Interpretation and Objectivity

Family Feuds: Positivism and Dilthey’s Hermeneutics

Weber’s philosophy of social science is interesting in part because it draws on but refuses to resolve the most important debates raging in the philosophy of social science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, contemporary thinkers have frequently taken up his work and evaluated its successes and deficiencies largely through the lens of these debates, the most significant of which has centered on the distinction between the natural sciences on one hand and the social or human sciences on the other, and on the status of interpretation among the methods used in these sciences. To begin, then, we must take a brief look at these debates, framed in large part around a philosophical divide between thinkers in the social sciences who advocated for a form of positivism in line with natural scientific models on one hand and thinkers who embraced a more interpretive, hermeneutic model on the other.

Max Weber between Positivism and Hermeneutics

The furor that Dilthey displays in attacking positivist visions of the unity of natural and human science can suggest an either/or attitude with regard to this debate. Either you agree with the positivists that the human sciences ought to adopt the methods of the natural sciences and leave interpretive understanding to aesthetics or you agree with the humanists that the human sciences, concerned as they are with meaningful social phenomena, must develop a separate methodology that embraces interpretation as the appropriate means to gain understanding of the social world. Indeed, today, more than a century after Dilthey’s initial exchange with the positivists, this framing of the debate persists particularly in the social science disciplines that embraced the positivist project most strongly—economics, sociology, and political science. But as early as the turn of the last century, there was considerable unease about this way of framing the issue, and no thinker more explicitly embodies the desire, in the words of one commentator, to “have it both ways” than Max Weber.

The critic and Weber scholar W. G. Runciman (1972, 16) characterized Weber’s thinking on this topic quite well:

Weber’s position . . . should be construed as a self-conscious and deliberate attempt to have it both ways. He agrees with the Positivists that the social sciences are value-free and causal. But he denies that this agreement is incompatible with the view that there is nevertheless a difference of kind between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man. Or to look at it the other way around: he acknowledges the peculiarities of human social behaviour as a subject for science, but believes it possible to allow for them without compromising scientific method.

As this diagnosis of apparent eclecticism may suggest, Weber’s philosophy of social science is complex and nuanced to the point of being quite baffling. The situation is not helped by the fact that Weber’s contributions in this field span decades and include not only systematic works of social theory, but also polemical reviews of others’ work, lectures, and other occasional pieces, social and economic history, mature works of sociology, and even the occasional essay on topics directly related to the philosophy of social science. Nonetheless, an attempt should be made to understand in broad outlines the ways in which Weber managed for a time to broker a tentative peace between the conflicting views.

Key to this work was Weber’s observation that the near-polar opposition of the human to the natural as understood by Dilthey was overdrawn. For instance, Weber agrees with Dilthey and others that where the natural sciences take primary interest in the quantitative and exact aspects of the phenomena they study, the human sciences may also concern themselves with the qualitative, psychological, and intellectual (Geistig) aspects of the phenomena that concern them, and, thus, must maintain a prominent place for empathic understanding beyond that recognized by the methodology of the natural sciences. Nonetheless, he notes, “this distinction in itself is not a distinction in principle. . . . Aside from pure mechanics, even the exact natural sciences do not proceed without qualitative categories” (Weber 1977b, 26). Although it may be tempting to read into Weber contemporary understandings of the qualitative aspect of all understanding, natural or social, this is not Weber’s ambition. Instead, he is merely following Heinrich Rickert in pointing out that natural science, too, takes its points of reference from the qualitative social world in the form of the subjective interests and social context of the scientific researchers. Scientists are subjective, socially situated, and saddled with value-judgments. Science itself in Weber’s view can and should still aspire to objectivity and value-neutrality—a distinction of some importance, and one that we will return to below.

