Hans-Georg Soeffner. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer. Volume 2, Sage Reference, 2005.
In contrast to explanation, the listing of the causal rules governing events, scientifically observable processes, or functional relationships, “understanding” addresses itself toward meaningful human behavior and the resultant meaningful objectified forms this behavior takes on within the fields of economy, politics, culture, and the arts. In comparison to the (philosophical) term knowledge, understanding is as a term more extensive, yet at the same time subject to greater limitations. It is more extensive in that it connotes a familiarity with the lifeworld, and everything belonging to this context. For this familiarity constitutes a precondition for the acquisition of knowledge through reason. The limitations of the term become apparent in relation to the interpretation of individual constructs of meaning: values, behavioral patterns, and motives. However, these very same constructs of meaning cannot be adequately interpreted either through identifying the laws of causality behind them or by recourse to “nomological” insights attained through pure reason. Only the interpretative reconstruction of the meaning behind the given behavior achieves this end. Although the additional knowledge gained through this interpretative understanding is in comparison to explanation on the basis of observation “bought at the price of the fundamentally more hypothetical and fragmentary character of the results won through interpretation,” these gains attained through the process of understanding designate “exactly the specific nature of sociological knowledge” (Weber [1922] 1978:15, § 1).
Construction and Reconstruction
Sociology, insofar as we mean it in Max Weber’s sense of the term, has disclosed that the human processes of perception, recognition, understanding, and explanation establishes images and constructions of “reality,” believe these constructions to be real, define them as reality, and orient themselves according to them. The transcendental-philosophical, Kantian development in the theory of perception carried on by Husserl; the social theories and protosociologies of Schütz, Berger, and Luckmann in this context; the anthropological expansion of the phenomenological point of view by Scheler, Plessner, and even Gehlen: all these have contributed to the systematic description and analysis of this phenomenon. A construct’s attainment of meaningful intersubjectivity within a monadic community (Husserl), the subjects of the “social constructions of reality” with an egologic perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 1970) the social constitution of the “structures of the life-world” (Schütz and Luckmann 1979, 1984), and the principally symbol boundedness of human perception and action (Peirce, Wittgenstein, Buehler) all serve here as examples.
Sociology as the science of reality aims to comprehend and explain all social constructions: the products of human activity, the forms of socialization and economy as well as the conceptions of the world, interpretive figures, and world outlooks. It presupposes that the symbol boundedness of human perception and action conceives of all social constructions in “symbolic forms” (Cassirer), that we move, interpreting, through a human preinterpreted and overinterpreted world, that we are trapped in our own symbols and fictions or constructions of reality, and that, in the orientation of our actions, we must grapple with the reality or, respectively, with the validity of these fictions and constructions.
It does not follow that the social sciences and humanities must once again fight the battles against realism, empiricism, and idealism fought by Carneades, Augustinus, Kant, and Husserl just because some natural scientists and cyberneticists—quite belatedly and with astounding coarseness—have uncovered (or discovered) what for them are new insights. The realization that subjects construct “their” reality according to their type-specific and individual abilities and that which is collectively held to be “real” is indeed a social construct, is of great consequence. However, this insight is not new. Thus, it should not lead to the repetition of old debates about our inability to perceive an outside world per se. Rather, the social sciences must address the various social constructions and offer comparative explanations for these sketches of reality as a result of their historical and social structural conditions. Sociology is primarily hindsighted prophecy—the reconstruction of social constructions and the conditions of constructions of reality. Thus, sociological prognoses are made up of the—often dubious—attempt to imagine one’s self and others on the basis of scientific interpretations and reconstructions of past realities, possibilities, or probabilities of “new” social sketches of reality.
Everyday and Scientific Constructions
From a pragmatic perspective, the everyday actor must—however faulty the results may be—prognosticate. Otherwise, setting goals and planning actions would not be possible: Survival requires more of us than reaction. In contrast, before he or she dares to prognosticate, the social scientist must first deal with the description and analysis of the particular construction on which the actions and plans of members of society in everyday, pragmatic perspectives are based. These are the first order constructions—the everyday, sociohistorically anchored types, models, routines, plausibilities, forms of knowledge, resources of knowledge, and (often implicitly) conclusions.
