HUMAN STUDIES 4, 179-200 O981)

Interpretive Sociology and Paul Ricoeur

STEVEN McGUIRE Olivet College

Olivet, Michigan

INTRODUCTION

Consider that human behavior is meaningful. Consider also that this meaningfulness presents certain difficulities for those who would engage in its scientific study. Within the social sciences, a tradition of Blumer, Cicourel, and a number of others stemming back beyond Weber has insisted on the centrality of meaning in human interaction. At the same time, this tradition has met with continual difficulities when it comes to calibrating the emphasis on meaning with the aims of a rigorous science. Two sorts of difficulties in particular deserve mention--those pertaining to historicity and those relating to Verstehen.

"Historicity" is a shorthand for the long-recognized problem of authentically extracting generalities from unique and transient events. Each human interaction is a unique moment in history, so that generalizations across a number of interactions distort them or fail to preserve the uniqueness of each event. Blumer (1969) and others have linked up this emphasis on the changing, processual aspect of human interaction with the thesis that social interaction is fundamentally a process of interpreting meanings. The point for Blumer then becomes to develop a methodology ("the methodology of symbolic interactionism") that taps this process rather than ignoring its fundamental feature. This highlighting of uniqueness, interpretation, and concomitant methodological difficulties has been given a further twist in writings commonly associated with ethnomethodology. Wilson (1970) says that within the interpretation process of social interaction different meanings stand in a part/whole interrelation such that generalization becomes even more problematical. The extraction of meanings from their contexts becomes both a phenomenon for study in its own right and a methodological problem besetting all generalizations (see also Cicourd, 1974; Coulter, 1971).

A temporal dimension also contributes to and rounds out the overall problem of historicity. Historical sociology in particular faces this problem: If an event is to be understood by reference to the epoch in which it occurred,

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how can the historian-bridge the temporal gap from one era to another (cf. Rock, 1976)7

If social interaction is in some important sense conveyed through meaning, then the social scientific understanding of it can be expected to show differences from that of atoms, quarks, and other subject matters of the physical sciences. The tradition of Weber and others has referred to this understanding of meaningful social action as Verstehen and has grappled with several problems in conjunction with it (see Natanson, 1963; Outhwaite, 1975; Truzzi, 1974, for initial reference). For present purposes, questions have often arisen as to whether Verstehen involves a mystical union with the private thoughts or feelings of those studied; whether it constitutes a privileged mode of verification; whether it entails or precludes scientific rigor; and what its relation is to deductive, lawlike explanation. Those discussing Verstehen in a favorable light have tended to hold that sociology should aim primarily to understand social reality, in contradistinction to less favorable commentators who argue that it should aim primarily to explain the subject matter through lawlike generalizations. Thus, there has been a long line of polemic as to whether social science requires a special interpretive understanding (Verstehen) or not, whether it is overly subjective, and indeed what its actual nature is.

So far I have presented two clusters of problems facing interpretive sociology, those centering around the historical and contextual nature of social action and those concerned with the interpretive understanding of the actions themselves. With this paper I present a body of writings by Paul Rieoeur that bear on the subject. I then critically evaluate this work as it stands in its own right and as it addresses the foregoing problems.

An initial sense of the interest Paul Ricoeur may hold for interpretive sociology can be glimpsed through a brief sketching of his thinking on major schools of thought. A contributor to Husserlian phenomenology, he draws the common distinction between an immediate, primoridal realm of lived experience and the realm of objectified meaning characteristic of science. But against Husserl, he finds that whereas science does presuppose a naivete rooted in the natural attitude of everyday life, phenomenology promotes a naivete of its own, one of transcendentalism. The transcendental subject tends to posit itself within a circle of subjectivity. Moreover, Husserlian phenomenology has not remained faithful to the implications of universal intentionality that consciousness has its meaning beyond itself, rather than having meaning unto itself (Rieoeur, 1975a). In other, words, Husselian phenomenology descends into subjectivity and idealism.

Ricouer says that to remain useful, the Husserlian project must be synthesized with a number of others, including hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, or the study of interpretation and understanding (Gadamer, 1975a; vide Palmer, 1967), by its nature bears an affinity with interpretive sociology

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(Giddens, 1976) and figures especially prominently in Ricoeur's thought. Ricoeur holds that by focusing on intersubjective understanding, hermeneutics can remedy phenomenology's centeredne~s on consciousness. It also denies the raising of consciousness to the status of an ultimate foundation (Ricoeur, 1975a). Furthermore, phenomenology needs what hermeneutics, Freud's psychoanalysis, and Habermas' critical theory presuppose--the idea that the Cogito or consciousness is not transparent to itself. This use of hermeneutics is tempered in turn by several accommodations to the critical theory of Habermas and Apel, accommodations that would mediate recent debates between these two schools (Symposium, 1975).

Hermeneutics is portrayed such that an element of evaluation is built into the structure of intersubjectivity and built into the praxis of the social philosopher. In a nutshell, Ricoeur is working toward a hermeneutical philosophy of science that incorporates Habermas" notions of the ideal speech situation and emancipation.

Ricoeur has long sought to escape further from phenomenology's "primacy of subjectivity" by way of structuralism, especially that of de Saussure and Levi-Strauss. He conceives ofstructuralism as a science and not a philosophy, in that it avoids historicity and the personal reference to interpreter and those interpreted (Ricoeur, 1973a). Phenomenology must meet the challenge posed by the progress of structural linguistics if it is to survive. It must show that structuralist language systems are presupposed by and actualized in speech. Merleau-Ponty, for example, comes too close to psychology by denying the centrality that structuralist systems have in everyday language use (Ricoeur, 1967; 1968).

