Abstract
Between interpretation and observation; general methodological problems of the systematic human sciences; interpretation and prediction; psychology; the social sciences; economy as the region of practical social interactions in the lifeworld; from jurisprudence and the science of law to politics and political science; and from political science to the science of law.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Sect. 4.2.
- 2.
Cf. Sect. 10.3.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
And at a geographical distance in other continents, e.g., in China.
- 7.
- 8.
Kaufmann admits that the social sciences need Weber’s schemes of interpretation, i.e., ideal types, and that they imply understanding of in-order-to-motives, but insists that social facts have to be constructed out of psychophysical facts in the way characterized above, cf. Reeder 1991, 43f., referring to Kaufmann 1944, 177–179. The main point is predictability, and with it degrees of empirical falsification.
- 9.
Schutz is first of all interested in the objective meaning contexts of ideal types. The problem of the secondary understanding and then interpretation of subjective meaning contexts remains in the margins, see Embree 2015, chapter 11 on meaning and there especially the references to PSW (Schutz 1967) 247; CP I, 6, 58; CP IV 206. Schutz mentions in passing the correlation of interpretation and application in jurisprudence Schutz 1967, 138 in the context of a quote from Kelsen, cf. also Sect. 10.6 below. The problem behind the problems of pre-scientific secondary understanding and interpretations of foreign life expressions lurks in the background of disinterested observations, cf. below Sect. 10.2.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Cf. ch. II, esp. §§7 and 9.
- 13.
Cf. Sect. 6.4.
- 14.
It is meaningful to predict, given certain reconstructed events in a past present, that certain other events can be reconstructed in the future horizon of this past present. But this prediction is not the prediction of an event. It predicts that new material can be available that admits the reconstruction of the event.
- 15.
- 16.
What follows is a summary of the main viewpoints that have been considered in Sect. 2.2.
- 17.
- 18.
This is in contrast to an interest in the normative question, what they ought to do according to epistemological theories a priori; cf. Sect. 7.2!
- 19.
Cf. Sect. 3.5.
- 20.
- 21.
Cf. Sect. 10.1.
- 22.
Schutz and others often use “natural attitude” as the correlative to “lifeworld,” but “natural attitude” is used in Husserl as the counterpart to the transcendental-phenomenological attitude (Einstellung) presupposing the transcendental phenomenological reduction. Simply to follow Schutz in this respect causes some problems. What does it mean to say that the mathematical entities of higher algebra, including imaginary and complex numbers or functions determining world points in four dimensional spaces with curvatures and their application to phenomena as objective correlates of mathematical methods in the hard sciences given in the natural attitude, are given in the lifeworld? There are according to the results of Sects. 8.2 and 8.4 neither in Husserl’s nor in Schutz’s nor in Gurwitsch’s publications satisfying analyses of the specific epistemological problems of post-classical mathematics and post-classical physics. What can be said is that the intentional objects of higher algebra are given in types of lifeworlds with natural sciences and formalized mathesis universalis. However, such objects are not given in pre-scientific lifeworlds and, hence, not in the lifeworld in general. An analysis of structures of the lifeworld requires analyses of the generation of these structures.
- 23.
Cf. Sect. 2.4. It is of significance for the following analyses that first-order understanding of interactions implies in addition possible partial or complete agreement and disagreement, and as a consequence the partial or complete disruption of interactions.
- 24.
For reasons that will become clear in the following sections. (2.a) can be called the economic and (2.b) the civil or political and legal aspect of social interactions.
- 25.
Cf. Sect. 9.2.
- 26.
This distinction of Max Weber was rejected by Schutz; cf. Embree 2000a, 84ff. Schutz CP II, 275; cf. 227. On Weber, see also Grünewald 2009, 108 and 135.
- 27.
- 28.
On other fixed life expressions cf. the beginnings of Sects. 3.2 and 3.4. It is and always has been a question of the available technologies for the kinds of fixed life expressions that can be produced in a cultural situation, and every new invention in this field will require the development of new methods for adequate interpretations of such new types of fixed life expressions.
- 29.
In the last two centuries technology has offered ways of producing new types of fixed life expressions beginning with photographs and records to videotapes; such inventions cause additional methodological difficulties for the systematic human sciences and for contemporary history. It is easy to manipulate such “sources” for attempts to reconstruct “what is or was really the case.” Required are new methods of “critique” for these new types of “historical” sources and these methods will have to use results of the natural sciences.
- 30.
Cf. Reeder 1991, 44f. on Kaufmann.
- 31.
