Why studies of human capacities modeled on ideal natural science can never achieve their goal
pp. 3-22
in: Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, Richard M. Burian (eds), Rationality, relativism and the human sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
Ever since the human sciences (anthropology, economics, linguistics, political science, psychology, and sociology) rather slowly and tentatively separated themselves from philosophy they have had to explain why the break was never clean, why they have a massive amount of data but little theoretical understanding, in short, why they have not found their own secure way of doing science as the natural sciences have. A recent discussion of this subject has taken the form of a three way debate in which Charles Taylor defends a sharp distinction between the kind of interpretive understanding we can expect in the sciences of man and the kind of theoretical explanation we have achieved in the sciences of nature; Richard Rorty claims there is no essential difference between the Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften, only between normal and non-normal science; and I draw on ethnomethodology to argue that the human sciences which try to emulate the physical sciences cannot be normal because they must but cannot account for their own conditions of possibility.2
