-
ferent from having knowledge about things, the social and
human sciences which study persons and texts appear to re-
quire a different methodology from that of the natural sci-
ences.
The task of explaining this difference has its

Before philosophers became accustomed to spea
cular relation between theories and data in th
ences, hermeneutics seemed forced to agree wi
piricism that in these sciences there is a sharp
between theoretical and observational statements such that the
former are verified by the latter. Hermeneutics is thereby put
in the awkward position of having to argue both that the same
does not hold in other disciplines and- that these are never-
theless "sciences."
The Hermeneutic Circle
Central to this argument is the claim that the study of

human behavior and institutions by humans themselves is cir-
cular in a way that the study of nature is not. In an article
reflecting on Haber mas's Knowledge and fiurnan Interests, Mary
Hesse identifies this "hermeneutic circle" with what English
philosophers call the paradox of analysis:
HERMENEUTICS 651
Just as a paradox seems to arise wh

conceptual tools are used to analys
language, because the product of such
tical with what was analysed, so in a
"hermeneutic circle" arises when th
frameworks of our own culture are u
stand alien texts, alien cultures and e
groups in our own culture or societ
guage and thought forms we are stud
intelligible without interpretation,
thought forms are not adapted to fit
tation is always problematic and acc
The problems for the study of h

artifacts in all their diversity and
of the need to interpret them in te
from which we can never entirely
cannot free ourselves from our phy
either, but that does not indicate th
biological nature is relative to our n
must be, then, that humans' access to their own states and
activities (presumably in such a way that they have some influ-
ence over these) makes the study of these states and activities
different from the study of physical nature.
Attacks on the logical empiricists' distinctions between fact
and meaning, observation and theory, came from many sides.
Finally the most influential criticisms were made by those who
were concerned not with defending the Geisteswissenschaften
but with showing that the relation between theories and data is
circular even for the physical sciences themselves. Charles
Taylor, a leading proponent of hermeneutics, parodies the
present hermeneutical scene by pointing out that these dis-
tinctions, and the entire gap between the Natur- and the
Geisteswissenschaften, seem to disappear
once we realize that the logical empiricists sold us an extraor-

dinary bill of goods about natural science. Once we awaken
2 Mary Hesse, "In Defence of Objectivity," Proceedings of the British Academy 54

(1972): 275-292, at p. 276.
652 SOCIAL RESEARCH
from our positivist slumbers we realize t

tures hold of natural science either. The two turn out to be
methodologically at one, not for the positivist reason that there
is no rational place for hermeneu tics; but for the radically op-
posed reason that all sciences are equally hermeneutic.
This is an extraordinary reversal. Old-guard Diltheyans, their
shoulders hunched from years-long resistance against the en-
croaching pressure of positivist natural science, suddenly pitch
forward on their faces as all opposition ceases to the reign of
universal hermeneutics.3
Showing that theory choice is underdetermined by the evi-

dence may indicate that there is some hermeneutic under-
standing of prior practices (that is, some of what Gadamer4
calls Vorurteile y or prejudgments, including one in favor of the
tradition) involved in the actual development of science. But
contrary to other commentators on hermeneutics, principally
Mary Hesse in the article just cited and Richard Rorty in his
new book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature5 (particularly in
chapters 7 and 8), Taylor thinks it is wrong to conclude that
there is not still an essential difference between the natural
and the human sciences.
Given this divide between the two kinds of science, which
Taylor does not want to collapse, the human sciences continue
to be threatened (and will perhaps be so perennially) by the
neighboring physical sciences. There is still a strong drive
(based on good but, for Taylor, wrong reasons) toward mak-
ing the human sciences conform methodologically to the natu-
ral sciences, a drive coming from within the human sciences
themselves. The temptation is to try to give descriptions of
human behavior and institutions which satisfy the requirement
Taylor thinks is the real key to the success of the natural
sciences. The "requirement of absoluteness" (a phrase bor-
rowed from Bernard Williams's Descartes: The Project of Pure
3 Charles Taylor, "Understanding in Human Science," Review of Metaphysics 34
(September 1980): 25-38, at p. 27.
4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).
5 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979).
HERMENEUTICS 653
Enquiry) is the demand that an