A synthesis of phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy further directs phenomenology from idealism and toward a dialogue with social science. Phenomenology's "essences" of lived experience are expressable and therefore public structures (Ricoeur, 1975b; 1977a). The suggestion is that these essential features of lived eXperience are identical with those features referred to by conceptual analysis in analytical philosophy.

Finally, regarding' the relation of phenomenology and social science, phenomenology is not an alternative method of investigation. Its task is to give sociology a foundation, to ground and delimit the objectivity particularly appropriate to it. Kant and several theses from Husserl's Cartesian Meditations provide a foundation and a parallel for the sociology of social action and social institutions set down by Marx Weber in the beginning of Economy and Society (Ricoeur, 1977a).

In this manner Ricoeur's work ranges over a number of schools of relevance to interpretive sociology. This sketch leaves the larger portion of this oeuvre untouched, including materials on religion, the sociology of knowledge, and political practice, as does the exposition that follows. My interest lies in his work on the issues of historicity and Verstehen and the way

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it actualizes the previously mentioned concerns. As wide-ranging as they are, his writings continually tie back to a core body of ideas. In the present case, the core body revolves around the notion of a "text paradigm."

In the next section I present the paradigm unto itself before developing a critical evaluation in the final section of the paper. In these two sections I propose that the work encompasses several valuable features, yet exhibits weaknesses and lacunae that deserve consideration. Ricoeur presents an original and intelligent model of meaning to address the problem of historicity. He invokes Husserl, ordinary language philosophy, and Levi- Straussian structuralism in order to remedy problems associated with ethnomethodology and the philosophy of history. In brief, he says that there are a number of important, related parallels between the interpretation of texts and that of social action (as portrayed by Weber), parallels that facilitate the objectification of social action, l I argue that this model of meaning thematizes largely the wrong distinctions and invites reification.

Second, Ricoeur's model of interpretive understanding (Verstehen) stands as a potentially major advance over most extant models--either those presumed by positivism or those promoted by interpretive sociology. But I suggest that the concept needs to be more fully elaborated in order to be extended from the authentic reading of written texts to the study of Weberian social action.

Third, the value of several points Ricoeur makes abour rigor, validation, and the like is overridden by a misguided reliance on a structuralist model of explanation. This reliance on a Levi-Straussian algebra and a structuralist objectivism is particularly in need of revision, in that it pervades and unites the entire text paradigm. Each of these difficulties bespeaks a problem of applying the paradigm of text interpretation to sociology.

Finally, I argue that Ricoeur's attempt to address the difficult areas of social science epistemology appears to make its gains contingent upon severe limitations. It channels social science away from the understanding of face-to- face interaction and away from the understanding of historical events as they occurred. The following section now directs attention to the text paradigm itself.

RICOEUR'S TEXT PARADIGM

The key to the text paradigm lies in Ricoeur's dual conception of meaning. In comparing Husserl and Wittgenstein on language, he proposes a theory of meaning composed of two dimensions, In the first dimension--semiotic

tRicoeur follows a movement within hermeneutics in which the referent of text is radically enlarged from an individually written text to any object interpretation. To him, history becomes a "text."

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dimension--meaning is a "term within a system of inner dependences [1969, p. 216]." This dimension of meaning in terms of a system of signs abstracted from lived experience is presupposed by the second dimension--semantic dimension--that is, meaning as use, language as a "form of life." A Wittgensteinian dimension of language as use, as a multiplicity of language games, is acknowledged but made dependent on a structuralist dimension of language as a system of signs.

Four tenets fill out this structuralist treatment of language as a system of signs: (1) A synchronic, atemporal approach must precede any diachronic, historical one; (2) the paradigmatic case for a structuralist approach is that of a finite set of discrete entities amenable to quasialgebraic combinations (e.g., phonology); (3) each entity exists and has meaning solely by its relation to the other units of its system; (4) language is a world of its own, a closed system; each item refers only to other items within the system (1976a, p. 5).

Natural language (and meaning), as treated by the latter Wittgenstein and by sociology in general, is relegated in Ricoeur's project to one dimension, the semantic, and then made dependent on the atemporal, structural dimension, The event of spoken discourse and then, by extension, Weberian social action ("action") designates instances of usage in everyday social interaction. "Meaning" is now given a more technical sense, with a structuralist connotat ion-- i t refers only to a closed, atemporal system like that of phonology. The dimension of use or activity is subordinated into an abstracted, au tonomous meaning-structure. Experienced events are "surpassed in" or "overcome by" meaning as atemporal structure; process is subordinated to structure.

Writing figures heavily in this subordination of use into structural meaning, thereby clarifying the latter concept. It contributes several important kinds of distance in terms of which an event is subordinated into "meaning." The meaning of written text stands at a distance from (1) the limited audience the author might have been writing to; (2) the meaning of the text to the author; and (3) the epoch in which the author wrote. Ricoeur makes the argument that the meaning of an action stands at a similar distance from those to whom it was first directed, from the meaning it had for the agent, and from its original context. That is, he makes a key analogy between the way in which written meaning and structuralist meaning alike stand at a distance from the experienced speech event, thereby objectivating it.

In a number of different places Ricoeur develops the idea that an event of spoken discourse or of social interaction is survived by its structural meaning. The historicity of an event embodies an "epistemological weakness [1976a, p. 9] in contrast to the scientific status that has been attained by language structures. Events vanish while systems remain. He makes the argument in terms of several different contexts, but the type of argument is largely the same in each case. In each instance, what he is doing is pointing out senses in

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which discourse(and action) yield a kind of structure that is less psychological and more easily dehistoricized than is the original experience itself. For example, he says that the meaning a speaker intends when he or she verbalizes a sentence is subjective in the sense that the meaning itself requires reference to the person of the speaker. Fortunately, there exist the grammatical devices of se l f - reference (such as personal p ronouns ) , which furnish a "nonpsychological, because purely semantic" speaker's meaning in which "no mental entity need ~be hypothesized or hypostasized [1976a, p. 13]." The meaning of the utterance can then in a sense be treated as referring back to the speaker but in a structural, impersonal way.

