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Social Theory as Practice: Metatheoretical Options for Social Inquiry Frank C. Richardson University of Texas at Austin John Chambers Christopher University of Guam Much academic psychology has managed to seal itself off to a great extent from contemporary debates about the nature of knowledge, the historical embeddedness or contingency of inquiry, and the moral and political dimensions of theory and research in the human sciences. However, the enterprise of modern social science, many critics have suggested, has been in part a massive charade of value-neutrality and would-be objective science masking a highly contentious ideology and program for living centered on individualism and the technical mastery of nature, our institutions, and ourselves (Bellah, 1983; Bernstein, 1976; Taylor, 1985a). At last, however, we may be getting to the point where we can take fuller responsibility for the value commitments and ethical aims that inevitably imbue our activities, instead of slipping them in unnoticed under the cover of "science," technical expertise, or value-neutral psychotherapy. Perhaps that is part of the greater "mature adulthood" Michel Foucault (1987) called for in his essay "What is Enlightenment." Foucault refers to the need to free ourselves of what he calls "Enlightenment blackmail," which we might freely translate as: "Do you agree with my Enlightenment program of liberty, rationality, and progress or are you an unenlightened schmuck!" We are all better at dealing with technical or conceptual problems than with human ones, with our emotional and moral concerns and motivations. We are not lacking in diligence or cleverness. The hard part of attaining the maturity Foucault speaks of will be maintaining the openness, courage, and good judgement required to sort through our most fundamental moral commitments and spiritual concerns. Acknowledging that social inquiry may be indelibly linked to ethical reflection raises all sorts of difficult questions for us. What becomes of the mainstream social science program of value-neutral inquiry? What metatheoretical view concerning the nature of social inquiry and the role of cultural and moral values in it would we, at least in part, put in the place of the mainstream view? Does the departure from familiar "objec-


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Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 13, No. 2, 1993

tive" social science plunge us into a chaotic or destructive relativism? What particular cultural or moral value commitments do we wish to inform our theoretical and research undertakings, and how would we justify them? No wonder we vacillate between denial and frustration in confronting these issues. Clearly we have been made the target of that fabled Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!" Few social scientists are trained to deal with such questions. Even when someone breaks away significantly from the conventional mainstream, they seem quickly to settle on what they take to be an attractive alternative—be it family systems theory, critical theory, a feminist perspective, some brand of postmodernism, whatever—and do not continue to critically sift their basic premises. In other words, they seem to carry over some of the same complacency, need for certainty, or even tendency toward dogmatism that characterize the doctrinaire empiricism against which they rebel. Nevertheless, it seems to us that real progress is possible on these questions if we (1) fully acknowledge that we are anchored in some basic metatheoretical position concerning the nature of knowledge and the role of values in social theory and then (2) go on to debate them in open, sustained dialogue. The good news, we think, is that there seem to be only a few fundamental metatheoretical options available to us, each presuming some ontology of human existence and colored by at least a few basic moral or spiritual commitments. There is no reason not to think that careful, sustained examination and comparison of these options will clarify their implications and relative merits. In what follows we would like briefly to sketch what we take to be some of the key options available to us and mention a few of their virtues and blind spots. The idea is not to settle anything but to nurture sustained discussion of these issues. MAINSTREAM SOCIAL SCIENCE. Even if we significantly depart from it, we need to keep refining our understanding and critique of the mainstream empiricist viewpoint in psychology. Only in that way will we be able to both retain its virtues and keep from duplicating its presumed errors or blind spots in another guise. Perhaps the defining feature of mainstream approaches is their adherence to the ideal of what Bernstein (1976) calls the "theorist as disinterested observer," according to which the social theorist first and foremost brackets the cares and commitments of everyday life in order to explain or describe social reality in a neutral and objective manner. The bulk of 20th century social science inspired by this ideal has sought genuinely explanatory or empirical theory. Such theory goes beyond raw correlations among interesting variables and achieves law-like correlations that are both theoretically derived and empirically confirmed. Only such theory which permits precise predictions extending far beyond what has already been observed is thought to constitute genuine knowledge or benefit practice. Moreover, as Moon (1983) points out, "even radical post-Kuhnian views of social science con-