avoid giving descriptions includin
that is, what the seventeenth cen
posed to primary qualities.
The question is not whether this r
for the natural sciences but whet
the human sciences. A likely init
Taylor will finally agree, is that w
of anthropomorphism, there is som
ing to do the same for the hum
people seems naturally to be able
with what Taylor calls, followin
characterizations, that is, in terms
desires. These are terms any ind
description, and would thus seem
tion of that individual's states and activities.
Human understanding involves self-understanding, and to
eliminate the latter by avoiding desirability characterizations
would indeed seem to make a human science hopelessly in-
adequate. What is the alternative? Taylor thinks that there are
also strong arguments for imposing the absoluteness require-
ment. Contrary to the naive behaviorism of Skinner (criticized
by Taylor in his first book, The Explanation of Behavior), this
can be done without abstracting entirely from subjective expe-
rience. The absoluteness requirement is met simply by distin-
guishing reality and subjective experience, capturing the
former in an objective description of the individual's situation
and the latter in a "colorless" addition that the individual has
either a pro or a con attitude toward that state of affairs.
The first, obvious advantage of such descriptions is meth-
odological, for they permit objective, quantifiable analysis.
The second advantage goes beyond this "scientistic reflex" and
is quite significant in that this impartial description satisfies
the requirement of value freedom. "One of the strong reasons
for sticking with absolute descriptions," says Taylor, "is that
they seem to offer the hope of intersubjective agreement free
654 SOCIAL RESEARCH
from interpretive dispute."6 Man

opaque, and terms like honor or int
times or cultures other than our own, or even in subsets of
what we take to be our own. (Taylor takes misunderstandings
among people to be a central feature that the hermeneutical
sciences must take into account. It would be a mistake to
explain away this feature by assuming that misunderstandin

are only peripheral and that people everywhere and alw
share a basic, common, commensurable ground which, if ful
understood, would lead to the elimination of misunderstand-
ing. Like many other hermeneu tic theorists, Taylor thus takes
a certain incommensurability to be a genuine possibility and
an ineluctable fact of human affairs.)
The irony of the two alternatives between which the human
sciences are torn is that each declares it does more justice to
human freedom. The "old-guard Diltheyans" wish to preserve
freedom by saving the human sciences from the tendency of
the natural sciences to reduce everything to causal explana-
tions and thus to deny freedom. Within the particular human
sciences, however, researchers tend to impose natural science's
absoluteness requirement precisely to avoid distortions caused
by implicit valuations. The scientific study of values, said
Weber, can itself be value-free. While this declaration is prob-
lematic, its intention is clear, namely, to avoid endless disputes
about how to interpret incommensurable desirability
characterizations by making possible intersubjective agreement
about results valid for everybody and replicable by all compe-
tent researchers.
This Peircean notion of consensus is important for other
hermeneutic theorists as well. Habermas, for instance, main-
tains that every cognitive discourse presupposes counterfactu-
ally that truth claims could be resolved in an ideal, constraint-
free speech situation. Truth would be identical with ideal
intersubjective agreement. Taylor's paper brings out a further
8 Taylor, "Understanding in Human Science," p. 36.
HERMENEUTICS 655
condition Habermas might resist

is made more likely if the eff
understanding is minimized by n
accounts of pro or con attitude
agreement would probably not
human sciences continued to ig
and impose the requirement of
It must be stressed that Taylor
absoluteness requirement ough
sciences. His earlier article, "Inte
Man,"7 challenges the appropr
subjective agreement for the st
that incommensurability of com
ble and conflict of interpretat
thus probably side with Gadam
lief that a counterfactual, ideal
lative ideal of all discourse. Tay
context is only that the collaps
not entail the collapse of the d
human sciences into a universal
Rorty and Hesse infer.
Actually, as a more recent pap
siders makes clear, Hesse herself
significant diffef enees betwee
"Theory and Value in the Social
the social sciences differ precis
single criterion for theory cho
Whereas the latter function for
matic criterion of predictive suc
by a variety of value goals. Rat
7 Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the