Literary codes and genres are given as a similar if more ambitious example. Borrowing from Chomsky and others, Ricoeur says that phonological, lexical, and syntactical codes provide the speaker with a set of discrete unities and combinatory rules with which he or she produces meaningful sentences. Literary genres function like this generative grammar in that they do not merely classify but also "produce" by furnishing a body of rules for producing literary works (1973c, pp. 135-136). A literary genre carries a genetic function like Chomsky's generative grammar in that it furnishes a basis for generating unique products (events) out of rules constitutive of literary structure( 1976a, p. 32; 1968). There is a particular affinity between writing and linguistic codes; each fixates or freezes speech into a manageable form (1977b). No claim is made that they do the same for social interaction; a different set of concepts is given this role, as is shown presently.

The problem of vanishing historical events is handled in tandem with that of the subjectiveness of an author's or agent's intention. The event endures in a kind of meaning that is not merely structural, but logical. "An act of discourse is not merely transitory . . . . It may be identified as the same so that we may say it again or in other words [1976a, p. 9] . ' Just as an historical event in a sense eventuates in an atemporal meaning, the private meaning of an agent's intention feeds into a corresponding public meaning. That which is uniquely eXperienced in one person's stream of consciousness cannot be transferred as such to another person's consciousness. But something does pass from one to another; not private experience but its corresponding public meaning. Here Ricoeur appropriates Husserl and Frege. Meaning is not a "psychic content" in someone's mind but an "ideal object," which can be identified and reidentified by different individuals at different times as being one and the same (1976a, p. 90). Husserl established that every psychic act is characterized by intentionality--the property of intending a meaning that is capable of being identified--so that although psychic life cannot be reached, one can "grasp what it intended, the objective and identical correlate in which psychic life transcended itself"(Ricoeur, 1973b, p. 118). These noematic or, in a sense, objective objects are irreducible to the psychic aspects of the acts from which they come. A text has an "inner connection" giving it the capacity to be

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understood by another person and fixed in writing. Meaning in terms of Verstehen loses historicity and gains a transcendental or logical aspect. Both private and temporal aspects are cancelled and then retained in an A ufhebung of language (1976a, p. 12).

To give content to this idealized dimension of meaning and make it applicable to sociology's subject mat ter- -act ion--Ricoeur extends some of the work by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1972) on speech acts. Certain kinds of speech acts involve an "illocutionary force," which involves doing things by speaking (e.g., saying "I do" at a wedding). Moreover, speech acts have been shown to embody constitutive rules that in a sense produce actions. Constitutive rules (as opposed to norms) do not regulate but create or define new forms of behavior (see Giddens, 1976). "The rules of footbal l . . , create the possibility of or define that activity. The activity of playing football is constituted in accordance with these rules . . . [Searle, 1972, p. 138]." Meaning is treated as a production and a fully social accomplishment. The speaker's intention incorporates into itself the commitment to produce in the listener the means of identifying and recognizing the speaker's intention. Meaning is social rather than private. Speech acts also imply a close connection between saying and doing, which would strengthen the application of texts to the domain of social action. Social scientists are given a handle (the rules) by which authentically to typify actions: the historicity of social interaction is overcome.

To further shore up the application to social action, Ricoeur suggests that an action has a content (propositional content) that can be identified and reidentified as the same ( 1971 a, pp. 537-539). He asserts that"verbs of action" contribute to a structure of action, as do the complements of these action verbs. This propositional content gives social action a noematic structure that may be fixed and extracted from the process of interaction as an object of interpretation. According to Ricoeur (1971a) the constitutive rules:

. . . allow the construction of"ideal models" similar to the Ideal-types of Max Weber. For example, to understand what a promise is, we have to understand what the"essential condition" is according to which is given action =counts as" a promise. Searle's "'essential condition" is not far from what H usserl called Sinngehalt, which covers both the"matter" (propositional content) and the "quality" (the illocutionary force) [p. 540]. 2

Thus speech and social action by extension become preserved in structure and hence amenable to scientific study. Texts and writing particularly exemplify this preservation, as can be seen by looking at the way the overall point applies to the distance between the meaning on the one hand and the

2Ricoeur suggests that these constitutive rules with their implicit "essential condition" may refer to "essential structures" of lived experience whose features are uncovered by ordinary language analysis (1975b, p. 184; 1977a, pp. 147-148).

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agent and original audience on the other. As noted previously, there is a distance between an agent's intention and the public meaning of his or her utterance. What a speaker means and what his or her discourse means are almost, but not quite, the same thing. This distance is especially amplified by writing. The meaning of a text does not overlap so much with what the author means; the text takes on a meaning of its own. Ricoeur proposes that the meaning of an interactional event becomes similarly detached from its agent(s). That is, a meaning independent oftbe actor's intentions comes into being. Ricoeur's warrant for this thesis is thr~fold: (1) actions have unintended effects; (2) the individual agency of a collective action is difficult to attribute; and (3) the meaning no longer overlaps with the agent's intention in the case of complex actions, as they do, he holds, with simple ones (1971a, p. 540.

