Introduction

In many respects, positivism and structuralism are the direct opposite of the interpretative or hermeneutic approaches discussed in chapter 7; they also reject the teleological philosophy of consciousness that characterized some of the dialectical approaches discussed in chapter 8. Instead, they proceed from the belief that the social and human sciences should follow the same approach as the natural sciences, and that conducting serious scientific research should hence be oriented towards observations that can be publicly checked or towards the formal features of the object of investigation. In this manner, they reject the idea that ‘subjective meanings’ deserve a special place in the humanities or social sciences. Whoever thinks that understanding is a useful tool is free to do so, on the condition that they test their hypotheses formed on the basis of understanding in the manner that has proved its value in the natural sciences. For this reason, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was to call positivist and structuralist approaches objectivist, as distinct from the subjectivism of interpretative methods (cf. § 10.4).

As remarked above, hermeneutic scholars do not accept this restricted and purely heuristic role for understanding: they point out that the humanities and social sciences study a reality that is already interpreted. Moreover, they see nothing enigmatic or unreliable in interpretation: it is an activity that all humans continuously engage in, if not a central feature of the human condition. Positivists and structuralists are not impressed by such claims: important developments in the (natural) sciences, they argue, have been achieved by explicitly abstracting away from everyday interpretations of phenomena, as Galilei already emphasized. Hence, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) wrote that sense perception should also be the guiding force for the social sciences, rather than the concepts shaped outside of science and for needs entirely unscientific; thus, scientists should free themselves from ‘those fallacious notions which hold sway over the mind of the ordinary person’. According to positivists, researchers in the humanities and social sciences enter an unknown world just as natural scientists do, and must leave their everyday prejudices behind at the gates of science.