William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social
California Press, 1979), pp. 25-71.
8 Mary Hesse, "Theory and Value in the So
and Philip Pettit, eds., Action and Interpretat
Sciences (London: Cambridge University Pr
656 SOCIAL RESEARCH
scientist's explanation, a social sc

in terms of a social theory will b
politics.
Hesse's account still might not satisfy Taylor, however, since
the difference between the sciences would be one of degree
rather than of kind. Hesse does not emphasize whether the
difference is essential or not, but Rorty is quite willing to
continue disagreeing with Taylor by denying that there is an
essential difference of kind. The paper by Taylor under dis-
cussion was presented on a panel at the 1979 meeting of the
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and
Rorty9 responded both to it and to a paper by Hubert
Dreyfus.10 Rorty challenges the rationale of applying the ab-
soluteness requirement to the human sciences not because
human beings would thereby be misdescribed, but rather be-
casue it is a mistake to think that the absoluteness requirement
is the key to the success of the natural sciences.
In drawing a distinction between terms that are subject-
related and terms that characterize things independently of
observing subjects, Taylor seems to Rorty to be reviving the
very notion hermeneutics opposes, namely, correspondence to
absolute reality. For Rorty "Taylor's inference from 'the world
exists independently of human percipients' to 'the world must
be understood in terms which reflect this' cari make sense only
if one can offer examples of terms which don't reflect this."
From a pragmatist perspective Taylor's advocacy of the abso-
luteness requirement is guilty of a hasty inference from "I can
get what I want out of X by thinking of it as Y" to "X is in itself
a Y," a move motivated by another non sequitur going from
"nature's causal independence of thought to the need for
subject-independent terms." The real difference between
primary and secondary qualities is for Rorty, then, only the
9 Richard Rorty, "A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor," Review of Metaphysics 34 (Septem-
ber 1980): 39-46.
10 Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Holism and Hermeneutics," Review of Metaphysics 34 (Sep-
tember 1980): 3-23.
HERMENEUTICS 657
pragmatic one between "terms

tion and terms not so useful."
To understand the motivation of Rorty's reply it is helpful

to understand his position in Philosophy and the Mirror of Na-
ture. He labels his own stance hermeneutics, but is explicit that
he does not think of hermeneutics as a method (as Dilthey does,
for instance, in speaking of it as the method of the human
sciences, or as Habermas does in distinguishing the her-
meneutical from the natural sciences on the one hand and the
"critical" sciences on the other). Rather, he reads Gadamer as
saying that hermeneutics is an attitude, and precisely the
anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian attitude of giving up the idea of
method.
Rorty's interest in hermeneutics is metaphilosophical in that

he construes it as offering, not a positive program, but only a
critique of traditional epistemology. Epistemology may suc-
ceed in capturing what goes on in normal science or normal
discourse, but hermeneutics is required when crises or in-
commensurabilities are encountered and discourse becomes
"abnormal." In the Kantian tradition epistemology is con-
ceived as a foundationalist enterprise - one that attempts t
separate knowledge from other forms of belief in order to
ascertain what is objectively certain. In contrast, hermeneutics
rejects the idea that the primary task of philosophy is to
supply foundations and guarantee certainty. It sees knowledge
as pragmatically relative to contexts of understanding. Th
paradigm of the phenomenon of understanding is the in-
terpretation of texts, and hermeneutical theory maintains tha
while there is no reductionistic fact of the matter to be prop-
erly or improperly represented by interpretations, neverthe-
less there are determinate constraints on what gets taken a
proper or improper interpretation. These constraints are
internal to the purposes and goals of the interpretations, and
are not the conclusions of a transcendental theory that
supplies the conditions for criticism, or that acts as the univer-
sal commensurating discourse for all possible discourses.
658 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Different Paradigms
If epistemology (theory of know

(theory of understanding) have ev
about what philosophical theories
simply that they have traditionally
ferent paradigms. Extremely con
the traditional notion of knowledge presupposes (1) a
privileged standpoint as the guarantee of certainty; (2) per-
ception as the paradigm case; (3) the atemporal truth of in-
stances of knowledge claims; and (4) the impotence of reflec-
tion to disrupt self-evident tenets. In contrast to each of these
four points, hermeneutics maintains that understanding is al-
ways interpretive, and therefore that (1) there is no uniquely
privileged standpoint for understanding; (2) reading rather
than seeing is the paradigm case of the phenomenon of
understanding; (3) understanding changes, and thus in-
terpretations require continual reexamination; and (4) any
interpretive understanding is laden with self-understanding,
however implicit, so that changes in the latter eventuate in
changes in the former.
The importance of hermeneutical philosophy for the sci-
ences is different when conceived by Gadamer and Rorty in
this metaphilosophical manner than when proffered by Dil-
they as a method. More in the spirit of Dilthey, for instance,
Paul Ricoeur argues in a paper originally published in this
journal that the social sciences are hermeneutical both because
their object, meaningful human comportment, is in central
respects like a text, and because the method of the social
sciences is essentially that of reading and interpreting these
text-analogues.11 While this analogy permits Ricoeur to make
significant philosophical amendments to Dilthey's overly psy-
chological model, every analogy has its limitations, and this
way of construing hermeneutics can be misleading. The social
11 Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a
Text," in Rabinow and Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science, pp. 73-101.
HERMENEUTICS 659
scientist may well balk at the fa

