Explanation and Interpretation in Sociology: Against Peter Winch's Methodological Criticism

The article is devoted to the evaluation of the significance of the ideas of Peter Winch and his followers Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read and Wes Sharrock for the methodology of sociological research. The essence of Winch's argument formulated in The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy is that, within sociology, what is explored consists in rules shared by a particular community rather than in empirical regularities, so the method should be considered as a conceptual analysis. The most radical interpretation of this argument by Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock implies that sociology cannot produce new knowledge at all and should be reduced only to clarifying what is already known to social actors. As it turned out in the course of research on the development of the ideas of Hans Skjervheim and Harold Garfinkel that are similar to Winch's ones, accepting Winch's methodological criticism of “objectifying” sociology does not cancel the fact that interpretive sociology supported by Winch cannot solve the problem he posed. Moreover, as it is shown below, similar problems exist in the natural sciences; therefore, something else is required to prove the impossibility of applying the scientific method in sociology. If one looks at the situation more broadly, it is unclear why the assumption of the usefulness of the scientific method in sociology is more dubious and needs more argumentation than the assumption of its uselessness. In addition, when Winch and his followers discuss sociology as a science they make an error that consists in the fact that the subject for a sociologist's explanation is not action itself but its descriptions, and, therefore, descriptions that do not allow a nomological explanation can be replaced with the ones that allow it. The article presents examples of such a replacement taken from the works of Arthur Danto on the methodology of history that can be easily translated into a sociological context. Thus, it has been demonstrated that an adequate scientific method for a sociological research is generally possible even if it is not possible to justify the adequacy of any of the existing specific methods.

Keywords

Authors

References