Phillip Clayton’s fascinating article The Fall from Objectivity: How Interpretation Entered into the (Scientific) World…And What It Means for Religion on Metanexus discusses the different types of hermeneutics involved in natural science, social science, literary criticism, and religion. Clayton notes that
just as the positivists were declaring empirical verifiability to be the only criterion of meaning, Toulmin, Hanson and Kuhn were already urging the incommensurability of competing paradigms; just as the human genome project was laying bare the very building blocks of the human machine, the 30,000+ genes that alone must code for all inherited human structures and behaviors, leading biologists were already describing the irreducible role of epigenetic factors and top-down causation in regulating genetic expression; and just as sociology and economics were setting undreamed-of standards for quantitative precision in social science, anthropology and the interpretive sciences were already declaring “no exit” from the hermeneutical blocks to objective knowledge of the Other. To the innocent observer, it certainly appears that the project of omni-reduction to scientific explanation collapsed, perhaps permanently, at what should have been its moment of greatest victory.
Yet, Clayton argues, identity theorists have gone too far in reducing all scientific truth claims (indeed all truth claims) to mere interpretation. Clayton observes:
But where the Identity Theorist sees an identity, I see a series of distinct types of human inquiry. Yes, interpretation is ubiquitous; but the role it plays varies. The human subject is always involved, but it’s not always involved in the same way. Here’s the core difference, which I owe to Anthony Giddens: the natural scientist is engaged in a process of interpreting a field of data, of seeing it as a certain way; and she partially constructs the world she sees. But the human scientist – the psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist – is involved not just in this single hermeneutic but in a “double hermeneutic.” In these three “human sciences” at least, both the inquirer and the object of inquiry are interpreting subjects. Here questions of interpretation are inescapable in an even more radical fashion than in the natural sciences, since the subject being interpreted is also imposing her own meaning on the situation.
I’m not sure I fully agree with Clayton’s conclusion, but it’s a fascinating essay.