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tinue to accept at least tacitly the naturalist view of scientific explanation in terms of the subsumption of individual events under general laws" or a "nomological account of explanation" (p. 172). Serious doubts have been voiced for decades, both within and without the social science arena, about whether genuine empirical theory of this sort ever has been or could be achieved in connection with human action in its real-life social and historical settings. In the absence of such welldeveloped theory, on what basis do we interpret our findings and correlations? Hoy (1986) observes that theory choice in the social sciences is. . .more relativistic than in the natural sciences, since the principles used to select social theories would be guided by a variety of values. Unlike a natural scientist's explanation, which relies of the pragmatic criterion of predictive success, a social scientist's evaluation of the data in terms of a commitment to a social theory would be more like taking a political stand (p. 124). No doubt a number of our theories and findings are illuminating and helpful in a variety of ways. But which ones are illuminating, why are they, and what sort of understanding do they convey? We get almost no help with these questions from the sort of black and white scientistic metatheory that classifies everything as either full-blown explanatory theory (of which we have none) or mere subjective opinion. In addition, it seems clear that the larger enterprise of explanatory social science is anything but value-free. Habermas (1971, pp. 268, ff.) argues persuasively that this whole enterprise is animated by a "positivist critique of ideology." In "continuity with the tradition of the Enlightenment" it aims is to distinguish sharply between facts and values, undermine superstition and dogma by banishing their normative claims to the realm of the "noncognitive" or merely "subjective," and replace them with positive, useful knowledge. Not only is this approach not value-neutral (although it may embrace many worthy values), but it is quite unclear how it would defend its own condemnation of superstition and domination as anything more than just one more subjective or irrational value preference. "DESCRIPTIVISMS." Over the course of the 20th century, increasingly refined arguments have been mounted to the effect that difficulties in achieving explanatory theories of social reality may be due to a profound epistemological inappropriateness of the explanatory ideal to its subject matter. D'Andrade (1986) captures the essence of this critique with his suggestion that conventional models of scientific explanation seem inadequate to describe the "semiotic sciences," inquiry that studies " 'imposed' order based on 'meaning' rather than on natural or physical order." This kind of imposed order "creates meaning and is created by the attempt to convey meaning." It is an "arbitrary order, which can change rapidly and


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varies from place to place and time to time." In other words, human actions and emotions, indeed our very selves, unlike events in the natural world, are symbolically structured aspects of social reality. They are constituted by their location within the practices and norms of "language games," traditions, or forms of life. Thus, they would be different if these practices and norms were different. As a result, as Taylor (1985b, p. 121) says, "personal interpretation enters into the very definition of the phenomenon under study." Insights of this sort concerning meaningful human action have been incorporated into such approaches to social inquiry as phenomenological approaches, ethnomethodology, and many kinds of so-called qualitative research. Bernstein (1976) suggests the helpful label "descriptivist" for these approaches. In varied ways they exemplify spirit of Clifford Geertz's (1973, p. 5) credo: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one is search of meaning." But Bernstein also argues convincingly that descriptivist approaches as well typically adhere to the ideal of the disinterested or morally neutral theorist. They, too, fail to gauge the extent to which we are historically and practically or morally embedded in the realities into which we inquire, making disinterested neutrality impossible and perhaps even undesirable. The Achilles heel of descriptivist approaches has always been fatal ambiguity about what standards we will use to discriminate adequate from inadequate accounts. They speak as if we were giving some kind of objective account of the patterns of action or meaning studied, without which it would appear that "anything goes." But there is good reason to think that all such accounts are creative, value-influenced interpretations of the reality portrayed. Indeed, there appears to be an ongoing relationship of mutual influence, or better co-constitution, between interpreter and object. The descriptivist metatheory leaves us with the uncomfortable dilemma of having to choose between an unattainable objectivism or a chaotic relativism, with no good alternative in sight. Moreover, there is the problem of ideology. If the self-understanding of social actors contain systematic distortions that reflect the sorts of repressions and rationalizations Freudians and Marxists uncover (which surely they sometimes do), descriptivist accounts will be poor at detecting them. They will tend to portray oppressed workers as happy campers and grim workalcoholics as proud citizens because of the accepted ideology of their society, and thus tend uncritically to support the status quo. Descriptivist approaches as well reflect tacit value commitments of respect and appreciation for a various forms of life and the desire to gain wisdom and perspective from acquaintance with them. But the disengaged, disinterested stance of the theorist in this approach prevents employing any meaningful criteria concerning what is worthwhile or