gestion (which is not what Ric
being studied are not real actio
Hermeneutics should avoid turn
model, since this would be to
Forgetting that it is a metaphor
hermeneutics is offering a new
texts.
In order not to misinterpret Ricoeur's talk about texts,

one must keep in mind that his main concern is in fact only
the Diltheyan one of distinguishing social-scientific methods
from the classical causal model. Despite his rejection of Dil-
they's notion of empathy and his substitution of the notion of
reading, however, his proposal that the hermeneutic circle is
inevitable in the human sciences disinters Dilthey's old prob-
lem. He himself asks whether he has not thereby legitimated
the intrusion of personal prejudice or subjective bias into
scientific inquiry, undermining it as "science." His only re-
sponse in the conclusion of this paper is to say that "we are not
allowed to exclude the final act of personal commitment from
the whole of objective and explanatory procedures which
mediate it." Even if this statement means that the bias can
itself be made an object of inquiry, Ricoeur still has not ex-
plained why it should follow that if a bias has or has not been
identified, social reality or the real world has thereby been
disclosed or not. He still seems drawn to saying both that there
is a real world that is properly or improperly disclosed, and
that a proper conception of method will ensure this disclosure.
That inference is precisely the one the Rorty-Taylor debate
brings into focus as the central issue in current hermeneutics.
The other participant in this debate, Hubert Dreyfus, intro-
duces another set of considerations which will divide her-
meneutical philosophers and influence how they see the rela-
tions between the sciences.12 Dreyfus distinguishes "theoretical
holists" (like Quine, Davidson, and Habermas) from "practical
12 Dreyfus, "Holism and Hermeneutics."
660 SOCIAL RESEARCH
holists." Theoretical holists reje

traditionally used to separate th
ences, and Dreyfus thinks the e
this denial is Feyerabend's view
tween the sciences is that the bat
mitted in the human sciences b
reason, in the natural sciences.
becomes the metainterpretive o
ing and translation between va
terpretations of reality are even
construed by theoretical holists
beliefs (theories), and "interpret
between theories, and possibly
works.
Practical holists, including Dreyfus and Heidegger, reject

the claim that all understanding is theoretical. Practical under-
standing may involve making implicit beliefs or hypotheses
explicit, but doing so would be possible only in determinate
contexts and against a background of shared practices. People
are brought up within their own background of practices and,
contrary to the theoretical holist, this background can never be
completely articulated in a theory. Dreyfus does not mean,
however, that the background of practices is ineffable. The
inability of theory to represent these practices is due to two
factors. First, practices involve bodily skills, which are not rep-
resentable simply as beliefs and rules. Second, the background
is too pervasive to be an object of analysis.
For Dreyfus, then, the principal difference between the
sciences is that "the human sciences, unlike the natural sci-
ences, must take account of those human activities which make
possible their own disciplines." If Dreyfus is correct, however,
the social sciences may be irrevocably entrapped in a version
of the hermeneutic circle. As theoretical disciplines they "must
take account of' and "explore" the background of practices
when at the same time the background cannot be "spelled out
in a theory."
HERMENEUTICS 661
Of course, if the background