The objectivating distance between the meaning of an event and its original audience is likewise amplified by writing. Events of spoken discourse or of action are addressed to a limited audiencemthose present at the moment. By its nature, writing gives discourse a potentially unlimited audience even when it is intended for a narrower one. Analogously, structuralist language systems have no limitations of audience because they are not addressed to an audience at all (1971a, p. 536). By extension, the meanings of actions are open to a potentially infinite audience. Actions are open to fresh interpretations that decide their meaning in current praxis. Importantly, the interpretation made of those originally present has "no particular privilege [1971a, p. 545]."

To complete the extension of texts from speech to action, history itself is none other than the "writing" of human action. Actions leave traces that are sedimented into patterns (i.e., social institutions), the sum total of which is history as we know it. And a "meaningful action" is one the importance of which goes beyond its relevance to the original situation. "The meaning of an important event exceeds, overcomes, transcends, the social conditions of its production and may be reenacted in new social contexts [1971a, p. 543]." Actions have nonsituational referents similar to those of written texts. Hence, social scientists can look to writing and to structuralist language systems for a sense in which transitory events are appropriately dehistoricized.

So far I have presented several theses Ricoeur makes in order to legitimate his model of the relationship between an event and its structural meaning. At this point he begins to move toward a conception of Verstehen and with it, a sense of rigor and methodology.

Perhaps the most pertinent point about writing is that, whereas face-to-face speech points toward a situated reality common to interactants, writing "shatters" this reference. Reference to the everyday, experienced world is abolished and replaced by a more fundamental realm of references "which reaches the wor ld . . , at the level Husserl designated by the expression Lebenswelt and Heidegger by 'being-in-the-world' [1973c, p. 140]."

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The first important implication is that this realm can be closer to the essence of social reality than is the realm of everyday speech. Most briefly, Ricoeur suggests that metaphors and scientific models (as described by Mary Hesse) alike function as heuristic devices; they are the means by which we can reconceive and redescribe reality. Scientific and poetic language both t ranscend everyday speech to " a im at a real i ty more real than appearances . . . . The eclipse of the objective, manipulable world thus makes way for the revelation of a new dimension of reality and truth [1976a, pp. 67- 68]." He is saying that there is a realm of writing, metaphor, and symbolism which is particularly suited for furnishing more truthful interpretations of the world.

The second, related point is that regarding the act of interpretation, writing facilitates an escape away from emphasis on the "pathetic investigation of submerged subjectivities" toward an emphasis on the more objective world referenced by text interpretation. By developing the notion of a "world" opened up by writing, Ricoeur contests subjective or psychological versions of Verstehen, replacing them with a continental model derived from Heidegger and Gadamer.

The initial contours of this model have been hinted at already. Literature and metaphor do not simply copy reality but redescribe it, introducing a novel element that reorients us in the world, that opens up for us new possibilities of being in the world. The upshot is that when we interpret a text we do not merely search for the author's psychological intentions.Rather, to interpret is to explicate a possible world. For instance, we interpret a text on the"world" of ancient Greece not to designate the situation for those who experienced it but instead to point toward nonsituational references outliving them, which are offered us as possible modes of being (1971a, p. 536). Writing has a distinct reference, the world opened up by a text. In turn, the act of interpreting the text is not a matter of simply representing it, but more one of explicating possible modes being unfolded by this world designated by the text.

A less psychological more fundamental notion of interpretat ion is required. Verstehen must be treated less as a method, which psychologizes it by focusing on accuracy in interpreting the agent. Here Verstehen treated epistemologically is subordinated to a more ontological treatment.

The subject/object relationship characteristic of all acts of knowing presupposes and takes place within a more fundamental tie to reality. The "mood" or the "situation" precedes knowledge by situating us first (1973b, pp. 120-125). The first function of understanding is to orient us within this situation. Therefore, understanding is addressed not to grasping a fact but to the apprehension of a possibility and our utmost potentialities. The methodological lesson is that to understand a text is not to find an inert meaning contained therein, but rather to unfold the possibility of being that is

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indicated:by the text. In writing (if not in the face-to-face situation), what we understand first is not another person, but a project, an outline of a new being-in-the-world.

The immediate problem with this model of Verstehen is that of the critical function: the ontological presuppositions "transcend in principle the idea of rigor [1973b, p. 125]." The only clue for a return to epistemological concerns is Heidegger's suggestion that in this circle of subject and object, we let ourselves be guided by the things themselves rather than popular conceptions. Here an element of critical distance is build into Verstehen. The ontological structure of understanding always contains not only an element of participation but also one of distance (1978c). To put Ricoeur's point in fieldwork terms, the interpreter is neither a full participant nor a pure, detached observer; elements from each pole are always involved. The relation between the two is never merely given but rather a movement between them. The possibility of a critical distance is always present in understanding.3 Authentic precomprehension requires a critical sorting between precomprehension and prejudice (1971b; 1975a; 1977a). "Bias," "prejudice," and "ideology" often mislead in that understanding always involves a preunderstanding.

The nature of this critical distance is important because the whole rigorous, methodological aspect of the text paradigm lies rooted within it. Importantly, rigor, validation, and objectivity are tied to the notion of a "genuine" or authentic" understanding.

Authentic interpretation requires being open to the world of text. Even though he builds the element of distance into the structure of every understanding, Ricoeur appears to make crigical authentic understanding a contingent possibility, but he does not discuss the ramifications that inauthentic understanding woruld have for the paradigm. I first present his idea of interpretation (authentic) and then the methodological element of explanatory procedures implied within it.