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dehumanizing in different ways of life. Strictly speaking, it undermines our ability even to condemn ways of life that exclude or trample on the descriptivist theorist's own cherished values of openness and respect. LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM. It has often been suggested that the "secret political ideal," as Hannah Arendt (1959) put it, of mainstream social science is a push for a mechanistic outlook that promotes conformity and discourages deviance in modern mass society (see also Zilboorg, 1957). But that view would seem to confuse one possible outcome of the mainstream approach with its original or best intentions. Modern social science generally has been intended—even when claiming to be valueneutral—to aid in the active re-engineering of human society in directions indicated by profound Western ideals of human freedom, dignity, and inalienable rights. The disguised ideology of mainstream social science is better described as liberal individualism or philosophic liberalism (Sandel, 1982; Sullivan, 1986). Bringing this outlook to light and critically scrutinizing it should be a high priority for us. In premodern or traditional societies, people apprehend themselves in a taken-for-granted manner as part of and defined by a hierarchical and meaningful order of being, part of a meaningful cosmic drama built around the sense that life moves toward the end or telos of a shared human existence in harmony with Nature or God. That proper existence, when achieved, is characterized by acquired human qualities or virtues such a courage, justice, or love. The moral temper of the modern age, by contrast, has always been anti-authoritarian and emancipatory. At its core lies a Promethean impulse that is willing to sacrifice the consolations of membership in a larger order for the full measure of what it takes to be human freedom and dignity. A new picture of life and living emerges in which separate, would-be autonomous individuals who see themselves as largely having cut their ties to tradition and external authority pursue their desires or the good life as they see fit, but also share a commitment benevolently to extend this freedom to all humankind. On the one hand, this new view portrays human action as radically selfinterested. Initially, this took the form of what Bellah, et al. (1985) call "utilitarian individualism," in which individuals are seen as strategic or instrumental actors, seeking to maximize outcomes defined solely by natural desires or individual preference. Later, under the influence of Romantic thought, what Bellah, et al. term "expressive individualism" arose, somewhat in opposition to utilitarian views. In the expressive view, "each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized" (1985, p. 334). On the other hand, the modern outlook has also usually counterbalanced this heavy stress on self-interest and inwardness with a strong ethical emphasis on regarding human agents as imbued with dignity and inherent worth and as possessed of natural rights. In its classic formulation by Kant, philosophic liberalism leaves the choice of ends or to private choice, but


