Can human actions be explained?

Yes, it can be explained using the hermeneutics

However, there is a problem, the hermeneutical circle

Critiques of the hermeneutical circle

Follesdal’s hypothetico-deductive method which is a plausible solution to the problem of the circle

Human actions can be explained.

1. On the “hermeneutical circle”:

(a) What is it?

Heideger proposed that hermeneutic phenomenology is the method of investigation most appropriate to the study of human action. This method is an innovative development of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Hermeneutics involves an attempt to describe and study meaningful human phenomena in a careful and detailed manner as free as possible from prior theoretical assumptions, based instead on practical understanding. What is meant by practical understanding will become clearer later. Heidegger’s method is hermeneutic because there is a need for interpretation when one is explicating experience. Hermeneutics was originally a set of techniques for interpreting written texts. Initially it was developed for the examination of biblical texts, carried out to uncover and reconstruct the message from god that it was believed the texts contained but that had become hidden. Later it became generalized to a method of textual interpretation that was not restricted to religious works. With Schleiermacher and Dilthey, it was generalized still further to apply also to human action. When we adopt a hermeneutic approach to human action, we essentially treat the action as though it has a semantic and textual structure. The philosophical hermeneutics approach rejects a subject/object ontology in which knowledge consists of an accurate representation of an external world in the mind of a subject. Instead, explaining the beliefs of a culture or society, whether our own or a foreign one, entails a kind of dialogue with it. The process of coming to understand a culture, society or social practice is analogous to a conversation with another person, especially one aimed at getting to know the other person. In such a conversation, both participants may have their views challenged, their presuppositions about the other exposed, and in the process a better understanding of themselves and their conservation partner will emerge. This different understanding of the nature of the object of inquiry is one of several differences between hermeneutics and the two currently dominant paradigms of investigation and explanation in the social sciences and in psychology in particular: the rationalist and the empiricist approaches.

We can best appreciate the character of the hermeneutic approach by comparing and contasting it with these two other paradigms. Within rationalism lies structuralism and much of cognitive science; empiricism includes behaviourism and positivist experimentalism. I will contrast these three paradigms in three areas: their assumptions about the nature and origin of knowledge, the kind of object they set out to study, and the type of explanation they seek.

(b) Where does it apply?

(c) Who claims that it poses a problem?

Martin Heidegger (1927) developed the concept of the hermeneutic circle to envision a whole in terms of a reality that was situated in the detailed experience of everyday existence by an individual (the parts). So understanding was developed on the basis of "fore-structures" of understanding, that allow external phenomena to be interpreted or in a preliminary way.

Gadamer (1975) further developed this concept, leading to what is recognized as a break with previous hermeneutic traditions. While Heidegger saw the hermeneutic process as cycles of self-reference that situated our understanding in a priori prejudices, Gadamer reconceptualized the hermeneutic circle as an iterative process through which a new understanding of a whole reality is developed by means of exploring the detail of existence. Gadamer viewed understanding as linguistically mediated, through conversations with others in which reality is explored and an agreement is reached that represents a new understanding.

(d) What problem, if any, does it pose?

1)

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

To understand an action we have to understand the intention with which persons do what they do. This intention can be said to unify the various bits of behaviour which realise the action. Now in order to understand this intention we have to also understand the beliefs and desires that prompt the individual parts of the action. But in order to understand what the beliefs and desires are that prompt the individual parts of the action, we must also understand the overall intention which makes the whole behaviour into an action.

The “hermeneutical circle” also poses a problem to the sciences that use interpretation: can we ever test an interpretation?

To convince another of our preferred interpretation, we must bring him/her to understand the language of the original text/the mental states behind the behaviour as we do. To achieve this, we must show how our interpretation coheres with already accepted interpretations and renders darker passages/behaviours clearer etc. But we can never offer evidence that is not an interpretation itself: to establish reading for the whole, we appeal to readings of specific parts, yet meanings of parts also depend on meaning of whole. Accordingly, interpretive social science is sharply distinguished from natural science by having no obvious decision procedure. Rather we need "insight" (and one person’s insight is another’s flight of fancy).

2)

In encountering a text, especially a dense, complex text, our understanding of each part is based on our understanding of the whole, including its personal and cultural context; and yet we can only build up our understanding of the whole (and its context) by understanding the different parts of which the text is constructed. Initially, our understanding of the whole is made up entirely of a “forestructure” of the expectations or pre-understandings that we have brought to our encounter with the text we are trying to understand. Paradoxically, it is these that make understanding possible in the first place; and yet, clearly, these expectations or even prejudices are at the same time the major impediment to truly understanding the text. Furthermore, this paradox is fundamental not only to our understanding of texts, but also our coming to know any novel situation or even other human beings. The hermeneutic circle thus raises the question of how it is possible for human beings to understand one another.

