Page 27 - Contribution To Phenomenology

20 LESTER EMBREE

There is, however, a clear distinction between the cultural sciences that
investigate individual life and those that investigate collective life, the
former being called "psychological sciences," while the latter can be called
the "communal sciences," at least while the differences between the social
sciences and the historical sciences within the communal type of science
are explored. Some believe that the historical sciences are confined to
textual data and thus different from the social sciences as focused on
behavior. But this is to fail to appreciate that prehistoric archaeology is
an historical science (in the broad signification) that relies on non-verbal
remains and that the participant observation relied on in various social
sciences is typically accompanied with, if not dominated by, the interpreta-
tion of written as well as spoken expressions. There can be no doubt that
many cultural disciplines, both social-scientific and historical-scientific, rely
to vast extents on the comprehension of language and thus that the
methods of interpretation of linguistic data are of great importance for
all the cultural sciences. Phenomenologists have not ignored this.^ The
overlooking the non-verbal is more likely the problem.
The cultural social sciences, such as economics, ethnology, geography,
linguistics, sociology, and political science, are focused on the contem-
porary world and are thus synchronic, while the historical cultural sciences
are diachronic, relating events of different times, the future even, and
having, also, no preference necessarily for the contemporary. It is not
uninteresting that evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology, etc., are also
diachronic and thus historical naturalistic sciences and to be compared as
well as contrasted with the historical cultural sciences. Whether there are
synchronic natural sciences is another question.
Social, historical, and psychological scientists who happen to read the
present essay might at this point be thinking that, like the character in
Molibre, they are only hearing a fancy new name for what they are
ab-eady doing. Nevertheless, it can still be asked what makes their
disciplines cultural. This question needs to be asked because a certain
naturalism is often observable in these disciplines. This naturalism is

^ See, e.g., Thomas M. Seebohm, "The New Hermeneutics, Other Trends,
and The Human Sciences from the Standpoint of Transcendental Phenomenology,"
in Hugh Silverman, John Sallis, and Thomas M. Seebohm, Continental Philosophy
in America (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983), "Boeckh and Dilthey: The
Development of Methodical Hermeneutics," Man and World 17 (1984), "Falsehood
as the Prime Mover of Hermeneutics," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 4
(1992), etc.