principle but only in practice (an intermediate position
Dreyfus attributes to Gadamer), the difference between
theoretical and practical holism would not be substantial. The
nonrepresentability of skills and the pervasiveness of the
background is for Dreyfus, however, a matter of principle. As
a consequence (one he accepts willingly), the social sciences
will always find themselves embroiled in a conflict of in-
terpretations. Or if they did not, they would thereby be con-
formist, complacent, and sterile. Debate about the kinds of
beings we are is natural to beings like ourselves. Dreyfus joins
Taylor, then, in thinking of humans as "self-interpreting" (or,
they could say, hermeneutical) animals.
Taylor and Dreyfus thus think there is an essential difference
between the natural and the human sciences, and that the
latter would be severely impoverished if this difference were
overlooked. Rorty disagrees, and believes Taylor is making a
mistake in insisting that there are two basically different kinds
of beings, things and persons (a distinction sometimes ex-
pressed as that between being-in-itself and being- for-itself).
Taylor thus seems to preserve the metaphysical nature-spirit
distinction as the ground for that between the natural and
human sciences. The motivation for doing so, of course, is to
save man by showing that human action can never be pre-
dicted and controlled by human science. Science will fail to
predict because man is a self-defining animal capable of al-
tering its own nature. For Rorty, this way of affirming human
freedom is philosophical overkill. Even if physicalism were
successful and could come up with complete descriptions of
the microstructural conditions of such basic human actions as
the production of verbal noises, there would still be an in-
commensurability between the language expressing the physi-
cal processes and the language in which the noise means
something.
Rorty wishes to drop the nature-spirit distinction altogether
as a needless carry-over from metaphysics, and prefers to
662 SOCIAL RESEARCH
follow the later Heidegger and t

that there is no human "essenc
Man's purported redefining of h
his understanding himself in di
human beings, says Rorty, mea
interesting sentences become tr
change of vocabulary, not chan
essence does not change, but bec
more to be expected than chang
ference between the natural and
us, is merely the line "between
inquiry where we feel rather unc
vocabulary at hand and that po
certain that we do."14 The former
"spirit" and the human sciences,
the physical sciences, but Rorty
reason why the situation could n
He is thus imagining an inverte
sciences are in a period of norm
sciences become as "abnormal" a
icism is today.
Understanding and Explana
There are other ways, however

meneutical insistence on the circu
and humans' study of this natu
maintain that there is nevertheless no radical difference in
kind between the sciences. In a recent double issue of Dialéc-
tica devoted to the theme of understanding and explanation,
the papers by Stanford philosophers J. M. Moravcsik and
Dagfinn Fjzfllesdal argue against a difference in kind, but for
13 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 351.

14 Ibid., p. 352.
HERMENEUTICS 663
opposed reasons.15 They both

the humanist and the scientis
that humanists use the scienti
edge acquisition, Moravcsik w
and argues that understandin
nations is not intrinsically d
people.
A theoretical holist (to use Dreyfus's term), Fjzfllesdal be-
lieves that human states and activities can be adequately repre-
sented for explanatory (although not predictive) purposes. In
contrast, Moravcsik, like Dreyfus and the hermeneutic school,
maintains that understanding is distinct from explanatory
knowledge in the important respect that it involves a non-
propositional component. Unlike Dreyfus, however,
Moravcsik does not base his case on phenomena like bodily
skills or the pervasiveness of background practices. For
Moravcsik the theory-practice distinction is beside the point
since he thinks understanding is different not only from
theoretical, propositional knowledge (kno wing-that), but also
from practical knowledge (know-how). To show that recent
analytic epistemology is misguided in construing all significant
cognitive states including understanding as combinations of
knowledge and belief, Moravcsik argues that even theoretical
cognitive states like understanding proofs, sentences,
theorems, games, and strategies involve more than knowing-
that and knowing-how. In the case of understanding proofs,
for instance, an agent could have all the relevant knowledge
about the proof including knowledge of its premises and rules,
how it is produced, and even how it is applied to different
instantiations, and yet still not understand the proof: "The
agent might not be able to see the significance of the proof, its
consequences, alternative ways of proving the same conclu-
sions, or the agent might lack intuitions concerning the vio-
15 J. M. Moravcsik, "Understanding," Dialéctica 33 (1979): 201-216; Dagfínn F^lles-
dal, "Hermeneutics and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method," Dialéctica 33
(1979): 319-336.
664 SOCIAL RESEARCH
lations of [the rules] in contexts other