Interpretation in the form of reading is an act of assimilation achieved insofar as the reader's interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the reader. This actualization is the fully existential act of appropriation (1976a, p. 91). Genuine interpretation--to make one's own what was at first other or foreign--ends in some form of appropriation (1974, p. 107). The object to be appropriated is "the meaning of the text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text [ 1976a, p. 92]." To interpret is to follow the movement from what the text says to what it is about. What is appropriated is the capacity of disclosing a world that the text refers to. The genuine referential power of the text is then the disclosure of a possible way of looking at things. The text is not closed in on itself but rather opens out in the

3In this way Ricoeur incorporates Habermas's emancipatory interest.

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act of reading. In this sense, we can understand an author better than he understood himself: the work means more than the author intended.

Ricoeur anticipates these difficulties. First, interpretation no longer is a circle between two subjectivities (agent and interpreter). Nor has it anything to do with empathy. Rather, appropria t ion takes the form of Gadamer ' s (1975a) "fusion of horizons. "The world horizon of the reader is fused with the world horizon of the text. The referent of the text does not "lie behind" it but "in front of" it; the meaning is not something hidden, but something disclosed. "Beyond my situation as a r eade r . . . I offer myself possible modes of being in the world that the text opens and discloses to me[1978, p. 144].'"

Second, the interpretation need not conform to that made by the text's original addressee: writing has already been shown to be open to new interpretations by a potentially universal audience.

Third, interpretation is not limited by the capacity of the reader, such that it would be a projection of the subjectivity of the reader into the text. Ricoeur insists that appropriat ion, even though it ends subjectively, in the interpreter, is not correctly described as projection. There is a sense in which it is a responding to the object of the text (1975a, pp. 94-95): emphasis in the original).

The reader "understands himself before, in front of" the world of the text, letting its world "enlarge the horizon of my self-understanding [1974, p. 107]." M oreover:

Far from saying that a subject already mastering his own way of being in the world projects the a priori of his self-understanding on the text and reads it into the text, I say that interpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being--or if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new forms of life--gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself... The reader.., is enlarged in his capacity of sell" projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself [1976a, p. 94].

Authentic understanding constitutes at the same time a genuine new self- understanding. The self is distanced from itself in the process. "I exchange the me. master of myself, for the se l f disciple of the text [1975a, p. 95; emphasis in original]." Appropr ia t ion is not fully a taking hold of things but rather implies a moment of "dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego." Arguing at this point against Husserlian phenomenology, Ricoeur assumes that the self is not transparent to itself but must look outward to the world (i.e., the text in its broadest sense) in order to attain genuine self- understanding. He develops this idea that interpretive understanding must incorporate critical distance and minimize subjectivity by asserting that genuine interpretations are mediated by a necessary stage o f "exp l ana to ry procedures."

In invoking the long polemic between understanding and explanation, Ricoeur reconceives not only understanding but explanation as well. He argues that Carl Hempers (1952) covering law model of explanation does not

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apply to the practice of historians, and that explanation must be seen instead as a bond of logical continuity within a given historical narrative. The understanding of a historical event is given priority; explanation is the general lawlike structure that the historian often uses to clarify his or her spontaneous understanding. Yet, as will be seen, explanation is given a more particularistic treatment, in order to tie it more compatibly with Verstehen and in order to help extend the whole text interpretation model to Weberian social action.

The explanation and understanding of speech (and action) are in dialectical interplay, first as a movement from understanding to explanation. Understanding is first a" guess, a judgment of an individual totality. A construing is necessary for several reasons. There is a part/whole interplay in which the parts are of varying importance to the whole; judgment of importance is a guess. And different aspects of the whole give its reconstruction a necessary perspectivist character. Also, procedures of validation partake of a "logic of subjective probability" such that we can only show an understanding to be most probable rather than "true" (1971a, p. 549).

Here Ricoeur moves the philosophy of the social sciences away from positivism, toward hermeneutics and critical theory. This "validation" is a fully argumentative discipline very similar to both juridical procedures of legal interpretation and procedures of literary criticism (1971 a, pp. 550-553). Verstehen escapes the danger of self-confirmation because the procedures of validating an interpretation are paired with procedures of invalidation similar to Popper ' s (1958) cri teria of falsif iabil i ty. Val ida t ion is fundamentally polemical--the conflict of interpretations functions in a way to falsify by making some interpretations more probable than others. 4

Ricoeur holds that the essentials of this model of validation are applicable to that of social action. Not only are actions open to several interpretations, but there is a basis on which we can impute the meaning of an action within certain limits and argue on that basis. What can and must be construed in human action is the motivational basis of an action, which is a set of "desirability-characters." We can make sense of wants and beliefs "as a result of the appa ren t good which is the corre la te o f their desi rabi l i ty character . . . On the basis of these desirability-characters and the apparent good which corresponds to them, it is possible to argue about the meaning of an action [1971a, p. 551; emphasis in original]." The understanding and explanation of action in terms of its motivational basis gives an action a limited field for conflicting interpretations of it. Furthermore, what seems to legitimate this extension from guessing the meaning of a text to guessing the

4Discussing emergent metaphor. Ricoeur says that the most probable interpretation is one that accounts for the greatest number of facts, offers the best convergence of the structures explicated in the text, and at the same time enlarges a way of being (1974, pp. 100-105).

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meaning of an action is that "in arguing about the meaning of an action I put my wants and beliefs at a distance and submit them to a concrete dialectic of confrontation with opposite points of view [1971a, p. 552]."

The dialectic of authentic interpretation also involves a movement from explanation to understanding. The different structuralist schools of literary criticism have shown that it is legitimate to treat a text in suspension, as a worldless, authorless system of signs in order to explain it by means of its structure of internal relations. The method of structural linguistics can be validly extended to literary texts on the key assumption that the larger unities of language-as-text are organized in a way similar to that of the smaller unities of linguistics (e.g., phonemes).

