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30 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism manner, as many of the participants have done, obscures the areas in which there has been a significant movement beyond objectivism and relativism. THE RECOVERY OF THE HERMENEUTICAL DIMENSION OF SCIENCE One way to begin to appreciate how these discussions converge and help to illuminate each other is to view them from the perspective of hermeneutics. As I have already mentioned, Winch was attempting to show how themes concerning the nature of meaning and action that were emerging from analytic philosophy, especially Wittgenstein 's Philosophical Investigations, were related to the major themes in the continental tradition of interpretative sociology. But if we consider this latter tradition, it was itself part of the general discussion that was taking place during the nineteenth century concerning the relation of the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften . Insofar as one strand in this complex discussion had been the claim that these two types of sciences are conceptually distinct, requiring different methods, Winch's arguments about the logical gap between the social and the natural can be understood as a linguistic version of the dichotomy between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Even the arguments that he uses to justify his claims sometimes read like a translation, in the new linguistic idiom, of those advanced by Dilthey.44 Dilthey drew upon hermeneutics , especially as it had been developed by Schleiermacher, to bring out what he took to be both the distinctive subject matter and the method of the Geisteswissenschaften, especially "historical reason." In the twentieth century, both the understanding and the scope of hermeneutics have been dramatically extended by Heidegger and other thinkers working in the phenomenological tradition, including HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. In contemporary reexaminations of the social disciplines there has been a recovery of the hermeneutical dimension, with its thematic emphasis on understanding and interpretation. This is also what has been happening in the postempiricist philosophy and history of science. Kuhn himself remarks in the preface to his recent collection of articles, What I as a physicist had to discover for myself, most historians learn by example in the course of professional training. Consciously or not, they are 31 An Overview all practitioners of the hermeneutic method. In my case, however, the discovery of hermeneutics did more than make history seem consequential. Its most immediate and decisive effect was instead on my view of science"S And he also states, The early models of the sort of history that has so influenced me and my historical colleagues is the product of a post-Kantian European tradition which I and my philosophical colleagues continue to find opaque. In my own case, for example, even the term "hermeneutic," to which I resorted briefly above, was no part of my vocabulary as recently as five years ago. Increasingly, I suspect that anyone who believes that history may have deep philosophical import will have to learn to bridge the longstanding divide between the Continental and English-language philosophical traditions.46 Kuhn sometimes uses the term "hermeneutic" in a weak sense to mean the type of sensitive reading that has always been considered essential in the hermeneutical tradition. The maxim that he offers to his students is one that we could find in almost any discussion of hermeneutics: When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.47 Such a maxim might lead one to think that what I am calling the "recovery" of the hermeneutical dimension of science is limited to the task of writing the history of science. There is, however, a much stronger and much more consequential sense in which the hermeneutical dimension of science has been recovered. In the critique of naive and even of sophisticated forms of logical positivism and empiricism; in the questioning of the claims of the primacy of the hypothetical-deductive model of explanation; in the questioning of the sharp dichotomy that has been made between observation and theory (or observational and theoretical language); in the insistence on the underdetermination of theory by fact; and in the exploration of the ways in which all description and observation are theoryimpregnated , we find claims and arguments that are consonant with those that have been at the very heart of hermeneutics...

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