tion."
Although understanding involves nonpropositional ingre-
dients like the ability to recognize rule violations - ingredients
which are often implicit or unconscious - it is not thereby
noncognitive. Like most contemporary hermeneutic philoso-
phers, Moravcsik rejects Dilthey's notion that humanistic
understanding is a matter of the empathy needed to project
oneself into strange situations or to know "what it is like to be"
another person. We cannot know what it is like to be Oedipus,
says Moravcsik, and yet we can nevertheless understand
Oedipus in the sense of obtaining a unique construal of the
person (or the drama).
Fjzfllesdal also does not appeal to psychological empathy to
account for the understanding of other people. Unlike
Moravcsik, however, Fjzfllesdal thinks this understanding can
be explicitly expressed using the methods of the natural sci-
ences plus some other tools like decision theory, game theory,
and certain assumptions about the rationality of agents. Fjzfl-
lesdal's main concern in this article is to show that hermeneu-
tic theorists like Habermas are wrong in thinking that the
humanities and social sciences do not use the hypothetical-
deductive method of the natural sciences. Fjzfllesdal attacks
Habermas by offering a counterexample from a discipline
least likely to be thought "scientific" in the narrow sense,
namely, literary criticism. He examines how five different in-
terpretations of Peer Gynt are put forth and tested by various
critics to see what consequences follow from the hypotheses
about the significance of the "Stranger" who appears rather
mysteriously twice in the fifth act.
The primary difficulty with Fjzfllesdal's argument is that he
construes the hypothetical-deductive method in a nonstandard
way. Defined simply as the formation of hypotheses and the
deduction of consequences to arrive at well-supported beliefs
which fit in with our other well-supported beliefs, the
"method" would of course be one used in other disciplines. In
HERMENEUTICS 665
fact, these procedures would be s

in most aspects of life, and thus it
them a "method."
Fjzfllesdal's definition of the method leaves out at least two
important features normally attributed to it by the logical
empiricists: (1) the law-like character of the hypotheses for-
mulated in the natural sciences; and (2) the deductive
stringency of the resulting explanations. Considering the first,
Fjzfllesdal's Peer Gynt examples do not demonstrate any law-like
hypotheses. Indeed, such a hypothesis is unlikely given that
for the logical empiricists explanations in the natural sciences
are nomothetic and not idiographic, which means that they
explain types of events rather than unique, nonrecurrent
events. For this reason, historians (including literary histo-
rians) resist the suggestion that since they do not formulate
laws of history (or of artworks), they are not explaining the
unique objects or events they study.
To accommodate the explanation of human agency and
historical events, the deductive-nomological model can be
modified to include probability considerations. Even this
modification does not waive the second feature, namely, the
fact that natural scientific explanations do not admit of the
variety of nonconcurring explanations Fjzfllesdale allows in-
sofar as he presents five more-or-less-plausible interpretations
of the same occurrence. For the positivistic philosophers
Habermas and others oppose, deduction is not simply a matter
of fitting as many as possible of our well-supported beliefs
together into a coherent whole. Rather, explanation is the
deduction of an explanandum statement describing the phe-
nomenon in question from an explanans including not only a
set of singular statements about initial conditions but also a set
of general laws.
Fjzfllesdal does point out that there are some differences
between the natural sciences and other disciplines. A principal
one is the circularity between theories and data. This must be
for him only a difference of degree and not of kind, however,
666 SOCIAL RESEARCH
since he thinks the circularity h

natural sciences as well.
In developing this thought, he brings in an example, not
from the disciplines in question, but from moral philosophy.
While a positivist would therefore rule out this as an example
of "scientific" explanation, F^Hesdal's comment is especially
interesting for a survey of the scope of hermeneutics. He is
suggesting that what hermeneutics calls the hermeneutic circle
is the same as the important procedure John Rawls in A Theory
of Justice calls reflective equilibrium. We go back and forth
between our intuitions and our theories, changing not only the
latter but also the former, until we arrive at an equilibrium
between our principles and our actual judgments. This equi-
librium is reflective in that we come thereby to an explicit
understanding of the principles that are functioning as prem-
ises of our judgments. (Gadamer describes the phenomenon
as one of making our Vorurteile - our prejudgments or even
prejudices - conscious, and thereby perhaps modifying or re-
jecting them.) While Rawls is thinking primarily about moral,
practical reasoning, a footnote to Nelson Goodman implies
that this procedure of mutual adjustment occurs in the sci-
ences as well.
Of course, in ethics we never actually reach reflective equi-

librium, according to Rawls. We could never examine all the
relevant evidence, descriptions, and arguments, whatever it
might mean to do so. Rawls's recognition that the interplay is
perpetually ongoing is consistent with the hermeneutical in-
sistence on the open-endedness of self-understanding and
self-interpretation. Even within hermeneutics, however, there
are those who worry that talk about indefinite open-endedness
is dangerously relativistic, and even nihilistic. What troubles
many about the tendency of hermeneutics toward historicism
is the apparent abdication of any critical role for philosophy
over against the sciences, both natural and human. Habermas
expresses this worry about Gadamer's theory, and both
Dreyfus and Taylor see it in Rorty's book. The danger of such
HERMENEUTICS 667
abdication is thought to be not