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insists on adherence to formal principles of fairness or procedural justice. Thus, it hopes both to protect our freedom from dogma and arbitrary authority while still giving us needed ethical guidance. Selznick (1992) aptly summarizes how the modern moral sensibility brings benefits of greater individual freedom, increased equality of opportunity, efficiency and accountability, and the rule of law, but does so at the price of "cultural attenuation," the diminishing of "symbolic experiences that create and sustain the organic unities of social life." There has been a "movement away from densely textured structures of meaning to less concrete, more abstract forms of expression and relatedness." This movement "may contribute to civilization—to technical excellence and an impersonal morality—but not to the mainsprings of culture and identity" (p. 6). The price to be paid for "cultural attenuation" becomes clearer with the passage of time. As Selznick puts it, "modernity, especially in its early stages, is marked by an enlargement of individual autonomy, competence, and self-assertion. In time, however, a strong, resourceful self confronts a weakened cultural context; still later, selfhood itself becomes problematic" (p. 8). Liberal individualism seems to be embroiled in the paradox of advocating a thoroughgoing neutrality toward all values as a way of promoting certain basic values of liberty, tolerance, and human rights. In other words, justice is strictly procedural and no one can define the good life for anyone else. Yet commitment to human dignity and rights do seem to sketch out a way of life that is taken to be morally superior or good in itself. But what is to prevent that principled neutrality toward all notions of the good life from extending to those basic values of liberty and human dignity as well, undermining their convincingness and stripping them of any possibility of rational defense (Kolakowski, 1986; Sarason, 1986)? Also, it has been suggested (Bell, 1978, p. xv ff.) that the insistent characterization of human action and motivation as exclusively self-interested may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The direct pursuit of security and happiness, when it defines what life is all about, seems to increasingly dissolve the capacity to respect and cherish others. A number of critics (Cushman, 1990; Prilleltensky, 1989; Richardson, 1989; Rieff, 1966; Sarason, 1986) have explored modern psychology's problematic entanglement with individualism. For example, Cushman (1990) has provided us with a particularly insightful analysis of how, because of this entanglement, psychotherapy may inadvertently perpetuate many modern problems in living in psychology's purported cure for them. Psychotherapy theory and practice tend to treat "self-contained individualism" as "an unquestioned value" (p. 599). They tend to decontextualize individuals from "family, community, and tradition" in favor of the ambitions of a "bounded, masterful self" that turn out to be insupportable. Thus they re-articulate and perpetuate the same decontextualized identity with highly autonomous aims, tending toward emptiness,



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whose confusions and stresses modern psychology has been called upon to explain and remedy. Liberal individualism promotes an ontology of decontextualized selves confronting an objectified world which may in some respects impede social inquiry. It obscures the great extent to which we are co-participants in what D'Andrade (1986) calls "imposed orders based on meaning. " Thus it tends to construct knowledge that either (1) identifies causal processes which brutely influence us apart from our meaningful participation in them or (2) represents an impersonal tool we may employ to manipulate events toward self-chosen ends. We are seen as either abject victims of events or lordly masters of them. Or both as, for example, in Bandura's notion of the "reciprocal determination" of instrumental activities and reinforcing events. Many dimensions of meaning and value and many kinds of social living are obfuscated by this view (Habermas, 1973; 1991). EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM. Expressive individualism has always coexisted uneasily with the ethics of liberalism. Its inward turn and profound suspicion of social pressures toward conformity and inauthenticity lead it toward celebrating human creativity as self-justifying and not subject to any higher norm of justice. Over time serious doubts grow concerning whether utilitarian or expressive individualist views, even if balanced by a liberal individualist stress on human dignity and rights, can provide satisfactory moral guidance in a post-traditional world. This situation seems to have lead to the emergence of a kind of existential individualism in which one tries consistently to eliminate reference to any sort of absolute values or moral authority altogether. In the 20th century, existentialism and various postmodern or neo-Nietzschean outlooks have decided to bite the bullet and admit that all distinctions between good and evil or ideals of the good life are ultimately arbitrary. Sartre's classic formulation of existential freedom epitomizes this new kind of individualism. This view has often inspired people who feel trapped or dehumanized in an age given to conformism and scientific determinism. In Being and Nothingness (1956) Sartre outlines an ontology of human existence which reveals that at our core we are "terrible freedom." Consciousness is the source of all meanings and all reality is a product of our meaning-giving acts. Although this view precludes formulating any ethical principles in the ordinary sense, it still has profound ethical ramifications (Guignon, 1986). We must repudiate as inauthentic "bad faith" any assumption of pregiven, objective values or obligations in the public world. We can take a kind of total responsibility for the de facto basic choices that "invent" the ultimate values and "fundamental project" of our lives as a whole, and indeed we ought to strive to realize both our own practical freedom and that of all others. Numerous modern therapy theories incorporate a version of this ideal of existential freedom, including Gestalt therapy, "existential" therapies,