3)

Gadamer argues that we never know a historical work as it originally appeared to its contemporaries. We have no access to its original context of production or to the intentions of its author. Tradition is always alive. It is not passive and stifling, but productive and in constant development. Trying, as the earlier hermeneuticians did, to locate the (scientific) value of the humanities in their capacity for objective reconstruction is bound to be a wasted effort. The past is handed over to us through the complex and ever-changing fabric of interpretations, which gets richer and more complex as decades and centuries pass. History, as Gadamer puts it, is always effective history. This, however, is not a deficiency. It is, rather, a unique possibility, a possibility that involves the particular kind of truth-claim that Gadamer ascribes to the human sciences: the truth of self-understanding.

At the end of the day, Gadamer claims, it is not really we who address the texts of tradition, but the canonic texts that address us. Having traveled through decades and centuries, the classic works of art, literature, science, and philosophy question us and our way of life. Our prejudices, whatever aspects of our cultural horizon that we take for granted, are brought into the open in the encounter with the past. As a part of the tradition in which we stand, historical texts have an authority that precedes our own. Yet this authority is kept alive only to the extent that it is recognized by the present. We recognize the authority of a text (or a work of art) by engaging with it in textual explication and interpretation, by entering into a dialogical relationship with the past. It is this movement of understanding that Gadamer refers to as the fusion of horizons. As we come, through the work of interpretation, to understand what at first appears alien, we participate in the production of a richer, more encompassing context of meaning—we gain a better and more profound understanding not only of the text but also of ourselves. In the fusion of horizons, the initial appearance of distance and alienness does itself emerge as a function of the limitations of our own initial point of departure.

Obtaining a fusion of horizons requires us to engage with the text in a productive way. This, however, is not something we can learn by coming to master a certain doctrine, method, or theory. It is more like a tacit capacity, which we acquire by following the example of others. The knowledge at stake is like a practical know-how; it resembles the Aristotelian phronesis. It is a knowledge that can neither be deduced theoretically, nor be fully articulated, but that rests on a kind of tact or sensitivity that is only exhibited in the form of exemplary judgments and interpretations.

This co-determination of text and reader is Gadamer's version of the hermeneutic circle. As important as the interplay between the parts and the whole of a text is the way in which our reading contributes to its effective history, adding to the complexity and depth of its meaning. The meaning of the text is not something we can grasp once and for all. It is something that exists in the complex dialogical interplay between past and present. Just as we can never master the texts of the past, so do we fail—necessarily and constitutively—to obtain conclusive self-knowledge. Gaining knowledge of tradition and knowing ourselves are both interminable processes; they are tasks without determinate end-points. This is the philosophical gist of Gadamer's humanistic ontology: that our being, historically conditioned as it is, is always more being (Sein) than conscious being (Bewusstsein).

4)

Understanding is a process continuously changing over time. There is no final state resulting in divine insight to all knowledge. Recall the example of baking a blueberry cake. Early in the learning process of baking a cake, understanding involves the ability to follow a recipe. At a later point, understanding consists in profound knowledge of how adding a certain ingredient will enhance the taste of the blueberry cake. Understanding requires the ability to identify a relevant relation in a domain, which provides the possibility to understand more complex aspects of the domain.

Gaining new knowledge requires going back and forth between hypotheses and the material until a fit is achieved (Føllesdal, 2001). The fit between the hypothesis and the investigated material must be suitable both for the whole and for the parts of the investigated material. The interpretation of the material is always affected every time a new viewpoint is considered. This is called the process of the hermeneutic circle. The fluctuation between the whole and the part is one part in the hermeneutic circle. According to Føllesdal (2001) there is a question-answer circle and a subject object circle as well. He describes these circles in relation to the interpretation of texts. However, I claim that these circles can be applied and used for describing what happens when understanding occurs. The question-answer circle can be applied to understanding a knowledge domain, like the French revolution, and changes occurring as we gain more understanding of the material. In the same way as an interpretation changes when a text is studied, the same occurs with understanding.

5)

Given his extension of the domain of hermeneutics from texts to all “manifestations of the human spirit”, the hermeneutic circle affects also the understanding of what humans do: their action. Here we can perhaps reformulate the problem in out terminology as follows.

