Ways of Understanding

Interpretation and explanation are critical to understanding. There is not one way to describe either of the two concepts. Erklären means law-governed explanation. Scientists who engage in erklären attempt to make explanatory sense of something by resorting to the laws that govern that thing. It relates to the social/natural sciences and is mainly used by people who make objective explanations of things. By contrast, verstehen means interpretative understanding. This approach comes from a view where the phenomenon appears to be meaningful and appropriate. It therefore enters into the world of subjectivity and places great weight on the meaning of things in order to identify the true explanation of things. Verstehen favours the social sciences over the natural sciences by asserting that explanatory statements of social phenomena will never result in an accurate understanding of such phenomena. Each approach provides two different ways to make sense of certain phenomenon.  

Why is making explanatory sense of a social phenomena, not enough?

The history of the German culture has it that philosophy and metaphysics were themselves historical phenomena. Accordingly, thoughts and ideas became known as objects of the world and inside the world. Despite them being absent of content, thoughts and ideas became mental appearances that were made the subject of empirical science. Dilthey proposed that there are two fundamentally diverse kinds of empirical objects: natural and mental phenomena. Through the use of erklären (law-governed explanation) – natural science can make explanatory sense of natural phenomena. On the contrary, natural science can not make the same sense of thoughts and ideas. Such empirical objects are better understood by means of verstehen. The only way to make comprehensive sense of mental phenomena is to grasp it’s meaning. Mental phenomena can be manifested in empirical objects that are interconnected to the purpose and meaning of that object. For example, ink on paper is an empirical object, because the feature of the text meaning something is crucial to its identity. Nothing can make sense of the text if it were detached from its meaning.

Reasoning within the domain of the social science is nugatory without pointing out the significance of the distinction between mental and natural phenomena. Sometimes the line is fine to draw because social phenomena like human actions can be as inextricably connected to meaning – as are mental phenomena. In this sense, an explanation of both social and mental phenomena requires an insight into the meaning of the action or text. The best way to discern the difference between the two phenomena is to recognise the different features of each.

Philosophers who argue that verstehen is independent of any other phenomena – base their argument on the fact that mental phenomena are not only (1) meaningful, but also (2) purposive and (3) essentially relational. However, despite the importance of recognising a methodological distinction between verstehen and erklären (that is, between mental and social/natural phenomena) – it is not necessary to draw a virtual line between the two. All that is important is to realise that verstehen and erklären are different in some respects, but not all respects.

(1) The issue with defining the meaning of mental phenomena is that it is impossible to capture the meaning of phenomenon irrespective of all the different perspectives of people who ascribe meaning to that phenomenon. Individuals cannot best discern meanings on their own when the meaning of a gesture, action or text could have different effects on different people. (2) As regards purposiveness, it is common for people to carry out actions in order to bring certain future occurrences about. For example, a student would complete an assignment because the assignment is due in the future, not because the student enrolled in a university in the past. This relates to erklären, in the sense that defining purpose elucidates what it means to make empathetic sense of action by looking for the reasons that make the action meaningful and appropriate. To make explanatory sense of natural events, not only the cause of that event can be explained, but also the reason for the event. This is a way of rationalising the event. Such an approach commonly requires a normative reason to be given for why the action was conducted. For example, the student completed the assignment because otherwise s/he would fail. This is the implicit normativity of the action: the fact that the student is enrolled in university would be an insufficient reason to rationalise the event. (3) Essential relationality reveals that natural phenomena can be individuated for different reasons why mental phenomena are chosen to be the focus. Natural phenomena, such as the birds are singing can be identified by people without those people knowing why they are talking about the event. This causes us to fail in understanding the meaning of a phenomenon despite our ability to describe it sufficiently – and this is what motivates an adoption of erklären rather than verstehen: to look for the law-governed explanations.

Controversies between verstehen and erklären

The concept of Logical Positivism asserts ways to define and successfully predict natural phenomena.  According to the positivist, we should try to explain human actions by looking for the causal laws that govern those actions, and thus simultaneously adopt the erklären approach. However, this evokes misunderstandings with respect to the position of verstehen in the social sciences. One could opine that science is an attempt to make sense of all phenomena. But the problem with this opinion is that the notion of ‘sense’ is not defined. There is a difference between explanatory sense compared to empathetic sense. Mere explanatory sense looks to the law governing the action (close to the erklären categorisation) – while empathetic sense looks to the reason why the manifestations appear to be meaningful and appropriate (according to the verstehen categorisation). The position of a positivist, however, is that the explanation of human action should be undertaken according to objective patters of behaviour rather than through telling stories about how these patterns look from the view of people on the scene.

The position of the positivist gives rise to three issues. First, positivists define intentional explanations by virtue of overt bodily movements, which is contrary to how all scientists and people define such explanations. However, opponents argue that in order to make empathetic sense of human actions, the beliefs and desires of the people carrying out the action needs to be taken into account. Second, many argue that science is an attempt to transcend subjective points of view. That is, science is all about objectivity and leaves no room for subjective perspectives under the verstehen approach. The problem with this approach is that it excludes the possibility of science recognising subjective meanings, whereas verstehen proponents argue that common sense requires subjective meanings to be considered as part of intentional phenomena and that there is no way to interpret scientific knowledge without associating a subjective character to that knowledge.  The third problem relates to different types of deliberation. Rational choice theory recognises the indispensable role that normativity and subjectivity has to play in behavioural attitudes. However, it is possible to notice the importance of subjectivity without forfeiting the aim of unified science based on the more objective erklären approach. Overall, social science can never be completed solely on the erklären approach. It needs to deliberate events by ascribing meaning to why the events were carried out under the verstehen theory. To conclude, while recognising the differences and similarities between the two approaches, a balance ought to be struck between the two, as one cannot do well without the other.