Weber is not solely interested in revealing the respects in which natural science resembles human science. Rather, he turns his attention to the human sciences and notes the ways in which it can and should follow the natural sciences. Note Weber’s (1977a, 49) definition of a “law” in social science, paying special attention to his use of ideas drawn from both positive and hermeneutic traditions: “[Laws are] typical probabilities confirmed by observation to the effect that under certain given conditions an expected course of action will occur, which is understandable in terms of the typical motives and typical subjective intentions of the actors.” Much of the first part of this statement recalls the deductive-nomological account of scientific explanation forwarded by positivists: the language of laws combined with “certain given conditions” draws directly from this account. The second half of the definition, however, draws on the hermeneutic tradition: the language of understanding, motives, and “subjective intentions of the actors” vividly recalls Dilthey’s philosophy of “lived experience.” For Weber, social science will at times focus on the law-like regularities of human behavior that can give rise to something like prediction. Alternately, social scientists can make use of the kind of empathetic understanding emphasized by Dilthey to focus in on the concrete actions of particular individuals or specific cases. The approach preferred at a given time is a product of the subjective values and the interests of the scientist.

So Weber’s philosophy of social science manages to incorporate features of both positivist and humanist visions of science. He maintains a place in the social sciences for causal, explanatory laws, but also “attempted to incorporate the concept of interpretation into his account of social-scientific explanation, and thus to bridge the chasm that Dilthey and others had dug between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’” (Outhwaite 1985, 33). He retains a place for the interpretation of subjective intentions and the subjective understandings of meanings as well as allowing for the subjective orientations of the scientist, but notes that “it obviously does not follow from this that research in the cultural sciences can only have results which are ‘subjective’ in the sense that they are valid for one person and not for others” (Weber 1977b, 32). In fact, Weber (1977b, 36) has a rather robust understanding of the objectivity of sociological knowledge, albeit objectivity of a very specific type:

The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests exclusively on the ordering of the given reality according to categories which are subjective in a specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of our knowledge and are based on the presuppositions of the value of those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us.

In short, objective empirical knowledge is possible, but only on the basis of presuppositions that are subjective in the sense that they are oriented by human interest and values. Weber’s guarded approach to objectivity is evident throughout the essay quoted above, where the term is frequently presented in quotation marks. ² This proposition was at the time and continues to be controversial. The extent to which Weber succeeded at his ambitious project remains a matter of considerable debate, but if his goal was to bring debates concerning the relationship between the human and the natural sciences on the basis of their shared objectivity to a close, he clearly failed. This failure is most apparent in the divergent legacies that Weber himself can claim: on one hand, Weber is praised by some for taking a decisive step away from interpretive understanding toward a unified vision of science beholden to the model of the natural sciences, and, on the other hand, Weber is lauded by others as an interpretive scientist par excellence, responsible for establishing the legitimacy of interpretive social science against the impositions of the positivists.

A preeminent example of the former legacy is offered by prominent Weber translator and social theorist Talcott Parsons. In the introduction to his English language translation of Weber’s Economy and Society, Parsons puts forward his interpretation of Weber as solidly in the positivist tradition of unifying human and natural science, writing,

What Weber did was to take an enormous step in the direction of bridging the gap between the two types of science, and to make possible the treatment of social material in a systematic scientific manner rather than as an art. But he failed to complete the process, and the nature of the half-way point at which he stopped helps to account for many of the difficulties of his position. (Dallmayr and McCarthy 1977b, 21)

As this excerpt makes clear, Parsons acknowledges that interpretive aspects remain in Weber’s philosophy of social science, but ultimately believes that these elements held Weber back, accounting for “the difficulties of his position.” According to this reading, Weber is “bridging the gap” between the human and the natural sciences by importing into the former the methodology—the “systematic scientific manner”—of the latter. The major flaw of Weber’s position, for Parsons, is that he did not go far enough.

