Czystość czy zmaza? Czy jest sens łączyć rozumienie z wyjaśnianiem w antropologii i interpretatywnej socjologii?
Purity or Danger? Is It Useful to Combine Understanding with Causal Explanation in Cultural Anthropology and Humanistic Sociology?

Summary/Abstract: For the two last decades cultural social sciences have been facing critical methodological transformation. The widespread tendency in qualitative research to mingling and synthesizing differing interpretive paradigms has been recently confronted with a venture to integration of science and the humanities. This current is not a plain revitalization of historical tendency to submit interpretive methods to scientific explanation of social life, but is seeking a new theoretical base to establish a balance between hermeneutic and causal analysis. This essay discusses different theoretical concepts of the relationship between hermeneutic interpretation and causal explanation. It introduces a concept of “maximal interpretation” devised inside the strong program of cultural sociology as a procedure of unified interpretive-causal analysis of historical events, and analyzes this innovation with theoretical lenses of grid-group theory.

• Details
• Contents