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of course (Yalom, 1980), and Schafer's (1976) radical revision of the psychoanalytic metapsychology. Schafer's view sharply contrasts (1) "disowning responsibility" for our actions by attributing them to inner or outer causes other than our own choice with (2) accepting our ultimate responsibility as authors of our ourselves, others, and our world through what Schafer calls "optional ways of telling the stories of human lives." Schafer celebrates the "joyfulness" and "integrity" of this kind of freedom and autonomy can bring. Very little mainstream social science research explicitly utilizes the idea of existential freedom, although there are some exceptions (Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Veeder, M., Pyszczynski, T., Rosenblatt, A., Kirkland, S., and Lyon, D., 1990). But one suspects that as faith in the sufficiency of science and liberal ethics loses credibility, the consoling and disturbing notion of existential freedom looms large in the background of our thinking. The ideal of existential freedom incurs many difficulties in theory and practice. It begins to restore a sense of our being committed, practical agents in all our activities, including social inquiry. But it also greatly obscures the historical conditionedness of human action and personality. It represents, in fact, a rather extreme version of the bounded, masterful self as a dimensionless point of consciousness and will standing entirely apart from the contingencies of historical life. Of course, this approach offers no way to articulate the superiority of one way of life over another. It tends reduce the radical choice of ultimate values to a matter of just registering brute preferences or just plunking for one option over another in a completely arbitrary or random manner (Taylor, 1989). This inarticulacy leaves us with no explanation as to why we should elect a life of authenticity or integrity or ought to nurture our own or others' existential freedom! There seems to be no genuine reason to care about my freedom as opposed to, say, the short-term comforts of conformity or blaming others. This view may actually undermine genuine autonomy. Just plunking for one among an indefinite number of possible "optional narratives" for one's life, for example, seems hard to distinguish from making oneself the slave of every passing whim (Guignon, 1986). SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM. In our day, highly influential, so-called postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard, and others effectively have called into question both the metaphysics of the bounded, masterful self and the hegemony of liberal individualist ethics. Drawing on this work, leading constructionist thinkers like Gergen (1982, 1985), Sampson (1985), and Cushman (1990) weave together many of critiques of mainstream social science, insights discussed above concerning how human action is embedded in "webs of significance," and existentialism's insistence on our personal and moral involvement in our subject matter into a coherent and compelling new metatheoretical option. The constructionist orientation opposes the decontextualized view of the self with a radically contextualized alternative. Humanity is "a self-



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interpreting way of being whose practices have enabled it to act as if it had a whole series of different natures in the course of history" (Dreyfus, 1987, p. 65). Culture does not differently clothe the universal human; it infuses individuals, fundamentally shaping them. The patterns of human life for the most part are "social artifacts," not naturalistically given lawful occurrences. In life and social theory, there "no 'truth through method' " (Gergen, 1985, p. 272). Rather, understanding in both results from an ongoing "negotiation of meanings." Thus, we are freed up to characterize the meanings, stories, and norms that imbue our practices and institutions in appropriate terms, as the rich cultural forms they are. Both social theory and the worlds it represents are products of the rules or conventions of a particular community. But such theory lacks any independent "factual warrant." Familiar modern gaps between theory and practice, subject and object, and fact and value are closed to a degree in this approach. The "facts" of our socially constructed life-world are really embodied meanings, to which we gain access only as participants. We interpret them, or negotiate interpretations of them, in the ongoing business of living. Our theories, narratives, and values lack any objective foundation, dogmatic or factual, beyond the swirl of negotiated meanings in our lifeworld. The only appropriate basis for evaluating our beliefs and practices is strictly according to their "pragmatic implications" (Gergen, 1985, p. 275). This means that we evaluate theories or narratives in terms of what ends or values we happen to prefer and that our success in getting others to pursue the ends we favor depends on our "capacity to invite, compel, stimulate, or delight the audience, and not on criteria of veracity" (Ibid, p. 272). Social constructionism reinforces and clarifies our understanding of human action as embedded in web of significance and moves beyond "descriptivisms" by illuminating how our theories are creative interpretations of social reality that shape that reality and are shaped by it in turn. It incorporates existentialism's stress on our intimate personal and moral involvement in these interpretive ventures. But it also corrects distortions in the existential approach by illuminating how social theory is an historically embedded activity, profoundly conditioned by the cultural context in which it takes place and is as Gergen (1985, p. 267) puts it, the "result of an active, cooperative enterprise of persons in relationships." Nevertheless, constructionism seems to propose a somewhat disjoint and implausible view of the self or human agency. The self in this view seems to be at once both (a) radically contextualized in and shaped by society and history and (b) radically free to reinterpret social reality and itself however it wishes. But, if we are radically contextualized, how do we get the leverage needed to reinterpret and reinvent ourselves? And, if we are radically free to reinterpret and redirect our course in this way, why have we not just reproduced the problematic existential freedom of a


