Hermeneutics and Social Sciences

(some of this is from Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World)

Science in general searches for the causes or structure of things. But with human beings, we need to take into account meaning.

What is meaning? Humans "make sense" out of their own worlds in various ways. Some of these are conscious (they tell stories), some of them are not. Hermeneutics assumes that the world is a meaningful place already, and it is our task to discover this meaning.

How is the world already meaningful? Take, for example, your pen or pencil.

Until I mentioned it, you probably weren't thinking about it. It was transparent to you.
Despite that, you knew how to use it "naturally". Of course, it wasn't natural at all, you had to learn how to use it, but by now it fits into your world. You "cope" with it.
In fact, you didn't think about it, but you thought through it.
The only time you think about it is if something goes wrong -- it doesn't write, you can't find it.
If needed, you can use it for other things, like prying into something, propping something up, poking something.
Not only does it become transparent to you, you become transparent when using it. You don't think, "Here am I using this pen to write with". You focus on the writing. A good guitarist doesn't think about herself playing the guitar, but just does it.
The pen fits into a social world. If you want to know about the pen, you have to refer to its purpose in the world. Those purposes are partly determined by you, the user (remember, you can also use the pen for other, non-writing reasons), but it is not only determined by the individual. We recognize pens as pens because they fit into a set of uses that the social world makes possible. Think, in contrast, about something less familiar, from another culture. "What it is" and "how you use it" are intertwined.

Contrasting Ways of Being in the World

Spatial
Existential
in
In-clusion, being in
She is in the house (spatial)
She is in the working class (socio-economic)
In-volvement, being-in
He is in love. She is in a good mood. (personal)
He is in the working class, and conscious of it. (involved)
at
He is at work (place)
She is at (her) work. (occupied with)
by
He stood by (beside)
She stood by (was faithful to)
to
She turned to (face) X
He turned (for help) to X

Physical objects might physically touch each other, but cannot matter to each other (the literal sense). We are concerned here with what matters, and what it means to matter. This is where meaning becomes evident.

Take a chair, for example. What is it to be a chair?:

1. We might know some facts about it, like its shape, material, etc. However, chairs come in all sorts of shapes and materials.

2. We might have an image of a prototypical chair, and compare other objects to this prototype. But would someone from another culture, who had this image and could pick out things that compare to it, really know what a chair was?

3. We could define it abstractly or functionally -- "A chair is a portable seat for one." But this is difficult to do.

The problem is that we recognize chairs by how they fit into the whole, how they fit with tables, people, floors, etc.

Now, when we encounter a chair, there are several features of it that are part of that encounter:

1. We manipulate the chair. Our most basic way of understanding a chair is to use it. We might know what a thing is without using it, but this is a secondary mode of understanding.

2. The chair is transparent. When using equipment, it has a tendency to disappear. We are not aware of its characteristics at all. A blind person could describe a cane, but when it comes to using it, he loses the awareness of the cane, and is only aware of the curb. It is an extension of the person. Equipment in use is equipment in itself.

3. We are also transparent. When a person is skilled, they no longer think about the piano keys, the guitar strings, the basketball. In the midst of an activity, the equipment disappears, but so does the person. We do not decide to do something, and then do it. We just do it. We become absorbed in the world.

Aren't we just like robots, in the way we approach the world? No. There are a number of ways in which we are different from the robot:

1. "Circumspection" (reflecting on things) is a mode of awareness. It is not a matter of an inner, mental, first person experience of the world. However, it is experience. It opens up the world.

2. "Comportment" is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways. Carpenters do not hammer like robots. Even in a reflex activity, there is adjustment based on past experience.

3. Comportment reveals entities under aspects. I can go about my business to use my desk to type on, to read at, to keep things on. I creatively use the desk.

4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled. This is because our action is directed into the future. Robots are never startled. We are always ahead of ourselves.

5. If the going gets tough, we must pay attention and so switch to deliberate subject/object intentionality. We can decide to use intentionality to direct actions.

So, this notion of meaning has several features:

1. Meaning is not universal. We cope with things differently than people from other cultures.

2. While it is not universal, it is also not completely subjective either. There is a "shared" aspect to it.

3. It is not completely available to our reflection. We cope with the pen "unconsciously", but not in Freud's sense of the unconscious.

4. We know more than we can say. We cope in situations in ways that extend past our explicit training. The set of rules for going on a first date, for instance, is vast and always changing. BUT THERE ARE RULES, if only rules about treating someone decently.

5. Thinking in terms of causes or structures misses the point of meaning, because we do not address what we are like as human persons, but only as products of systems.

6. Thinking in terms of folk psychology (looking for beliefs and desires which produce actions) also misses the point, because it is another "causal" system, and supposes that we can get clear on what our beliefs and desires are.

Is there anything scientific about examining the world using the assumption that meaning is central to the human sciences? How does this differ from just doing philosophy?

This is not just philosophy, if by that we mean the search for universals or universal truth. Hermeneutics starts from the particulars. Important term to know in this regard: phenomenology.

Phenomenology
Phenomenology = "phenomenon" + "ology"
-ology: "study of"
Phenomenon: What appears; what presents itself; what is given.
Phenomenology is the study of what presents itself to us. Sounds simple? Not quite. We seem to always bring our opinions and convictions to the world, in order to structure it. Phenomenology is the attempt to "bracket" those convictions off, for the moment, and just "look" at phenomena.
What convictions are these? Mostly, our metaphysical and epistemological certainties about how the world is. Things like causation. The nature of space and time. Even external existence.
A phenomenologist recognizes that we cannot know the outside world "for sure" (after all, it could all just be the Matrix). What is the only thing we can know? That we experience something. Experience is primary, not the object of experience (e.g., the pencil), nor the subject of experience (me).

Perhaps this is better understood through some examples.

	Spatial	Existential
in	In-clusion, being in She is in the house (spatial) She is in the working class (socio-economic)	In-volvement, being-in He is in love. She is in a good mood. (personal) He is in the working class, and conscious of it. (involved)
at	He is at work (place)	She is at (her) work. (occupied with)
by	He stood by (beside)	She stood by (was faithful to)
to	She turned to (face) X	He turned (for help) to X