ABSTRACT
The most significant development in the philosophy of the human sciences in the last two decades or so has been the movement away from the previously dominant positivistic or objectivistic approach.1 This postpositivist turn is one which an increasing number of authors have come to be concerned with and have described in various ways. Richard Rorty (1979) has labelled it the move from ‘epistemology’ to ‘hermeneutics’. In a useful collection of essays on the subject, Rabinow and Sullivan have referred to it as ‘the interpretive turn’.2 What ‘the interpretive or hermeneutic approach’ (Rabinow and Sullivan 1979, p. 1) stands for is a rejection of what Lewis White Beck (1971 [1949]) referred to as ‘the Natural Science Ideal’—the idea espoused by the logical positivists of a ‘unified science’ embracing both the natural and the human sciences. The interpretive approach rejects this sort of methodological imperialism; it rejects the idea that the human sciences can or ought to be modelled on the natural sciences. It rejects the very idea that the purpose of the human sciences is to explain (in the customary scientistic sense) and predict human phenomena. Because the principal goal of the human sciences is not to explain human affairs but to understand them, formal scientific methodology and quantification techniques are ill-suited to these disciplines, having at best a strictly limited usefulness. What, above all, is called into question is the applicability to human affairs of the sub-human reductionist models (such as those borrowed from genetics or cybernetics) that objectivistic scientists are so fond of. The two leading exponents of the hermeneutical approach have been Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.