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bounded, masterful self of the very sort constructionism has taught us to criticize. This view may reflect some of the worst features of determinism and existentialism rather than represent a genuine alternative to them. Also, social constructionism seems to have a serious problem with moral relativism. It suggests that eliminating metaphysical and moral universals by itself will free us from modern pretensions, return us to some sort of historical belongingness, and foster more humane and fulfilling kinds of living. But, what would keep us from completely throwing out cherished modern values of freedom and universal respect—some version of which most of us are deeply committed to, even if we do not feel they are a sufficient ethics—in exchange for some comforting new tyranny? And why would the newly invented vocabularies and practices constructionists encourage us to endlessly invent and negotiate mean anything to us? How could they foster any sense of purpose or conviction that might counter the temptation to sell out to modern illusions of power and absoluteness, or to the distractions of a consumer society, which postmodern social constructionists themselves so helpfully document? Moreover, there seems to be difficulty with the key constructionist notion of evaluating our beliefs and values strictly in terms of their "pragmatic implications." After all, it is hard to see how we can evaluate different belief systems or ways of life in this manner when, in any given case, what we mean by pragmatically beneficial or deleterious will be determined by the belief system or way of life we currently inhabit! Also, there is the difficulty that evaluating our commitments strictly in terms of their "pragmatic implications" is just not what most of us mean by making commitments or exercising responsibility. In the place of any notion of truer beliefs or more authentic narratives constructionists would put a "creative participation in the unending and unfolding meaning of life" (Gergen and Kaye, 1992, p. 183). But it is difficult to see how, within this perspective, we might make our way from one point of view to another except by some sort of arbitrary, unthinking lurch in one direction or another (Taylor, 1985a pp. 27 ff.). One thoughtful constructionist response to this criticism seems to be that as socially embedded creatures we cannot change all at once but must do so quite gradually, taking into account many interrelated factors. Thus, constructionism is said to afford us "stability of understanding without the stultification of foundationalism" (Gergen, 1985, p. 273; see also Rorty, 1985). There is wisdom in this observation, reflecting the advantage that constructionist theory, by viewing our activities as historically situated, has over standard existentialist accounts. Still, many constructionist thinkers strongly urge us to view ourselves in the moment as radically free from any particular narrative option for living, a view which over time might actually undermine genuine autonomy and foster extreme fragmentation. Finally, a close examination of social constructionist writings suggests



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that these authors do not, in fact, regard all of our beliefs and values as thoroughly relative and revisable. They seem to at least tacitly endorse a minimum of familiar modern liberal values concerning the dignity and worth of individuals, individual freedom, and opposition to arbitrary authority. For example, both Cushman (1990), discussing the "empty self," and Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1990), discussing gender and postmodernism, seem to try to have their cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, these authors endorse the thoroughgoing relativism implied by constructionist theory . On the other hand, they roundly condemn certain forms of domination and inequality! They even seem to view relativism as a means for advancing certain of their particular (perhaps quite worthy) moral commitments. Of course, this approach is reminiscent of liberal individualism's questionable attempt to avoid commitment to any substantive notion of the good life while still retaining a serious ethical focus. Perhaps this illustrates why Selznick (1992) characterizes some postmodern thought as the "wayward child of modernism," carrying its logic to extremes rather than presenting a clear alternative. CONTEMPORARY HERMENEUTICS. Contemporary philosophical or ontological hermeneutics (Fowers and Richardson, 1993; Gadamer, 1975; Guignon, 1991; Richardson and Woolfolk, 1993; Sullivan, 1986; Taylor, 1985a, 1985b), when taken up by social or psychological theorists, becomes a form of interpretive social science that overlaps a great deal with social constructionist views. Hermeneutic thinkers agree that humans are self-interpreting animals embedded in an endlessly historically unfolding life-world which shapes and is shaped by them in turn. Human action, indeed, is not fundamentally instrumental, but a matter of praxis . We grasp our lives in terms of narratives which give form and direction to them. And hermeneutic thinkers endorse a notion of "dialogic understanding" (Warnke, 1987, p. 100 ff.) or a "dialogical self" (Taylor, 1991) that parallels the constructionist idea of the negotiation of meanings. However, hermeneutics understands human agency to be more deeply embedded in a practical or moral sense in culture and history. Taylor (1989), for example, argues that we think and live in terms of "inescapable frameworks." It is not just a contingent fact about us that we are always already committed to some core notion of the good or decent life and some sort of spiritual or philosophical wisdom concerning ultimate questions. Rather, according to Taylor, we are always already operating in a "space of questions" mapped in terms of fundamentally evaluative or moral distinctions. This "moral space," provides "the horizon within which we know where we stand, and what meanings things have for us" (Taylor, 1989, p. 29). This is neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable. The fact that we are always operating in terms of some framework of "qualitative distinctions" or "strong evaluations" is a "transcendental condition" of being human. We simply cannot imagine a recognizably