The opposed camp, which sees Weber as a proponent of a kind of hermeneutics in the Dilthean tradition, is well represented by Jürgen Habermas. Responding directly to Parsons’s reading of Weber, Habermas (1977, 66) accepts large portions of the characterization of Weber as “interested in knowledge as a part of his general theory of social behaviour,” and allows that within that general theory, “Weber accords methodologically subordinate status to the understanding of meaning.” But, he continues, Weber’s interest in human knowledge stretched far beyond his commitment to a general theory of social behavior, and that the “deduction and verification of hypotheses concerned with laws . . . form preliminary studies, which as such do not lead us straight to ‘the knowledge we are striving for’.” It is not in the formulation and testing of such hypotheses, but rather in interpreting their significance that knowledge of the social world lies. From this viewpoint, Weber is less the torchbearer of positivist science than an early practitioner of interpretive science in the Dilthean mold.

Regardless of where one falls in this debate over Weber’s legacy, it seems clear that although Weber, perhaps inadequately but in any case courageously, engaged these issues head on in his work, contemporary social science continues to fixate on the clash between positivism and interpretivism, naturalism and humanism. The truth, as Weber attests, seems to be that these two traditions of thought are not so antithetically positioned as contemporary social scientific discourse—with its emphasis on diametrically opposed camps or “separate tables”—prefers to see them. In fact, they share certain important premises, premises that Weber and others valued sufficiently to allow them to hold to versions of both positivism and interpretivism simultaneously. These premises have since, however, been undermined, and it is this new situation that contemporary social science must grapple with.

“An Extraordinary Reversal”

The reversal that ultimately subverted the premises shared by both positivism and Dilthean hermeneutics took place not on the contested battleground of the philosophy of social science, but rather in the formerly stable natural sciences. While these thinkers disagreed as to the appropriate relationship between the natural sciences and the human sciences, theorists from Comte and Dilthey through Weber took it as established that these methods and the philosophies of science that supported them were both perfectly appropriate in the natural sciences, and oriented toward an ideal of objectivity. Throughout the twentieth century, however, these shared understandings came under sustained attack, with surprising results for the philosophy of social science. Somewhat less surprising was the original locus of these attacks.

Of the major tenets that the positivist theories of science discussed above borrowed from the philosophy of natural science, the weakest historically has been its somewhat naïve empiricism. Even Hume, an early proponent of the view that the constant conjunction of observed events was the route to scientific understanding, had his doubts. The sociologist William Outhwaite (1991, 26) notes that in light of its weaknesses, “the history of empiricist philosophy of science in the twentieth century is basically that of its dissolution or at least its transmutation.”

The decline in faith in empiricism was symptomatic of a more general fall from grace for the natural sciences. It certainly did not help matters that some of the greatest difficulties with classical models of scientific understanding were being encountered in physics, the branch of natural science revered as a paragon to positivists. The coup de grâce came at the hands of a sociologist of science—T. S. Kuhn—who set out to understand how members of the scientific community come to embrace explanations of the physical world that seem to directly contradict received knowledge (as appeared to be the case when Einstein proposed relativity). His argument that theory change in the natural sciences, or the shift from one “paradigm” to another, contained irrational elements, and the suggestion that the perseverance of scientific theories had as much to do with intellectual inertia as with the merits of particular theories undercut the popular image of natural science as guided above all by reason and objective truth.

These developments—the decline of faith in empiricism, and the doubt cast by Kuhn and others on the rationality and objectivity of natural science—seemed to conspire to bring about the reversal alluded to above: a kind of parity was established between the human and the natural sciences, although not in the way envisioned by the positivists. Rather than unifying the human and the natural sciences under the methodology of positivism, these developments brought the two scientific traditions together in their mutual dependence on interpretation as the route to understanding. Interpretation was no longer a wedge that divided the human and natural sciences, but rather a shared (if hidden) premise. Charles Taylor (1980, 26) summarizes the results of this strange development for the human sciences with characteristic wit:

This is an extraordinary reversal. Old-guard Diltheans, their shoulders hunched from years-long resistance against the encroaching pressure of positivist natural science, suddenly pitch forward on their faces as all opposition ceases to the reign of universal hermeneutics.

