Page 10 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

xi Translator’s Introduction

of the methodological issues surrounding social inquiry in general
and critical theory in particular. One of his principal targets in
both books was the neopositivist thesis of the unity of scientific
method, the thesis, in particular, that the logic of scientific inquiry
in the human sciences is basically the same as that in the natural
sciences. In Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften the main line of
attack runs through a consideration of the nature and role of
Verstehen, or interpretive understanding, in social inquiry. Ex-
aming various verstehenden approaches to society—neo-Kantian
and Weberian, social interactionist, phenomenological and ethno-
methodological, linguistic and hermeneutic—Habermas argues
that access to a symbolically structured object domain calls for
procedures that are logically distinct from those developed in the
natural sciences, procedures designed to grasp the “meaning”
that is constitutive of social reality. Social action depends on the
agent’s “definition of the situation,” and this is not solely a matter
of subjective motivations. The meanings to which social action is
oriented are primarily intersubjective meanings constitutive of
the sociocultural matrix in which individuals find themselves and
act: inherited values and world views, institutionalized roles and
social norms, and so on. Any methodology that systematically
neglects the interpretive schemata through which social action is
itself mediated, that pursues the tasks of concept and theory
formation in abstraction from the prior categorical formation of
social reality, is doomed to failure. Sociological concepts are, 1n
Alfred Schutz’s words, ‘second-level constructs’; the “‘first-level
constructs” are those through which social actors have already
prestructured the social world prior to its scientific investigation.
Understanding the latter is a necessary point of departure for
constructing the former.
While arguing this point Habermas was careful, at the same
time, to distance himself from the view that interpretive under-
standing could be the sole methodological basis of social inquiry.
In his lengthy discussion of Gadamer’s philosophical hermenutics,
which he took to be the most developed form of this view, he
pointed out different aspects of social reality that called for modes
of inquiry going beyond the merely interpretive.’ For one thing,
the reduction of social research to the explication of meaning