Treatments of folklore narratives and analyses of myth serve as models for the extension of structural linguistics to written texts and to sociology in general. Levi-Strauss (1963) abstracts "mythemes," which are similar to phonemes and morphemes and treated according to the same rules. A mytheme is "an oppositive value attached to several individual sentences forming. . , a 'bundle of relations'" (1971b, p. 141). The combination or arrangement of these bundles is the myth's structure. In analyzing folklore narratives, Propp, Barthes, and Greimas extract unities of action which correspond to formalized roles irrespective of psychological subjects or traits. The structuralists extract "action kernels" from the narrative sequence into a logic of comb.inations, giving the narrative its structural meaning, its "symphonic structure" (1971 b, p. 143). This structuralist algebra comprises the heart of "explanation" for Ricoeur, and he develops Levi-Strauss's analysis of the Oedipus myth as exemplary in this respect (1976a, pp. 83-84).

This explanation, however, requires understanding; the structuralism of Levi-Strauss requires hermeneutics. Explaining the inner suspended world of the text presupposes and takes place within the semantic realm of understanding. Furthermore, the element of meaning in the existential rather than structuralist sense is in no way neutralized when sentences of the narrative are placed in combinations of bundles. And structural analysis would be a "sterile game, a divisive algebra" if the system of oppositions did not mediate "meaningful" oppositions or existential tensions along the order o f"b i r th and death, blindness and lucidity, sexuality and truth [1971a, p. 556]." Structural analysis merely suppresses that which it actually presupposes- - the hermeneutic moment of understanding meaningful behavior.

In this manner, explanation and understanding are harmoniously bound together rather than set in opposition. Moreover, each refers to the same sphere of subject matter (signs) rather than one to culture and one to nature (as has often been implied previously in the debate). The binding together is then cemented in the idea of authentic interpretation as a movement going from understanding as a guess through structrual explanation into the act 'of appropriation discussed previously.

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This unity of explanation and understanding completes the earlier thesis that interpretation is not a projection of the subjectivity of the interpreter into the text. Surface understandings or guesses mediated by structural explanation become a kind of depth-interpretation or depth-semantics. We interpret not the vivid experience of the agent but the world opened up by the text . Au then t i c i n t e rp re t a t ion , necessari ly media ted by s t ruc tu ra l explanation, has nothing to do with an "'immediate grasping of a foreign psychic life or with an e m o t i o n a l iden t i f ica t ion with a menta l intention . . . . [ 1971 a, p. 561; emphasis in o riginal]."The interpretation is not something"felt"; it is the dynamic of disclosing a world. This depth semantics is "less a subjective operation than an objective process; less an act on the text, than an act o f the t ex t . . , interpretation is the act of the text, before being an act of exegesis; it is like an arrow borne by the text itself, indicating the direction for the exegetical work [1971 b, pp. I48-149; emphasis in original]."

In filling out this last point, Ricoeur appears to be developing a conception of the historical method and its object--his tory--drawn from Gadamer, one that would amount to significant revision of most current conceptions of historical sociology. Gadamer has argued that in historical interpretation, temporal distance is not a chasm to be bridged but rather ~'a living continuity," a tradition. The metaphor is not one of a gap but of an unbroken chain through which the past is given to the historian. In the act of historical interpretation (e.g., of a document), the personal opinions of the sender are of secondary import to the thing itself, the immanent meaning being communicated. The interpreter anticipates that the text makes a claim regarding the things to which it refers. The very meaning and structure of historical interpretation are not some psychic state but the "thing" being delivered by historical tradition. That which is interpreted is the unity of the interpreter's preunderstanding with the thing interpreted; historical reality is constituted through their relationship. Hence, the problem of a temporal gap is illusory, and the truth content of that which is interpreted takes primacy over the subjectivity of either interpreter or agent.

Ricoeur picks up on both of these points regarding the act of historical interpretation, again giving them a structuralist cast (1971 b). The key point, however, is that interpretation exists as a kind of chain, in which the first interpreters serve as a tradition for later ones. Each in a sense subordinates him/herself to the movement of the text itself, to the thing itself, which in its own way guides the dialogue between interpreters (1971b, p. 150; 1973b, p. 128). This interpretation attains an objective status in that it makes use of explanatory procedures and in that it is part of an intersubjective dialogue guided by the object itself.

How can this model of interpretation be connected to sociology? First, the structural model of explanation may be extended beyond textual entities to all social phenomena because the semiotic or symbolic function is the "very

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foundation" of social life; social reality is fundamentally semiotic. The structural model can be generalized insofar as social phenomena have the typical relations of structuralist systems (1971a, p. 559). Explanation then reflects not the classical model of causation as a regular sequence of antecedents and consequents having "no inner logical connection," but a structural model of correlative rather than sequential relations (1971a, pp. 559-560; 1978b).

Second, the search for correlations between social phenomena "would lose importance and interest" if it would not yield something like a depth semantics. Just as linguistic games are Wittgensteinian forms of life, "social structures are also attempts to cope with existential perplexities, human predicaments and deep-ro oted conflicts [ 1971 a, p. 560]." I n this sense social structures refer to the existential dimension of Levi-Straussian myths and a projected "world." Social science, too, proceeds from preliminary surface interpretation through structural analysis to the depth interpretation that gives the whole process a meaning.

CONCLUSIONS

Such is the text paradigm. It should be evident how Ricoeur offers it to social science as a model for appropriately objectivating unique events and for a nonsubjective Verstehen. We can also see how the text paradigm can play a role in connection with transcendental phenomenology and recent critical theory. The autonomy of the text and the nature of text interpretation would preclude transcendental phenomenology's primacy of subjectivity. At the same time, the critical, emancipating aspect of Habermasian critical theory is both implied in and premised upon the model of authentic text interpretation.