The prediction of economists that a certain set of transactions in the market will lead to falling profits for the participants in the interactions will change the behavior of the participants at the very moment at which they receive the information about the prediction.
- 32.
The recommendations are implied in statements like: “If x is done, then y will be the case”; “If x is not done, then y will not be the case.”
- 33.
- 34.
There are not only interesting slips of the tongue of the clients. There are also interesting slips of hearing and understanding by psychoanalysts, slips that are last but not least pre-determined by their theories.
- 35.
Cf. Sect. 3.4.
- 36.
Gurwitsch 1929, introduced this viewpoint. The hyletic field is already structured in its own right and is not a collection of atomistic hyletic data.
- 37.
E.g. family and clan structures, economic structures, structures of the distribution of power.
- 38.
It is possible, for instance, that certain groups of participants in social interactions are guided by expectations embedded in intentions and purposes that have not been considered to be relevant for the outcome of the interactions by other participants in the interactions. These problems will be considered in the next section.
- 39.
There is, furthermore, the interpretation of the psychologists of the answers of their “objects” to their questions and inquiries, and there is then finally the task of the interpretation of the whole context of all of the dimensions of such investigations in a final evaluation of their results.
- 40.
Cf. Sect. 2.3. A systematic account of the meaning of types, morphological ideal types, ideal types and rational ideal types in the social sciences will be given in the next section.
- 41.
For Dilthey, this level of individual psychology was also of interest for the historical human sciences, and there especially for interpretations of works of art.
- 42.
According to Ricoeur 1970 Freud’s psychoanalysis is an art of interpretation. Psychoanalysis in the strict sense on the level of its application to patients does not use drugs, but only the diagnostic dialogue with patients. Today psychiatrists trying to understand the patient using communications with the patients can also use drugs if they have the licence to do so in the treatment of their patients.
- 43.
Cf. Sect. 6.4.
- 44.
The assumption that Freud was not able to analyze workers in Vienna because they were too stupid speaks against Freud’s theory and not against the Vienna workers. Seen from the viewpoint of historical research, it is also an absurd anachronism to explain, for instance, the behavior of the pharaoh Akhnaton with elements taken from the myth of Oedipus. The family structures especially the family tradition of the Egyptian pharaohs and their mythological background cannot be explained and interpreted with myths taken from the archaic Greek tradition.
- 45.
Biography is in the center of Dilthey’s reflections on historical interpretations; cf. Sect. 4.2.
- 46.
Experimental psychology and only experimental psychology can be reduced with behaviorism to a natural science as long as only intersensory observations without any admixture of empathic understanding or interpretations of verbal and/or fixed life expressions are admitted in the description of the reactions to the stimuli.
- 47.
Cf. Sect. 4.5 and the interpretation and discussion of the difficulties of the term Wissenschaftslehre in the introduction to Embree n.d.
- 48.
Cf. Embree 1980 and the critical discussion in Nasu 2010; Schutz’s, “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretative Social Science” of 1953 was first published in Schutz 1997. An earlier shorter version entitled “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences” was published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1954 and is now available in Schutz CP I, 48–66.
- 49.
Cf. on lifeworld in Schutz also: Schutz and Luckman 1973.
- 50.
Schutz 1967, xxxi, 6, 196f; 227; cf. Embree 2015, ch. 10 with the references to Schutz CP I, 40–42, CP II, 81. A terminological synonym for “ideal type” used by Schutz after the fifties of the last century was “construct.” He also used for ideal types of acting persons the metaphors “puppet” and “homunculus.”
- 51.
- 52.
See Schutz CP IV 126 on the influence of the South-Western German Neo-Kantian school for the interpretation of “ideal” in “ideal type” in Weber in the first section of “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach in the Interpretative Social Sciences” in Schutz CP V. Schutz following in this respect Kelson, emphasized, however, also in the beginning of “Husserl and His Influence on Me,” CP V, that the Neo-Kantians nowhere provided a solution for the problem of the understanding of the subjective meaning of a social action of the actor.
- 53.
Husserl 1972, §83.
- 54.
Cf. Embree 2015, ch. 11 and the references there to Schutz CP I, 323, 348; cf. CP II 233.
- 55.
The constitution of constructs requires, according to “Positivistic Philosophy,” §2, in Schutz CP V; a “set of abstractions, generalizations, formalizations, and idealizations.” Seen from a formal-ontological point of view the same can be said about the constitution of numbers and sets.
- 56.
On subjective and objective meaning and Schutz’s critique of “objective” meaning in Weber’s terminology see Schutz CP II, 257 quoted in Embree 2015, ch. 11.
- 57.