The continuing relevance of Weber’s approach is well illustrated in the shadow of Taylor’s “extraordinary reversal.” Weber offers a route to rescuing objectivity from the relativizing effects of this extraordinary reversal. But in revisiting Weber, it is necessary to introduce a thinker whose own approach to interpretation and objectivity will allow us to re-appropriate Weber’s position in the contemporary context.

Revisiting Weber

As long as the role of interpretation in inquiry and the objective/subjective status of social scientific knowledge were viewed predominantly through the lens of the distinction between the natural and the social sciences, it was inevitable that Weber would appear as either an incomplete positivist or a halfhearted humanist. Weber’s refusal of the either/or that characterized this framing—either you minimize interpretation in search of objectivity or you embrace interpretive methodologies and raise the possibility that all social scientific knowledge is purely subjective or even relative—is revealed as a careful and subtle both/and, but one that must be revised for the contemporary context.

As noted above, a distinction between science and the scientist is central to Weber’s both/and. Weber’s (1978, 78) view was that,

anyone engaged in research or in presenting its results should keep two things absolutely separate, because they involve different kinds of problem: first, the statement of empirical facts (including facts established by him about the “evaluative” behavior of the empirical human beings whom he is studying); and secondly, his own practical value-position, that is, his judgment and, in this sense, “evaluation” of these facts (including possible “value-judgments” made by empirical human beings, which have themselves become an object of investigation) as satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

In other words, we can distinguish in principle and in practice between the evaluative stance of the scientist and the empirical truth of the facts under examination. Weber argued consistently that the major source of confusion around the ideas of “facts” and “values” in the social sciences revolved around the refusal or inability to recognize these as two distinct questions. ³ Do social scientists themselves harbor evaluative attitudes toward the social world that influence the decision to take up this or that sociological question, either at the level of broad causal laws or with reference to specific cases? Weber averred that this is demonstrably the case. Can social science deal objectively with empirical facts of human existence, which facts include the value-judgments and subjective interpretations of human actors themselves? Weber answered this question, too, in the affirmative, while acknowledging the special challenges that social science faces. Both questions are important, even crucial, for Weber, but they must be kept separate.

In one sense, Weber was well ahead of Kuhn. As early as 1913, Weber was devoting sustained attention to the extent to which the subjective values of the researcher inevitably orient and frame the object of research. However, and, unlike Kuhn, Weber hewed to the belief that this subjective orientation of the scientist was separable from the work of science itself, which proceeds on the basis of the objective observation of empirical facts, including facts about values. This is a problematic position in light of Kuhn’s work and the related decline in faith in the unassailability of empiricism. Thus, although returning to Weber provides instructive insight into the methods and practices of the social sciences that remained obscure when viewed through the lens of the either/or orientation of debate within the philosophy of social science, his position remains somewhat problematic even as this lens is removed. To reconcile Weber with the post-positivist insights discussed by Taylor, it is necessary to turn to another thinker invested in debates over interpretation, objectivity, and meaning.

In his magnum opus, Truth and Method, the German philologist and philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that the Dilthean view of interpretation as methodology (a view that remains prominent today) was unnecessarily limiting. Interpretation is not one methodology among many, he argued, but the prerequisite of all human understanding. In Gadamer’s (1989, 474) view, the medium for all meaning is language, and for this meaning to be understood, the language must be interpreted:

We can now see that this activity of the thing itself, the coming into language of meaning, points to a universal ontological structure, namely to the basic nature of everything toward which understanding can be directed. Being that can be understood is language.

Our touch point for understanding the world, in other words, is not empirical observation as positivism insisted, but language. The world around us, insofar as it is meaningful, can be understood only in and through language. ⁴ Along these lines, Gadamer (1989, xxviii) famously stated in the preface to the revised second edition of his Truth and Method that “[His] real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.” By noting that his concern was not with “what we do or what we ought to do,” Gadamer was attempting to clear up a confusion that had followed the publication of Truth and Method by explicitly stating that he was not concerned with method as such—he was not taking a stance “against method,” as Paul Feyerabend (1978) would do—rather he was concerning himself more fundamentally with the basic prerequisites of all human understanding. To understand, he claimed, was to interpret. There is no more immediate form of understanding, empirical or otherwise. Hermeneutics was, from this perspective, universal.