crisis if the status of its truth is not clarified, but that the
absence of philosophical insistence on the spiritual side of man
will endanger human freedom itself. Historicistic hermeneu-
tics is thus perceived (by Dreyfus, for instance) as dangerous
because we become unable to ask, in both a factual and a
moral sense, what makes good science good. (This criticism of
historicism also goes back to Husserl's 1910 essay, Philosophy as
Rigorous Science.)
Transcending (<Whiggishnessff
Traditionally philosophy has conceived itself as providing

the basis for critical assessment of society and its sciences by
claiming for itself a privileged standpoint, exempt from the
tooth of time. Kant, for instance, thus labels his philosophy
both transcendental and critical. Is historicist hermeneutics en-
tirely free of the strong grip of "epistemology"? Some com-
mentators think that Gadamer, for instance, manifests a ves-
tige of transcendental philosophy insofar as he insists on the
universality of hermeneutics.16 Now Rorty is advocating a more
thorough-going historicism, but one which he admits at the
end of his book to be frankly "Whiggish" insofar as it sees the
past culminating in the superior knowledge of the present:
The fact that hermeneutics inevitably takes some norm for

granted makes it, so far forth, "Whiggish." But insofar as it
proceeds nonreductively, and in the hope of picking up a new
angle on things, it can transcend its own Whiggishness.17
Although hermeneutics does not claim to be constructive but

only deconstructive, it must begin work somewhere. That is, it
starts from within some particular discourse, the one it takes
16 See, however, David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) and "Taking
History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34
(1979): 85-95.
668 SOCIAL RESEARCH
to be "normal" at the time. But

that this discourse need not co
itself, or reduce everything stra
ground (which it already know
mon ground is its own). Unders
example, would be impossible if
gishly interpreting it as holding
and desires."18
Another example of how hermeneutics can transcend its
own Whiggishness comes from Thomas Kuhn, whose his-
toriographical work started much of the debate about incom-
mensurability and scientific revolution. In the recent au-
tobiographical sketch presented as the preface to The Essential
Tension, Kuhn attributes his sudden break from standard
views about the history of science and about the nature of
historiography to his "discovery of hermeneutics."19 Con-
sciously or not, all good historians are, he thinks, practitioners
of the hermeneutic method, which he formulates in the fol-
lowing maxim:
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for

the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a
sensible person could have written them. When you find an
answer, . . . when those passages make sense, then you may find
that more central passages, ones you previously thought you
understood, have changed their meaning.20
While this advice may be valuable to historians, however,

there is still a philosophical problem about how to adjudicate
the conflicts between our own beliefs and the apparently ab-
surd ones of past thinkers. How can one theory be judged
better than another if the criteria for theory choice are them-
selves internal to theories? One way philosophers can deal
18 Ibid., p. 349. Debate about this problem in the methodology of the social sciences
can be found in Bryan R. Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and
Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
20 Ibid., p. xii.
HERMENEUTICS 669
with this question has been c

Maclntyre.21 To avoid the dan
tific revolution but also to pr
Maclntyre argues that we mus
theories and our histories as true. We can do so insofar as our
theories take account of earlier theories, which could not
themselves account for ours. In other words, a historicist can
maintain a theory of theories according to which a theory is
not simply a conceptual arrangement of the given. A theory is
implicitly hermeneutical in that it is also a historical account of
itself since it tries to comprehend and include its predecessor
theories. It explains them by showing how their internal in-
consistencies are only equivocations for them, but not neces-
sarily for the subsequent theoretical formation that can ac-
count for the inconsistencies. The adequacy of a theory's im-
plied history of its predecessors is a criterion of its own validity
and legitimacy.
The test of this approach will be, of course, its value in
reconstructing actual theories. For present purposes it can be
taken as an example of a strongly Whiggish answer to the
question about the source of criteria or standards which justify
one theory or paradigm over others. Kuhn's and Rorty's posi-
tions are more weakly Whiggish than Maclntyre's. For Kuhn
the criteria of choice between theories function only as values
which influence but do not determine choice. Are there
strictly scientific (and not, for instance, theological or so
standards for theory choice? Kuhn himself supplies the u
list: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulne
but none of these is decisive. He does not give an explic
negative answer to the question whether there is a way
ruling out apparently rational resistance to new theories
"illogical" and "unscientific." Rorty, however, is quite willin
give a definite negative response. It seems anachronistic
him to expect the Cardinals who objected to Galileo to realize
21 Alasdair Maclntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the