To understand an action we have to understand the intention with which persons do what they do. This intention can be said to unify the various bits of behaviour which realise the action. Now in order to understand this intention we have to also understand the beliefs and desires that prompt the individual parts of the action. But in order to understand what the beliefs and desires are that prompt the individual parts of the action, we must also understand the overall intention which makes the whole behaviour into an action.

The “hermeneutical circle” also poses a problem to the sciences that use interpretation: can we ever test an interpretation?

To convince another of our preferred interpretation, we must bring him/her to understand the language of the original text/the mental states behind the behaviour as we do. To achieve this, we must show how our interpretation coheres with already accepted interpretations and renders darker passages/behaviours clearer etc. But we can never offer evidence that is not an interpretation itself: to establish reading for the whole, we appeal to readings of specific parts, yet meanings of parts also depend on meaning of whole. Accordingly, interpretive social science is sharply distinguished from natural science by having no obvious decision procedure. Rather we need "insight" (and one person’s insight is another’s flight of fancy).

2. What is the “hypothetico-deductive method”? (What relation, if any, does it bear to the “deductive-nomological model” of scientific explanation?)

As the name indicates, it is an application of two operations: the formation of hypotheses and the deduction of consequences from them in order to arrive at beliefs which - although they are hypothetical - are well supported, through the way their deductive consequences fit in with our experiences and with our other well-supported beliefs.

The hypothetico-deductive method aims at establishing a set of hypotheses concerning the subject matter that we are studying. Together with our beliefs these hypotheses form a comprehensive hypothetico-deductive system which is logically consistent and fits in with all our experience. The beliefs that make up such a hypothetico-deductive system are not justified “from above”, as they are in an axiomatic system, where the axioms are supposed to be justified by some special kind of insight or necessity. Instead, they are justified from below, through their consequences. In a hypothetico- deductive system, the hypotheses are never known with certainty.

From a system of hypotheses an infinite number of consequences follow and there is always a risk that some of these consequences may turn out not to fit in with our experience. Some of the consequences relate, for example, to our future experiences, these are the predictions of the theory, and only time may show whether they are true. Further, even if all the consequences should fit in with our experience, the same consequences may be derived also from other hypotheses, as was observed by several philosophers already in antiquity and the Middle Ages, as e. g. Simplicius and Thomas Aquinas. The question then arises as to which of these hypotheses we should believe. As you know, the simplicity of our total set of hypotheses, i. e. our theory, is generally considered decisive. The notion of simplicity includes several different factors that we regard as important for the evaluation of a theory, as for example the variety of different data that are accounted for by the same set of hypotheses.

3. Follesdal claims that the hypothetico-deductive method can be applied in the interpretation of meaningful materials. How close is the analogy between the use of the HD-method in science and in the interpretation of meaningful materials ?

(a) Are the “hypotheses” that are to be established of the same logical form? (Are they universal sentences (as in HD-method applied to DN-model)?

(b) Are the consequences of the interpretive hypotheses established by (strict) deduction?

4. What is a “reflective equilibrium”? How does the use of the HD-method help us in reaching such a reflective equilibrium?

When our theories change, then also many of our intuitions change, so that we often must go repeatedly back and forth between our intuitions and our theories before we arrive at a reflective equilibrium, as Rawls has called it, where our theories and our intuitions fit in with one another.

This is also the case when we interpret literary texts. Our interpretation of the words and sentences is influenced by our interpretation of the whole work, but the interpretation of the whole work depends of course on the interpretation of the individual parts, so that we often have to go for a long time back and forth between whole and part before we arrive at a “reflective equilibrium”, that is, a satisfactory interpretation, where the interpretation of the whole and the interpretation of the parts fit in with one another. This movement back and forth, which is so conspicuous in the humanities and the social sciences, is what is usually called the “hermeneutic circle”. It is particularly striking in the humanities, but as we noted, we find it in the natural sciences as well.

5. What are the conditions that Follesdal offers for when a hypothesis concerning meaningful material (an interpretation) is to be accepted?

6. Do you think that Follesdal provides a plausible solution to the problem of the hermeneutical circle?

Another solution

The answer to this puzzle turns out to be repeated careful readings, which means that the hermeneutic circle is really more of spiral, as we circle deeper and deeper into understanding a text, qualitative interview protocol, or another human being. This is because each encounter or reading brings us into contact with new aspects of the text or person, deepening our understanding. Our reading moves tentatively at first in a kind of dialog, back and forth, gradually both deepening and opening up the text or person to us. Although this process is never really complete, it eventually reaches far enough to satisfy our immediate purposes, as researchers or fellow human beings.