This insight into the universality of hermeneutic understanding is not unique to Gadamer; in fact, this insight played a large role in the “extraordinary reversal” described above. As a result of this move, any pretensions of complete objectivity on the part of the interpreter are called radically into question (Gadamer 1983, 1989, 284–85, 456). If interpretation is always in part an application to one’s own situation, then complete distanciation from the meaning or truth of the text and the tradition that bears this meaning cannot possibly be accomplished. Objectivity in this naïve sense is not only impossible in light of this implication, though; it is entirely inappropriate. Insofar as we understand, we interpret and apply; and this extends far beyond textual interpretation to include one’s entire understanding of the world—natural, physical, social. This is simply our way of being in the world.

But Gadamer does not take the universality of hermeneutics to imply pure relativism or even subjectivism. If the characteristic fault of naïve objectivism is to artificially create distance between the interpreter and the text, the more serious fault of subjectivism is the confusion of the meaning of the text with the psychological states either of the author or of the interpreter. Gadamer was, after all, a student of Heidegger’s, and the latter’s antagonism toward subjectivism in favor of an ontologically distinct, nonhumanist understanding of Being constitutes one of his major contributions to the philosophy of the twentieth century. Beyond rejecting subjectivism and relativism, though, Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be read as contributing to a more sophisticated, nuanced notion of objectivity distinct from that implied by the naïve objectivism based on empirical truth claims espoused by early positivist approaches.

This argument for objectivity without objectivism challenges a dominant reading of Gadamer that has him rejecting the possibility of any form of objectivity. ⁵ Although Gadamer does disavow objectivism, it is important to note that this rejection understands objectivity in one or both of two primary senses. In the first case, we have the naïve objectivism of positivist social science, discussed above. Bernstein helpfully defines this view as “the basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the basis of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness or rightness. . . .” Gadamer (1989, 284–85) explicitly rejects such a position. In the second case, we have the “hermeneutic objectivism” of Dilthey (Habermas 1990, 28), which suggests that the interpreter of a text or historical phenomenon can remove herself and her own biases from the act of interpretation through an act of empathic distanciation—putting oneself in the position of another’s consciousness. Gadamer similarly rejects this view. Interpretation is not a process that removes us from our own particular position or prejudices. On the contrary, prejudice as prejudgment is not an obstacle to understanding, but rather a precondition of understanding. We understand from the perspective of one situated within a tradition, constituted by an entire complex of prejudices (prejudgments) and foreunderstandings. It is only from this situated perspective that we can understand at all.

But, much as Weber’s challenging of the naturalistic model of objectivity did not imply his rejection of objectivity as such, Gadamer’s rejection of objectivism in these senses need not imply a rejection of any aspiration to objectivity, certainly not if we associate objectivity with a notion of truth that exceeds the subjective impressions of a single individual. Throughout his work, Gadamer affirms the possibility of discerning truth in ways that are divorced from the methods familiar to positivism. Gadamer’s understanding of truth is surprisingly ambiguous and elusive, and has frustrated many of his most subtle readers (Risser 1997; Wachterhauser 1986, 1994), but there remains a consensus that Gadamer intends to affirm such a possibility. As Brice Wachterhauser (1994, 6) notes, “Gadamer’s most suggestive and important contribution consists, in my opinion, in his insistence that the contextualized nature of such truth claims is not a threat to their truth-value.” These truth claims relate to particular objects, although these objects must not be considered as distinct and separable from the hermeneutic situation. ⁶ Although Gadamer would resist the idea that the object of our knowledge must resemble the eternal and unchanging thing-in-itself for our knowledge to be valid, this rejection need not be taken to be so absolute as to require the rejection of the possibility of true knowledge of the objects described by Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Instead, as Stueber (1994, 182) notes, “Objectivity of knowledge and truth is established only within our linguistically mediated grasp of the world.”