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human life without such frameworks. They orient us toward some notion of the good and allow us to gauge where we stand in relation to it. There is no way to demonstrate conclusively that this analysis is correct. It just represents what hermeneutic thinkers find to be the "best account" of the human situation. We often do and often should question our basic beliefs and values. But we always seem to do so in terms of an emerging sense of what is a better understanding of our predicament and the good life. In the hermeneutic view, every deconstruction is undertaken in the service of reconstructing a better view of things, whether this is admitted or not. The hermeneutic counterpart of the "negotiation of meanings" is the idea that understanding has a certain "dialogic structure" (Warnke, 1987), which Gadamer (1975) calls the "fusion of horizons." But this process comes out looking a little different against the backdrop of a hermeneutic ontology. In this view, the understanding of meaning in life or the human sciences always involves what everyday social actors or social theorists take to be insight into the truth of claims to knowledge or normative authority. Such claims to understanding may contain a great deal of humor or irony. Those who propose them may understand such claims to be distinctly limited or ultimately shrouded in mystery. But they do lay claim to some better or truer understanding of the matter at hand. In the hermeneutic view, our endless "negotiations" of meaning presuppose some fact or truth of the matter (Taylor, 1988, p. 55), even if we can never obtain any final or certain rendition of it. Of course, one wonders how the "truth" hermeneutic thinkers speak of can be made compatible talking about that escapes their own principle of historical contingency or embeddedness. Gadamer (1975) makes it clear that he has in mind a kind of understanding or insight for which being historically situated is a condition, not an impediment. Following Aristotle he envisions a practical/moral sphere of understanding that can neither be assimilated to disinterested theoretical knowledge nor reduced to technical skill. To give a crude example, the understanding that we should lead a courageous life cannot be formulated as a timeless ethical principle. It is part of the reality and risk of the moral life that to act courageously means different things under different circumstances, and our insight into it alters or grows with experience. Nor can courageous action be understood as a technical means for reaching ends we just happen to prefer. The point of talking about courage was to characterize a way of life that was good in itself. Thus we really can't evaluate our norm of courage in terms of its "pragmatic implications." We are just stuck with our current best understanding of what seems to be brave rather than pusillanimous, authentic rather than inauthentic, or wise rather than foolish. The interplay and mutual influence between person and person, interpreter and text, or present and past envisioned by hermeneutics is a thoroughly embodied, historically situated affair. It may be searching and