In that the social scientist is occupied with it, the reconstruction does not double the constructs of everyday action. Indeed, in the processes of describing, understanding, and explaining the construction of “the everyday,” a network of categorizations, ideal-typical suppositions, ex-post conclusions and causalities, or finalizations is established (“in order to” and “because motives”). In short, one designs second-order constructions. These are (demonstrable theoretically as well as in formal models) controlled, methodically examined and checkable, comprehensive reconstructions of the first-order constructions.
There is more than just a logical difference between first- and second-order constructions. When a reconstruction begins, the action to which it refers is already finished, past, and unrepeatable. Insofar as it is open to interpretation, it must be represented in certain data, and it “presents” itself in the data as a completed action. Since social scientists are interested in testable—that is, intersubjectively, rationally understandable—reconstructions, they can neither understand the action in the same way as the actor, nor can they project themselves into the souls and minds, thoughts and feelings of the actor. Instead, they develop “reconstructive-hermeneutic” models of possibilities for the processes of action as well as for the actor.
The data recording past events are, after all, not the “original” situations in which the action took place but their records. To the same small degree, the interpretations are not the repeated and “rationally explicit” original action in the reconstruction. Rather, they are models of objectively possible symbolic figures that are based on and refer only to the records of the action (indeed for the purpose of interpretation, all human products share the status of records of action). Thus, interpretations do not “contain” “the actor who truly existed” (or, respectively, the first-order constructions formed by partners in action in specific situations) anymore but, rather, models of the actors. These, in turn, are put in a situation that they did not choose themselves—in no small part due to the way a social scientist has posed the question with which he or she is concerned. “He [or she] has created these figures, these homunculi,” in order to understand and explain their doings according to his or her own as well as general conceptions of comprehensible and rational action. In the case of all logical, “existential” differences between everyday perception, interpretation, action, and understanding on one hand and, on the other hand, the scientific reconstruction of the first-order constructions on which they rely and the conditions of their reconstruction, it can be determined that everyday and scientific constructions are based on the same framework (that of the human condition) and on a largely shared repertoire consisting of experiences, sociohistorically conveyable and learnable skills and methods. In other words, our everyday and our scientific actions and interpretations are each part of different “provinces of meaning” (Schütz) and each represents a different attitude, a different method of recognition with regard to ourselves and the world around us, but the scientific capacity to understand is to a great extent structured similarly to everyday life—from which science derives and the methods and criteria of which are borrowed more subconsciously and implicitly than consciously and in a controlled manner.
Despite all attempts to distinguish between the two, the results of scientific (which remain mostly inexplicit) and prescientific comprehensions demonstrate a series of similarities. Both meet in the formulation of explanations, and these explanations rest often enough on nothing other than standards of plausibility that seem to be closely tied to a supposed common sense. These certainties, in turn, are derived from unknown or no longer known routines of typifications and connections of standard experiences, from processes of “interpret however” and collective semantics that are no longer questioned. It is similar to or the same for the prescientific and the scientific explications of experiences that their explanations are typified and classified observations, enumerations, and relations of data that have always been rationally constructed. The social world is constructed understandably, and we move interpreting in a preinterpreted and overly interpreted world, a sociohistorical symbolic a priori.
With regard to their basic structure, scientific comprehension and explanation are probably analogous to everyday thought but have been more formalized and institutionalized. In contrast to past paradigms of interpretation and comprehension, both methods of explanation—the scientific and everyday—are generally equally unreflective. Of course, social scientists in particular like to deal with the “ideologies” and “myths of the everyday,” but seldom do they pursue the question of how much their own myths rely on exactly those of the everyday, how much they are derived from the latter, or—in case this compositional wrong tree has not been barked up—whether and to what degree they differ at all structurally or formally analytically from quasi-mythological thinking.