Understood in this way, the contribution made by Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not to find a way past the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism by rejecting both, but rather to force a reconsideration of what is meant by objectivity by jettisoning the more problematic elements of a naïve objectivism. In short, Gadamer makes a novel argument for the objectivity of truth claims, albeit an objectivity that is far removed from the empirical truth claims of positivism. In this sense, Gadamer works in a Weberian vein: comfortable acknowledging the subjective elements in human understanding, and equally insistent that objectivity remains a desirable and attainable end. The form of objectivity that Gadamer defends rests on his view of understanding in terms of what he calls the “fusion of horizons.”

The notion of a horizon in Gadamer (1989, 302) corresponds to a commonsense understanding that, to understand the world of a historical text, we must transplant ourselves from our own “horizon”—“the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point”—to the horizon of the text or historical moment that we are examining. Gadamer ultimately rejects this notion of distinct, closed horizons that require an empathetic dislocation and relocation of the understanding subject,

Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other.

This positing of a higher universality does several things for Gadamer. Not least of all, it lends weight to his assertion that the meaning of a text or historical moment is not “closed off” by the subjective intentions of the author or by the interpretive biases of the reader. Instead, we can speak intelligibly of the “truth” of a text that transcends the subjective views or preferences of either author or reader. More significantly for our purposes, it suggests the validity of objective truth claims even in the absence of empirical certainty.

To see how this might be the case, it is helpful to see how Gadamer (1989, 306) applies this idea to historical understanding:

In fact the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices. An important part of this testing occurs in encountering the past and in understanding the tradition from which we come. Hence the horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past. There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.

The hermeneutical process mediating the relationship of the present with tradition involves neither the subordination of the horizon of the present to that of the past, nor the trumping of historical horizons with the horizon of the present. Rather, understanding emerges in the fusion of these horizons as the two are brought together in dialogue.

Gadamer (1989, 446) notes,

It must be emphasized that language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding. . . . Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another.

Gadamer affirms that our access to the past is by way of language itself, but this does not imply an “anything goes” approach to our understanding of historical events where each interpreter/historian is free to impose whatever subjective reading she would like on the past. Instead, we are restrained by the shared horizon that encompasses past and present. Our contemporary understanding is formed by and through the tradition of interpretation that is carried down by and through us as interpreters.

The relevance of this point for the social sciences lies in the fact that, like the subjective historian, social scientists are liable to view the world through their own subjective sets of lenses. But also like the historian, the social scientist is restrained in their interpretations—in this case, their truth claims—by both the history of interpretation, including the interpretations of social phenomena offered by social actors themselves, and the challenges posed by our fellow social scientists. The first portion of the block quote above is not incidental. The emphasis on the constant testing of our prejudices is a serious, and necessarily collective endeavor. The objectivity of the social sciences resides not in the empirical validity of observation (positivism) or in the stable expressions of lived experience grasped through understanding (Dilthey’s hermeneutics), but rather in this continually reexamined fusion of horizons that can be understood only in and through language, and that is necessarily communal. As Bernstein (1983, 154) notes, Gadamer’s notion of truth “amounts to what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters who open themselves to what tradition ‘says to us’.”

A number of difficulties arise in bringing Gadamerian hermeneutics to bear on Weber’s social science. It could be objected that by shifting the basis of objectivity from empirical observation to a fusion of horizons, we risk losing the basis for value-neutrality. In one sense, this is clearly the case. The fact-value distinction so characteristic of Weber’s approach is radically challenged by the universality of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In another sense, though, we can maintain a Weberian attitude with respect to the concern regarding relativism. Here, the emphasis on a fusion of horizons among interpreters in dialogue with a tradition of interpretation may appear rather too fluid, offering too many opportunities for the deleterious influence of individual or collective bias.