E.g., Schutz 1967, 210.
- 58.
Cf. Seebohm 2013.
- 59.
Setting aside the difficulty that “interpretative” would be an inadequate translation because “interpretation” means more than just “Verstehen.,” The terminology used in this investigation follows the explication of the terms in the analyses of the typology of understanding in Sect. 3.2.
- 60.
This is, for instance, at least questionable for psychoanalytic interpretations and ideology critique.
- 61.
- 62.
Schutz 1967, 188–190; Schutz CP II 81, CP V “Reflections on the Problem of Relevance,” §§2 and 3, cf. Embree 2015, ch. 10.
- 63.
Cf. Schutz and Luckman 1973, 3, C, 4 on typicality and prediction 238f.
- 64.
This is the assumption of the positivistic and analytic tradition in the epistemology of the systematic and even the historical human sciences. Cf. also the Introduction of Embree 2015.
- 65.
Cf. Sect. 8.1 on the generative foundations of the natural sciences.
- 66.
Embree 2009c.
- 67.
Cf. in Schutz 1967, 237. The explications of the concepts “ideal type,” “construct,” and “postulate” ought not be understood as an interpretation of Schutz’s theory of ideal types, constructs, and postulates. Instead, it prepares the explication of the application of these terms in the context of the present systematic investigation.
- 68.
- 69.
Participation in and interpretation of such interactions requires the “re-living” in Dilthey’s sense of the work of the “genius”; cf. Seebohm 2004, 60f., 160f.
- 70.
Cf. for what follows the discussion of the difficulties of this term (with numerous references to the writings of Schutz) the Introduction to Embree 2015.
- 71.
Cf. fn. 148: Wissenschaftslehre in Fichte is the deduction of the basic categories of theoretical and practical philosophy as an explication of the positing absolute acts, Tathandlungen, of the absolute I. Wissenschaftslehre in Bolzano is the explication of the categories of an ontological logic. However, in the development of the positivism of the nineteenth century in Germany in the wake of J. S. Mill, the term already covered epistemological reflections on the methodology of the empirical sciences as well.
- 72.
See “Reflections on the Problems of Relevance 3” and “The Interdependency of the Systems of Relevance” in Schutz CP V.
- 73.
- 74.
CP II 85 and CP V l.c. – The postulates of relevance and of adequacy can be understood as necessary implications of applications of an occasionally mentioned postulate of testability or verification for the empirical sciences in general of the positivistic tradition to the social sciences in Schutz epistemology of the social sciences.
- 75.
Cf. Sect. 4.3 above.
- 76.
CP I, 165; CP V, “Positivistic Philosophy.”
- 77.
See Sect. 4.1 on Boeckh and the work of the genius.
- 78.
- 79.
The author of the first book on economics in the Aristotelian tradition was probably Theophrastus. Latin translations with some extensions existed since the first half of the thirteenth century.
- 80.
- 81.
Mathematical statistics can also be applied in the definitions of the categories of a region in the hard natural sciences, e.g., in the statistical theory of gases and then in quantum theory.
- 82.
Simple statistical investigations, e.g., for determining the frequencies of words used in a text, can be hints for the solution of the problem of identifying authors of texts.
- 83.
More will be said about practical social interactions, techniques, and technology below.
- 84.
- 85.
An observation of a technology that “works” in an interaction confirms a hypothetical prediction that it will also work in realizing a purpose in the future.
- 86.
An economic liberalism presupposing the quasi-metaphysical principles of isolated “free” individuals as original economic actors and private labor as justification of ownership is, seen from the viewpoint of social and economic history, a myth. Individual ownership makes sense only on the level of the trade of products in a market economy. A feudum in feudalistic societies was not understood as private property in this sense.
- 87.
The simple form of raising taxes used by administrators of political power is the immediate confiscation of goods from the producer of goods and “delivers” in turn the promise to defend the producers – and later in addition the merchants – against “illegal” violence from outside and inside the community.
- 88.
Cf. Sect. 8.3.
- 89.
The formal-ontological terminology used in the following analyses is the terminology of the phenomenological theory of the whole and the parts introduced in Sect. 2.2.
- 90.
- 91.
- 92.
The simplified general model is not a theoretical construction. Merchants selling and buying merchandise at the door to interested persons and trading in the general store in a small village are concrete instances of the formal structure of this model.
- 93.
Charging interest is shunned in certain religious contexts, but a Muslim banker has to make profit somehow, regardless of how this will be done and explained in Muslim theology.
- 94.
Cf. Sect. 10.5.
- 95.