Understanding and Explaining
A systematic examination of the structural conditions for the constitution of these myths is even more seldom undertaken in practical research: the genres and types of narration, symbolism, and components of construction; historical lines of argumentation and quotation (“discourses”); the process of the construction of perspective, expectation, and consensus. If, however, the subject is meant to be the description, an interpreted understanding and explanation of social orientation as well as social action and its products, then one cannot get around these fundamental analyses—unless, of course, one is content with these individual myths.
The analysis of human subjects, “groups,” or societies’ historical, “individual,” or “collective” conception of self is not possible without the identification, description, and analysis of the “practices,” “rules,” “patterns.” and “communicative types of presentation”—foregoing all the constructions of “contents,” opinions, dogmas, and worldviews—that we employ when we orient, reassure, and acquaint ourselves—when we act, produce, and interpret. There can be no rational sociology of the content of knowledge and of action without a sociology of the forms that shape knowledge and action and without which both would be rendered unrecognizable as well as not sustainable. Often enough, “contents,” opinions, and convictions are nothing more than decorations—colorful trim on the forms that practically lend action social sense and are content—”forms are the food of faith” (Gehlen 1988).
It may be fascinating to be devoted to ideas, assertions, and convictions; to read and “reread anew” certain authors and books; to introduce, for example, to the Marxist method of reading from yesterday something new from today. As long as a historical-reconstructive analysis of the structures of the text and argumentation and the symbolic networks and discursive references of Marxist texts are partially tackled and, in Bultmann’s sense of the word, de-mythologized, while at the same time this same method is not applied to the description of the patterns of reception, of the series of quotes and recitations rampant in them, there is nothing to expect of the “new” literature other than a continuation of the never-ending story of old approaches. Something totally different would be a literature on the horizon of sociology, a sociology that has as a necessary component a developed and systematically proceeding sociology of comprehension.
The scientific “comprehension of something” necessarily requires the description and explication of the implicit procedures and perspectives of comprehension—the comprehension of comprehension itself. In the same way, speaking of sociology as a “science of experience” only then makes sense, when it is not simply understood as a collection of and an analytical historicizing renarration of experiences, but as a science of the social constitution, recording, and transmission of experiences as well.
Inasmuch as one understands sociology in a “social scientific hermeneutical,” a basic theoretical, “protosociological” (Luckmann) as well as a practical research sense, it will appear—theoretically necessarily—as the sociology of knowledge. This means no more and no less than the science of the reconstruction of the social constitution of experiences and the social construction of reality. Only as a “comprehensive,” hermeneutic-reconstructive science of the social can sociology fulfill its role as the science of reality and experiences.
Pulling together the thoughts of Max Weber and Alfred Schütz, one can help bring to an end a widespread prejudice, which, simplifying Schleiermacher, states that social scientific comprehension concerns itself inductively and more or less empathically with the specific, while explanations according to preset principles subsume the specific to a general. Beyond this, “comprehension” is more a process of humanities, “explanation” more a natural science-oriented method. One does not encounter this prejudice in just the shrinking, dedicated community of colleagues who work with theoretical models, pure quantification, or both. Rather, this is also seen in various conventicles in the colorful camp of “qualitative social research”—by those who use expressions such as “hermeneutics” and “comprehension” as war cries against explanative = mathematicalizing, overmeasuring, and soulless—in short, Cartesian sociology.
Max Weber’s ([1922]1978) famous definition of “interpretive” sociology, in the first sentence of the first section of Economy and Society, has either been forgotten or was never taken particularly seriously. “Sociology…is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of a social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequence” (p. 4, § 1). The methodological consequences of this definition can be sketched onto four steps: observe, describe, understand, explain.