It is worth noting two points here. First, the objects of social scientific study are not infinitely malleable in the interpretations made available to social science. Second, value-neutrality, understood not as a characteristic of the individual scientist but rather as a characteristic of the scientific community, can withstand this challenge. In the first case, Gunnell offers a convincing defense of Weber’s philosophy of social science that is relevant to this point. Gunnell (2009, 14) notes that Weber, while demonstrating that “all social inquiry as a metapractical endeavor, is interpretive,” in the sense that the object of study is always already preconstituted in a web of interpretation woven by the objects themselves, also recognized that “interpretations [offered by social science] come up abruptly, both cognitively and practically, against the conceptual structure and content of the practices about which they speak.” The scientist, in other words, is not free to reinterpret social phenomena in any way she pleases, but is constrained by the object of study itself. I would add to this constraint the further limitation posed by the community of scientists. The partial or biased interpretation of the social scientist must also contend with the interpretations of competing observers. Even situations of institutional or broadly shared bias must confront the judgment of history, and in this sense have a chance to achieve objectivity. In this approach, objectivity is not a trait of the scientist so much as it is a trait of science as a continuous practice.

This approach also suggests that social science will be best able to approximate the objectivity appropriate to the unique objects that it studies when this social science is pluralistic in a meaningful sense. Gadamer’s appeals to authority and tradition should not be read in such a way as to close off engagement with the other, the marginalized, or the historically silenced. Quite the opposite, I would suggest. Gadamer’s discussion of the fusion of horizons continually references the value of confronting interpretations that bring one up short, forcing one to reconsider a dominant perspective in light of the view from another’s perspective (Gadamer 1989, 367–68). More than an approximation of the liberal argument for pluralism that argues in favor of a “marketplace of ideas,” this approach acknowledges that the object of knowledge itself is constituted in this confrontation, and that the subject herself is not the sovereign individual standing apart from this process, but is instead herself implicated in this dialogue.

Conclusion

Positivist philosophies of social science introduced the idea of a methodological unity between the natural and the human sciences, and this unity presupposed a minimization of interpretive elements in both forms of science. Objectivity in the human sciences as in the natural sciences would rest on the verifiable empirical evidence of the senses, particularly as evidenced in the behavior of actors. Dilthey, still viewing things through the lens of the relationship between the natural and the human sciences, sought a separate methodology for the human sciences, and saw hermeneutics as the science of interpretation as a prime candidate. In the midst of these methodological debates, Weber’s social science attempted to find a middle ground, incorporating interpretive elements, but hanging onto important aspects of positivist philosophy. By the 1960s, the debate had shifted, and the objectivity claims that Weber sought in the social sciences were shown to be problematic. Gadamer’s hermeneutics point the way toward a reconfigured understanding of interpretation that exceeds the boundaries of method, and that seeks objectivity in the notion of the fusion of horizons.

Freed of the bounds of the debate over the relationship between the natural and social sciences, Weber no longer appears as either an incomplete positivist or a halfhearted humanist. Instead, his insistence on distinguishing between the subjective values of the scientist and the claims to objectivity in science both anticipate and provide a way beyond the “extraordinary reversal” that undermined the distinction between social and natural science. Weber anticipated this development in his acknowledgment that scientists themselves, as Kuhn would convincingly demonstrate, are motivated by subjective, potentially even irrational values and interests. Whereas scholars such as Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty would embrace this idea and extend it to make a case for the subjectivism or even relativism of all scientific practice, returning to Weber provides us with an alternative approach. Rather than reading the subjective intent of scientists and the undermining of empiricism to necessarily obviate the objectivity of science, we can affirm the objectivity of science while acknowledging subjective intent. As Stueber (1994, 183) puts it, “Rather than urging us to give up the pursuit of objectivity, Rorty should have asked us to reconsider our definition of the objectivity of knowledge.” Although Weber’s own notions of objectivity are no longer adequate, Hans-Georg Gadamer points the way to an alternative understanding of objectivity that is more consistent with the undermining of empirical validity. With Weber, we can distinguish between the subjective scientist and the objective science. With Gadamer, we can embrace that the objectivity of science is not accomplished in spite of the subjectivity of the scientist, but rather with that subjectivity as a necessary prerequisite.