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open or it may be distorted by defensiveness or domination. It is, in any case, a dialectical process in which both the object and our knowledge of it are continually transformed (Gadamer, 1975). This process involves a going back and forth between (1) openness to whatever insights or coherent perspectives another person, a text, or a form of life may convey and (2) what Gadamer calls "application" or testing to see if this understanding reveals obscured features of our current motives, challenges, and dilemmas and helps make better sense out of them (Richardson and Woolfolk, 1993; Warnke, 1987). Openness risks conservatism or excessive deference to received points of view and established authorities. There is no life without risk, however, and the only way to minimize this one is more rigorous application. Application risks subjectivism or opportunistically interpreting matters to suit dishonest or unworthy purposes. The only answer to that risk is genuine, sometimes painful openness to insights from others or the past that may dispel our errors. Both constructionist and hermeneutic approaches undercut the possibility of appealing to dogmatic authorities or mythical "objective" facts to finally validate our understandings of human action or cultural meanings. In the nature of the case, hermeneutics stresses our dependence upon and reinterpretation of traditions and tends to downplay the possibility of radical departures from them. For this reason, constructionists often conclude that hermeneutics is excessively conservative and courts dogmatism. But hermeneutic thinkers tend to feel that postmodern social constructionism still retains a residue of the disembodied, disengaged modern self that stands apart from the flux of history and life to render its interpretations and make its choices. As a result, it tend to obscure inherited beliefs and values that crucially shape its own position. It has its own "disguised ideology." Giving up this residue means that hermeneutic thinkers hold firmly to an "insiders perspective" in which our task is seen as "critically evaluating our current commitments in the light of possibilities laid out by the past in order to formulate meaningful goals for the future" (Guignon and Hiley, 1990, p. 361). Thinkers as diverse as Foucault (1977) and Taylor (1985b) have argued that social theory is best understood as a form of practice. According to Foucault, of course, each society defines its own variant of "truth" and there is no escape from power into freedom or truth because systems of power are coextensive with human society. Hermeneutic thinkers have problems with such a firm proclamation of the basic truth that there no truths but only, as Foucault says, "truth-effects." Does this basic truth not apply to that basic proclamation as well, thereby undermining it? According to the hermeneutic version of social theory as practice (Taylor, 1985b), social and psychological theory which seeks to explain human action in real life cultural contexts cannot be understood as formulating hypotheses and comparing them to independent facts. The "facts" in this case are our psychological dynamics and social practices which are not


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independent objects but are constituted in part by certain self-understandings. Implicit in these practices are a rich "diversity of goods." There is always a pre-theoretical understanding concerning these practices among the members of a society. Even if it is not articulated in any sort of reflective theory, our institutions and indeed our very selves could not exist without it. Social and psychological theory, in essence, clarify the meanings we live by. They may largely reiterate and reinforce our way of life, as many economics textbooks clarify and celebrate our market economy. But they always reinterpret our practices to some degree, and often do so in ways that push toward their transformation. They bring to light inconsistencies, point out ways we defeat our own ends, and suggest ways the ends we seek may be humanly or morally deficient. Taylor calls these the "self-defining" uses of theory. Theories offer causal explanations as well as clarifications of meanings. But they are inextricably intertwined. Our account of basic human motivations, for example, is bound to be shaped by our sense of the good or decent life, and vice versa. We might say that the hermeneutic view of social theory as practice offers an alternative to both explanatory and constructionist accounts. The clarifying or self-defining uses of theory are not simply "ideological" in the pejorative sense, a confusion of values with facts, because there is no independent order of facts against which to validate these theories and their primary purpose is the clarification of meanings, not predictive accuracy. However, this does not mean that "anything goes" and all senses of validation go out the window. Our historical and practical embeddedness, in the hermeneutic view, means that we are always coming to conclusions we take quite seriously about the contours of the human situation and about what is just, or loving, or decent in human life. Attempts to undermine all such conclusions as a matter of principle really appear to be undertaken in the clandestine service of yet another idea about what is really worthwhile or wise. In the hermeneutic view, social constructionism still preserves a residue of scientism's untenable sharp dichotomy between value and fact, as if we could detach ourselves like gods from the "all too human" flow of our lives. References Arendt, H. (1959). The human condition. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Bell, D. (1978). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bellah, R. The ethical aims of social inquiry. In N. Haan, R. Bellah, P. Rablnow and W. Sullivan (Eds.), Social science as moral inquiry (pp. 360-382). New York: Columbia University Press. Bernstein, R. (1976). The restructuring of social and political theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.



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