Scientific “observation,” which assumes a limited inquiry and a preliminary establishment of what the case should be, is to be understood here as controlled investigation and production of data. At the same time, the observer’s perception as such cannot at all be controlled, or at best, only to a certain degree. Attention, then, must be directed all the more closely to those processes in which, in connection with—nonlingual—perception, linguistically set data are derived from impressions. The social scientist in this case becomes a scribe. Actions are translated into language, speaking into writing. The written text lends a new and different structure—that of text—to the structure of action, conversation, or both. The structure of text has its own rules of organization and procedure. Its chronological and procedural structures have hardly anything in common with those of nonlingual action and its perception. In this way, the immediate, reciprocal relationship in which interaction partners perceive and react to each other, for example, is turned into a dramatic text broken up into sequences and made up of director’s comments and dialogue. The perception of the simultaneous becomes a sequence of text.
Controlling the difference between observation and transcripts of observation is as much a part of controlling the description as it is a reflection on the fabrication and “artificiality” of the data. Limiting what the case should be provides benefits not only for the selection of what the description will entail but also often for the style of presentation. Aside from implicit and explicit contextual judgments, just through its formal arrangement (or its belonging to a specific genre: from an ostensibly neutral explanatory text to the report oriented closely on the field to the narration enhanced by literature), it contains its own explanatory rules for subsequent interpretations. Whatever may be the result of the control, it leads principally to the insight that the scientific interpretation of data is a secondhand interpretation of life.
Scientific understanding (the controlled putting forth of data to which of course all products and documents of human activity count as or can be made into natural data) can only then begin systematically and methodically reflectively if the data are provided discursively. They must be recorded in some way. It must be possible for interpreters to examine them, interpret them, and turn them around again and again. In short, the “fleeting,” as it is not fixed, attention of everyday interaction can, by way of the establishment and continuous recallability of the data, be made permanent. Then even “the most unremitting attention,” as Dilthey ([1900]1962) knew,
can become a skillful method, in which a controllable degree of objectivity is reached, only if the expression of life is fixed and we are able to return to it again and again. We call such skillful comprehension of constantly fixed expressions of life exegesis or interpretation. (p. 318)
Beyond this, it becomes apparent that both scientifically “constructed” and “natural” data are actually constructions. Both are given (back) the status of first-order constructions if one inquires beyond their specific contexts, integrates them into a more general horizon of understanding, and thereby indicates their objectively possible, general potential for meaning—that is, if the case-specific significance of action is made evident in contrast to a general horizon of significance. Such an interpretation aims for a reconstruction of a social first-order construction, oriented along the lines of the case structure of the documented action. It is case specifically laid out, elaborating for the case, “interpretive understanding” of social action in Weber’s sense of the term.
The path from the interpretive understanding to the “causal” explanation of the procedure and the effects of social action passes through the construction of a theoretically pure type of subjective meaning attributed to the hypothetical actor or actors in a given type of action: a second-order construction. Only in the realm of the ideal-typical constructions of rational action can it be decided how an actor “would act in a scenario of ideal rational action” and would have acted. Only with the help of these ideal-typical constructions, which better serve their purpose terminologically, classificationally, and heuristically the more “abstract and unrealistic” they are, can comparisons with the documented actors be made. Only then is it possible “to explain causally” the gap between action in ideal-typical rational action on one hand and documented action on the other so that the elements of the case being examined that were mixed in with the “pure rational action” can be identified.
The specific individual case is thus exclusively causally explained with regard to its distance from and difference to the terminologically “pure” ideal type of rational action. The individual case cannot be understood by the causal explanation of the difference—the opposite is true. By way of the interpretive understanding of social action, the constructions of ideal types can be found, which in turn cast light on the individual case and help it get its just deserve. In that they explain the case’s difference to the ideal type, they aid in the understanding of a case in its singularity and concretion.
In this sense, sociology is the progressive interpretive understanding of social action that takes seriously the individual case and thereby people, their orders, and their history. The scientific second-order constructions, the historic-genetic ideal types, aim exactly and equally for this historical understanding of the individual case and the understanding of history.
Social scientific, historic reconstructive hermeneutics is thus much more than a methodology and the repertoire of procedures that spring from it. It is a specific historic self-reflexive style of perception with the background supposition that there is no conclusive, ahistorical, ensurable knowledge, no social theory of a final solution. And this style of perception succeeds in naming good reasons for its background supposition.