Cf. Gary Brent Madison 1997 about such attempts in the literature. See now also Staudigl 2010. Economics is not of interest for the authors of the essays in this volume. Of interest is for such a reduction of understanding sociology is only what can be said about music, literature, interpretation of social activities in everyday life, etc.
- 96.
Reflections about such distributions are, however, already reflections on civil social interactions.
- 97.
What follows is an application of what has been said about the relevance of external factors for practical social interactions to economic interactions.
- 98.
Cf. Sect. 8.3.
- 99.
- 100.
Kant KGS VI, Metaphysik der Sitten Einleitung in die Rechtslehre §A. As metaphysical principles of the doctrine the principles of the “natural law” are, of course, in need of a transcendental deduction from the principles of practical reason in the specific context of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
- 101.
See, for instance, Grünewald 2009, 31f., 46.f., who excludes jurisprudence and the science of the law together with theology and philosophy from the list of the human sciences.
- 102.
See Schutz 1967, 138, 242, 246.
- 103.
Cf. Schutz 1967; 247f., on Kelson and quoting Kelsen. The problem of modern law positivism and different philosophical theories of natural law will be considered below.
- 104.
Permitted are in general all social interactions that are not required or forbidden by the law. The definition is negative but precise under the additional formal assumption that a system of laws has to cover the ground of all social interactions.
- 105.
Systems of civil social interactions that are not determined by written laws still occur in societies with an otherwise developed system of written laws, e.g., in educational contexts, but also in the social relation of a coach and the members of the soccer team, etc.
- 106.
Cf. Sect. 3.4.
- 107.
God is in the last instance the lawgiver in monotheistic religions. The emperor has this function as the son of heaven in the tradition of the Chinese legalists. The Greeks and others opted, however, for a human lawgiver, e.g., Solon, with partial support of the gods.
- 108.
The sovereign is in such systems also “under” the law.
- 109.
The term “positive law” is relevant for practicing jurisprudence. Law positivism is a position of philosophical reflections on the science of the law in Kant’s sense.
- 110.
- 111.
The confrontation of courts of law in Germany after 1945 with the “positive” laws (and their principles) that were introduced in the Third Reich is a striking example of such situations.
- 112.
This principle is one of the requirements in the definition of a just law of the Roman jurists. Cf. Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I. II. qu. 95r, art. 3, objection I on Isidore of Sevilla’s list of such requirements.
- 113.
It was, for instance, in the United States at the time of the New Deal for the American realists among the jurists whether a certain law designed for a certain economic situation in the nineteenth century is still applicable after changes in the economic and social system in the twentieth century.
- 114.
Thomas of Aquinas, 1882, I.II. qu. 95, art.3, objection 1.
- 115.
Cf. Sect. 7.2.
- 116.
Cf. e.g., Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I.II. qu. 95, art. 2, objection 2.
- 117.
Cf. Kant KGS VII, Der Streit der Fakultäten, 24f. on the Eigenthümlichkeit der Juristenfakultät.
- 118.
Quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem. A principle of the Roman jurist Ulpian quoted (and rejected), in Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I.II. qu. 90, art. 1, objection 3. The extension requires only replacing princeps with sovereign and to admit that, e.g., a parliament can be the sovereign. Well-known examples for such theories in the science of the law that by the same token are also certain political theories, e.g., the theories of Thomas Hobbes or, in the twentieth century, of Carl Schmitt.
- 119.
It is possible to characterize the position of Hans Kelsen as belonging to law positivism; see for instance Grünewald 2009, 32, n. 21, and 108, n. 160, on Schutz and Kelson.
- 120.
- 121.
What has been said about historical causal explanations and real conditions in Chap. 6 is presupposed for the following reflections.
- 122.
The simplified version of the list is: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny.
- 123.
Such structures are, however, still of basic significance for the political development in many of the so-called “developing countries” of the twenty-first century.
- 124.
Cf. Sect. 10.2.
- 125.
The fight for or against laws permitting/prohibiting marriages of homosexuals is in the last instance a fight between worldviews: namely, between the system of higher understanding of the right of individuals of the Enlightenment and the system of higher understanding of the theocratic laws of the Old Testament that still dominate ethical and political doctrines in Muslim and Christian traditions.
- 126.
Economic liberalism defends the freedom of the market against legal regulation of the state but has no sympathy for other types of freedom, e.g., the freedom of the enemies of merchants and bankers, namely, robber barons, bank robbers, and communists. The state is required to suppress such freedoms with the force of the law.
- 127.
- 128.
Cf. Sect. 6.2 esp. the example of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2015). History and the Systematic Human Sciences. In: History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_10
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