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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Analytical & linguistic philosophy
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Verstehen - The Uses of Understanding in the Social Sciences (Paperback)
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Verstehen - The Uses of Understanding in the Social Sciences (Paperback)
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In late nineteenth-century German academic circles, the term
verstehen (literally, understanding, or comprehension) came to be
associated with the view that social phenomena must be understood
from the point of view of the social actor. Advocates of this
approach were opposed by positivists who stressed the unity of
method between the social and natural sciences and an external,
experimental, and quantitative knowledge. Although modified over
time, the dispute between positivists and antipositivists--nowadays
called naturalists and antinaturalists--has persisted and still
defines many debates in the field of philosophy of social sciences.
In this volume, Michael Martin offers a critical appraisal of
verstehen as a method of verification and discovery as well as a
necessary condition for understanding. In its strongest forms,
verstehen entails subjectively reliving the experience of the
social actor or at least rethinking his or her thoughts, while in
its weaker forms it only involves reconstructing the rationale for
acting. Martin's opening chapter offers a reconsideration of the
debate between the classical verstehen theorists--Wilhelm Dilthey,
Max Weber, R.G. Collingwood--and the positivists. Chapters 2 and 3
deal with positivist critiques of verstehen as a method of social
scientific verification and understanding. In the subsequent
chapters Martin considers contemporary varieties of the verstehen
position and argues that they like the classical positions, they
conflict with the pluralistic nature of social science. Chapter 4
discusses Peter Winch's and William Dray's variants of verstehen,
while chapters 5 through 9 consider recent theorists--Karl Popper,
Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz--whose work can be characterized in
verstehenist terms: In his conclusion Martin defines the
limitations of the classical and recent verstehen positions and
proposes a methodological pluralism in which verstehen is justified
pragmatically in terms of the purposes and contexts of inquiry.
This volume is the only comprehensive and sustained critique of
verstehen theory currently available. It will be of interest to
sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and
anthropologists.
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