ABSTRACT
Our introduction and first chapter began the process of problematizing the desire for law-like explanations in the human and social sciences. As we noted, there are a number of possible challenges to this picture of inquiry, ranging from purely ideographic and descriptive approaches to those that stress statistical probabilities and causal mechanisms. In this chapter, we examine self-styled hermeneutical opponents of the causal law model that focus on understanding the meanings of human actions and practices in particular contexts. A common element of these accounts is a critique of the naturalistic ideal of causal explanation, including the pre-eminence accorded to the role of prediction as the key criterion for discriminating among competing explanatory hypotheses. Equally important, as John Stuart Mill makes clear in his comparison of Bentham and Coleridge, is the adoption of
a perspective that seeks ‘from within’ to make intelligible the meanings and reasons social agents give for their actions and practices. This approach contrasts with the objectivistic stance of the positivist mainstream, which adopts a stance ‘outside’ the social and political phenomena it seeks to explain. Expressed more positively, those within the hermeneutical tradition focus on the practice of interpreting the self-interpretations of social actors in particular historical contexts. Contextualised self-interpretations thus become the key component of the hermeneutical explanans.