I think the work presents a large number of suggestive ideas for an interpretive social science. Ricoeur has pointed out and sought to develop a number of important similarities between text interpretation and that of social interaction. I do not enumerate each of these but attempt to point out the important ones while suggesting four issues that the paradigm needs to address if it is to reach its goal of applicability to sociology.

1. I argue that the conception of meaning, which is central to the whole work, is potentially helpful but requires qualification. Ricoeur merges sev.erial kinds of meaning together into a single pair, one of which eventuates in the other. There are intended meanings and unintended ones. Then there are the meanings of complex actions, which are qualitatively distinct from those of more simple ones. There are experienced meanings, and then there are the important ones that are reenacted, such as those of great-works of culture. Finally, there is the existential "meaningfulness" exemplified by Levi° Strauss's myths. In order to say that actions give offautonomous meanings,

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Ricoeur makes some dubious comments. He implies that the mea~aing of a simple action, as opposed to a complex one, is equivalent or almost equivalent to the actor's intention. He also implies that were it not for the existence of unintended effects of an action, its meaning would often, if not always, be identical with the actor's intention. He further implies that the meaning of an action would be more a matter of the actor's intention, except that the actor's contribution is hard to sort out from that of the others. Finally, he says that important actions are those that are reenacted and, hence, their meanings are independent of the social conditions of their production.

I submit that these implications are misleading and that the distinctions largely obscure the issue. Ricoeur thematizes the difference between private and p.ublic meanings, mixing disparate types of each, when he should also thematize the distinction between an autonomous, social meaning of an event and that of the analyst/observer. He conflates the meaning for the social scientist alternately with the subjective meaning of the actor and an autonomous social meaning. His continual de-emphasis of the agent's intention as the object of study is symptomatic in this regard. The implication is that the social dimension of meaning is nearly, if not fully, identical with the interpreter's, but that a deep chasm separates the interpreter from the intentions of the agent. In contrast, 1 argue that a social or nonprivate aspect of the actor's intentions can be studied, irrespective of the complexity of the action, irrespective of the degree to which the action has unintended consequences, and irrespective of its existential meaningfulness. By the same token, i t needs to be spelled out that in every instance of social action, the meaning of the event varies at least partially with each observer/participant and then over time.

I think problems ensue when Ricoeur tries to give empirica! meanings similar characteristics or typify them. The need for rethinking the different

senses of meaning and for thematizing the difference between"the meaning" of an event and the meaning for the social scientist becomes crucial when we consider the idea that an action can be identified according to its constitutive rules.

The autonomous meaning was given both em0irical and logical aspects. An original empirical event leaves traces in history, which are sedimented into patterns (i.e., social institutions). These empirical events also take on a "logicity," becoming an ideal object that can be identified and typified as the same by reference to the structure• constitutive rules of the given type of action.

I think that much depends on the use to which this idea is put or the way it is elaborated. The Austin and Searle model of speech acts appears to bea more promising treatment than many current models. Yet the reference to Weber's

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ideal types occasions the sort of reification that has long accompanied such attempts at typifying historical events.

One might use the structures or constitutive rules to identify actions according to type, in a mechanical way. Ricoeur's treatments of personal pronouns, linguistic codes, and literary genres suggest that he may b e heading this way. Searle (1972) appears to have taken up such a strategy, and the results are instructive for present concerns. Searle has continual difficulty avoiding a tautology, and he acknowledges this, attributing the difficulty to the nature of constitutive rules. He also finds it a normal occurrence that the rules are not absolutely strict. As a consequence, he is forced to exclude all sorts of borderline cases from analysis.

I think that these and related difficulties inhere in this overall strategy. A setting down and mechanical usage of such structures will progress little beyond a definitional exercise; the account given will stop short of any deep understanding of the subject matter. Here the danger of conflating an autonomous meaning with that of the interpreter is exacerbated. The interpreter conflating the two will miss the important role of his or her own interpretive work in making and using identifications (cf. Cicourel, 1964; Heap, 1977). Just what counts as the rule or structure is itself problematic, so that the rules themselves should be treated more as the situated accomplishments of those studied and of the interpreter (insofar as the issue is authentic typification of action) (cf. Turner, 1974; Weider, 1974). The more valuable wor k will usually be that which goes far beyond typifying an action, toward describing and/or analyzing it more fully. If this point can be developed from Ricoeur's treatment of emergent metaphor and of the understanding of possible worlds, then it needs to..be clarified by reference to the constitutive rules per se.

2. I find much of value in the preceding model of Verstehen, but I find that qualifications and further specifications are needed. It implies a more sophisticated tr6atment of bias and ideology than is oRen promoted. More important, the main thrust of treating Verstehen more ontologicaUy and less as a special sociological method is, I think, a significant advance along the right track. The Gadamer model of the "fusion of horizons" substantially improves upon prominent Anglo-Saxon models such as those of Abel 0974) and ~ to fill the breach left by much interpretive sociology. A dev¢lopment of this concept could clarify our imagery of historical interpretation affd participant observation, and indeed all sociological work and its epistemological status.

However, Ricoeur slides by one of the main problems facing both this model and previous ones. He does not fully address the issue e lan interpreter projecting him/herself into the text/subject matter, in that he addresses only authentic.interpretation. In this connection he has clarified sociological

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praxis, but he has not dealt sufficiently with inauthentic interpretations. It is as though the problem is defined away through a specification of what good interpretive understanding should be. This illuminates good interpretations and their status as knowledge, but it relegates the issue at hand to poorer interpretations and in that way leaves the problem largely untouched.

