Explanation in the Sciences of Man

Abstract

There is a long tradition of distinguishing explanation from interpretation which has characterized philosophical analyses of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the human sciences. This tradition was fuelled partly by the positivistic distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, partly by the coveringlaw model of explanation, but mostly by the hermeneutic philosophy which attempted to separate explanation as practiced in the natural sciences from interpretation and understanding as practiced in the so-called “Geisteswissenschaften”. The context of discovery, where both positivists and critical rationalists thought interpretation belonged, was regarded as a part of psychology, which accounted for how scientists produced hypotheses, whereas the context of justification, which transformed a mere hypothesis into a genuine scientific explanation, was seen as a subject to which the most rigorous methods applied. Carl G. Hempel and Karl Popper developed the covering-law model of scientific explanation and ignored the pragmatic origin of all kinds of explanation.¹ They thereby ostracized the human sciences, leaving them to a touchy-feely enterprise. Also hermeneuticists believed that explanation was reserved to the natural sciences, while the humanities were occupied with understanding. These historical positions have all been found to be inadequate characterizations of the full range of scientific understanding of our world. In this and the succeeding chapter I shall present a unitary theory of explanation and interpretation .²