Philosophy of Science," The Monist 60 (1977): 453-472.
670 SOCIAL RESEARCH
what considerations would determine the sorts of evidence

there could be for statements about the movements of planets
and thus to accuse them of being illogical and unscientific
What "scientific" means was precisely in the process of bein
formed.
Of course, we cannot now throw off the demand to be
scientific (although "reverse Whigs" like Feyerabend and
Foucault may want us to do so). Rorty is neither discarding the
notion of objectivity nor, following Kuhn's reply to his critics,
reducing judgment to matters of taste. Rather, he is accepting
the consequences of his own pragmatism. The only real use
the notion of objectivity has, he argues in his book, is as
agreement or consensus of rational discussants, not as mir-
roring or correspondence.22 If this is all "objectivity" means,
then "subjectivity" only means "unfamiliar to us." "We," of
course, will always take the success of normal science or dis-
course as evidence that we are understanding better, or coping
better with what really is there. This apparent concession to
realist intuitions should be taken, however, not as a sign of our
having the transcendental truth, but simply as telling what
Rorty describes as a "coherent causal story about our interac-
tions with the world."23
However formulated, then, historicism and some degree of

Whiggishness are not inconsistent. There is no necessary in-
compatibility between insisting on the likelihood of our own
theories being superseded and at the same time affirming the
superiority of our theories to others we can understand. Fur-
thermore, this Whiggishness can be transcended through the
hermeneutical awareness obtained by the contrast with other,
perhaps strange ways of thinking. The contrast can force us to
become conscious of, and possibly to realize the inadequacy of,
our own norms and standards. There may be finally no real
philosophical problem about what makes good science good.
Even if no transcendental set of norms and standards exists

"Ibid., p. 341.
HERMENEUTICS 671
which all inquiry shares, that is,

are internal and relative to par
there is no reason to think inq
Science will arbitrate and evalu
terms of its own successes or sh
think it needs to supplement t
scopeless claim that successful
roring nature's and human nature's secrets is a needless
addition - one that takes philosophy beyond its own
historically delimited scope. Contrary to what unhermeneuti-
cal philosophy maintains, it is not science so much as
philosophy conceived as "rigorous science" which has failed to
reflect upon itself and to clarify the nature of its own under-
standing.

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Hermeneutics

Author(s): DAVID COUZENS HOY

In the nineteenth century hermeneutics was a branch of

science," to use Husserl's phrase, a

The task of explaining this difference has its

The Hermeneutic Circle

Central to this argument is the claim that the study of

Just as a paradox seems to arise wh

The problems for the study of h

once we realize that the logical empiricists sold us an extraor-

2 Mary Hesse, "In Defence of Objectivity," Proceedings of the British Academy 54

from our positivist slumbers we realize t

Showing that theory choice is underdetermined by the evi-

Enquiry) is the demand that an

from interpretive dispute."6 Man

explain away this feature by assuming that misunderstandin

condition Habermas might resist

7 Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the

scientist's explanation, a social sc

pragmatic one between "terms

To understand the motivation of Rorty's reply it is helpful

Rorty's interest in hermeneutics is metaphilosophical in that

If epistemology (theory of know

scientist may well balk at the fa

In order not to misinterpret Ricoeur's talk about texts,

holists." Theoretical holists reje

Practical holists, including Dreyfus and Heidegger, reject

Of course, if the background

follow the later Heidegger and t

Understanding and Explana

There are other ways, however

13 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 351.

opposed reasons.15 They both

lations of [the rules] in contexts other

fact, these procedures would be s

since he thinks the circularity h

Of course, in ethics we never actually reach reflective equi-

abdication is thought to be not

Traditionally philosophy has conceived itself as providing

The fact that hermeneutics inevitably takes some norm for

Although hermeneutics does not claim to be constructive but

to be "normal" at the time. But

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for

While this advice may be valuable to historians, however,

with this question has been c

21 Alasdair Maclntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the

what considerations would determine the sorts of evidence

However formulated, then, historicism and some degree of

22 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 337.

which all inquiry shares, that is,

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