The point is to extend text interpretation to that of social action, but Ricoeur limits (rightly so) some of the main features of his Verstehen model to the former. Interpretation is de-psychologized in that it understands first another project in the world rather than a person, but this point is always made in connection with the interpretation of writing alone. Thus, the thesis would apply to the interpretation of questionnaire responses but not to the observation of social interaction, for example. More needs to be said if this set of ideas is to contribute substantially to sociology's use of Verstehen.

3. Although much of the methodological aspect of the paradigm is valuable, there are unnecessary and inappropriate elements. The parallel drawn between scientific and literary realms illiminates, as does the highlighting of the role of argument in "validation." The tentative character attributed to understanding is well noted, in light of its polemical history. I propose, however, that the extension of the model to social action by way of "desirability-characters" is unnecessarily limited. It should be noted that Ricoeur has broached this general area of intentions, motives, and causes in other ways (1978b), but the same criticism still applies. We can argue about the best interpretation of an action on the basis of any and all intersubjective evidence without limitation to desirability-characters or similar concepts.

The heart of the methodological element is the structuralist model of explanation, which coheres with the model of meaning. If the model were to work, it would give sociology a needed dose of existential power, in that it brings in the more fundamental aspects of social reality. The main issue, however, is the fit of the application of the structuralist algebra of explanation (of"action kernesl") to social action as conceived by Weber. I submit that social action does not fruitfully yield abstracted units analogous to mythemes and phonemes. Moreover, the structuralist explanation along the order of that of Oedipus constitutes a minimal advance over the Hempel covering law model, if that. A number of more valuable models of explanation are available.

The notions of action kernels, explanation, and meaning are instances of a particular kind of abstraction discussed by Zimmerman (1974, p. 20) which distinguish observable particulars of behavior from an abstract construction which is thought to lie behind and generate the features of observed behavior. Whole classes of data are suppressed, such that "it is always appropriate to ask whether or not the conception thus advanced (and the 'purification' of data that is its inevitable consequence) compromises the claims advanced for a particular analysis" (Zimmerman, 1974, p. 20). By this standard, the escape

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from historicity and subjectivity offered above are inappropriate. The structuralist purifications are not incidental to the advances that would be made-- the purifications are severe ones and without them the advances would be nil. Although there is always a close tie between methodological practices and the resulting knowledge product, this is an instance in which the product becomes largely an artifact of the procedures used.

Thus, social reality is indeed fundamentally symbolic, if not semiotic, as Ricoeur holds. It does not warrant the extension of structural explanation to social action. To radicalize the point Ricoeur makes against Levi-Strauss, such structural analyses do suppress a "realm" that they pre-suppose, that of interpretation or hermeneutics. This attempted reconcilation and union of two types of work has not proven fertile for the study of social action. The long tradition of interpretive sociology and its affiliates has had difficulty developing a sense of critical distance and methodological rigor to match its subject matter, but there exist a number of more direct paths toward this goal.

This shortcoming does not negate all the individual contr ibut ions presented, but it does deny the fitness of that which makes the substantive and epistemological facets of the text paradigm cohere--the structuralist theme. To the extent this element is an inappropriate idealization, the rather elegant harmony between subject matter and methodology becomes nonrelevant.

Overall, the point is that the tie to social action--sociology's subject matter--is weak. Like the model of meaning and that of Verstehen, the structuralist model of explanation falters when it is extended from other domains to that of action.

4. The final issue makes explicit a problem already hinted at. Ricoeur's presentation channels us away from two important and legitimate sorts of phenomena. I think he is largely correct in showing us limits within which we can proceed in connecti~on with interpretive understanding and in connection with history. Each of these areas can be treated more positively than they have been in the past, along some of the lines sketched previously. With the former, we are admittedly limited to the public side of the experience of those we study. However, events of social interaction are available to study, in ways not provided for above. As suggested regarding Verstehen, more needs to be said regarding the interpretive understanding that obtains when the social scientist and those studied are closer to a face-to-face situation than a reader- text situation. More generally, I submit that the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of actors are legitimate phenomena for study, across the board. It is neither fitting nor necessary to shy away from these areas and /or restrict their range of application, as done previously. Such matters do provide difficulties for investigators, but they also yield intersubjective evidence.

Likewise, the general model of historical interpretation marks a real improvement over conventional conceptions. We can but come from within our own preunderstanding; the questions we ask, the categories we use, and

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the sense we give to the data come out of our own historical nexus. A full return to the past is not available. By the same token, there is no chasm between past and present but ra ther a t rad i t ion being con t inua l ly reconstituted. An action is indeed continually open to new interpretations, and in a sense, the interpretation made by those originally present carr ies"no particular privilege" (it can be treated as faulty or epiphenomenal).

Even so, our interest in the past is not satisfied by its ability to open up possible dimensions of being, al though it does do that. The paradigm directs us toward the interpretation o f a possible world when we are often interested in an historical actuality. For certain purposes of study, we are interested in what happened, or in what people thought at the time. We want to constitute the historical past (cf. Goldstein, 1976), a l though it is not available in an objective sense. We have no "direct touchstone" of the past with which to judge interpretations, and historical facts too are situated accomplishments. We can and do, however, legitimately at tempt to constitute history in ways that the text paradigm needs to provide for more fully.

In sum: Ricoeur grapples with Verstehen and the historicity of social action in a highly original and promising way. Steering between a number of academic traditions, he nicely avoids many of their endemic weaknesses and brings forth several major ideas o f note. As always, the ideas display their gaps, weaknesses, and areas for clarification and elaboration. Fortunately, there is no need to treat them as a finished product in need of an epitaph, for they provide valuable materials to further transcend.

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