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Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39:1
0021–8308
Does Interpretation in Psychology Differ From

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Interpretation in Natural Science?
JACK MARTIN AND JEFF SUGARMAN
The necessarily interpretive nature of science is widely recognized. The theory

ladenness of scientific observation and data, the under-determination of theory by
data, and the role of values and interests in the selection and framing of focal
phenomena are now standard topics in the philosophy of science. More contro-
versially, many philosophers and social scientists also distinguish between natural
and social science in terms of quantitative and/or qualitative differences in the
degree and/or kind of interpretive activity that attends one versus the other. Even
more controversially, psychology occasionally is regarded as doubly or even multi-
ply interpretive in both its methods and subject matter in ways that distinguish
it from other social sciences. Clearly, the salience of such distinctions depends on
how sciences are understood in terms of their methods and ends. However, much
variation and nuance in analyses of interpretation and its role in natural science,
social science, and psychology also rest on how interpretation itself is conceptualized.
In psychology, classic phenomenology attempted to interpret the phenomenal
bases of human experience by identifying essential features of human consciousness
and intentionality. More recent forms of phenomenological inquiry in psychology
treat interpretation as a means of penetrating and making sense of the experiences,
perceptions, conceptions, and actions of individual persons. This kind of empirical
phenomenology has become closely linked with much qualitative methodology,
and with humanistic and cognitively constructivistic psychologies that approach
psychological interpretation as a task of comprehending experiences, intentions,
and significances that are unique to individual agents. Hermeneutic inquiry in
psychology takes interpretation to be enabled by a shared background of tradi-
tional and conventional ways of life consisting of networks of social and cultural
practices within which things and events are revealed or concealed, and generally
rendered intelligible. Historical ontologists and social constructionists in psychology
draw our attention to social and psychological phenomena that are themselves
partially or more fully constituted by human collective and individual interpretive
activity, in ways that physical phenomena are not. Psychological Wittgensteinians
understand language as an influential set of conventional “grammars in use” that
© 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009. Published by Blackwell
Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
20 Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman
enable conceptual activity that is an indispensable and independent guide to any
form of empirical inquiry in psychology or other disciplines. Social culturalists
and pragmatists both highlight the functional meanings and closely related
interpretive activities constituted within sociocultural, interpersonal sequences of
interactivity, and the ways in which these systems of meaning and interpretation
are taken up by individuals who participate in such social practices. Cognitively-
oriented psychologists and cognitive scientists have concerned themselves with
various forms of nativist, social-cognitive, and activity theorizing that attempt to
explain how persons differentiate themselves from things and others, and come to
interpret others as persons with minds like their own, but with perspectives that
might differ from their own.
In this essay, we clarify the nature of interpretation and the general way in
which it might be said to differ across psychological, social, and natural science.1
With such clarification in place, we then turn to a consideration of relevant
positions and arguments concerning differences between interpretation in social
and natural science as articulated by Charles Taylor and Thomas Kuhn. Finally,
we offer our own analysis of the Taylor-Kuhn debate, in which we draw upon, and
recast Ian Hacking’s use of Elizabeth Anscombe’s conceptualization of intentional
actions as actions under particular descriptions. Our conclusion is that the self-
interpretation of persons, as objects of psychological inquiry, requires interpretive
practices in the conduct of psychology that go beyond those required in natural
science. Importantly, in reaching this conclusion, we also maintain that the nature
of such additional and distinctive interpretation, if properly understood, does not
threaten the objectivity of psychological science, so long as objectivity is not
framed in terms of universal convergences of interpretation across all times and
contexts.
WHAT IS INTERPRETATION AND WHAT KINDS OF INTERPRETATION DO

DIFFERENT SCIENCES REQUIRE?
In general, interpretation is a way of understanding that discloses the meanings

of objects, actions, and/or events. Under many everyday circumstances, interpretation
seems so minimal and occurs so automatically as to go mostly unnoticed. However,
when meanings are hidden, opaque, uncertain, ambiguous, or multiple, interpre-
tation may need to be explicitly purposeful, perhaps even methodical. Moreover,
precisely what interpretation is taken to be, and how it might be achieved, may
vary according to different theories of meaning. To simplify matters, almost all
theories of meaning subscribe to one or both of two conceptions of meaning. One
conception is the conventional sense or use of an expression or gesture within a
given language or sociocultural practice. This kind of meaning requires coordination
of conceptions and their use within a particular linguistic and sociocultural
collective. The other conception of meaning concerns what a person intends to
© 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
Interpretation in Psychology 21
communicate by a particular gesture or utterance. In this case, the person’s
intended meaning may or may not coincide with the conventional meanings of
the community in which she acts. However, too much deviation between individual
intentions and collective practices of meaning risks incoherence that renders
interpretation by others, including social scientists, difficult or even impossible.
There are many other distinctions that have been made among kinds of meaning,
including work that has challenged this basic distinction between collective,
conventional meaning and personal intentionality and significance. Nonetheless,
we believe that this distinction still can serve as a useful conceptual device for
exploring some of the principal similarities and differences that have been posited
among interpretation in science in general, interpretation in social science, and
interpretation in psychology.
All scientists must concern themselves with concepts. Traditionally, concepts
have been considered to be principles of classification used to determine mem-
bership in a given class. Although some consider concepts variously to be mental
representations or even brain states, it seems clear that concepts function within
conventional, social relational practices, especially linguistic practices. As basic units
of meaning in linguistic and pre-linguistic social practices, concepts are governed
by conventional rules of employment that are necessary if language is to serve its
coordinating, communicative functions within human societies. Such rules of
employment may be explicitly articulated, but often are implicit in our linguistic
and communicative practices. These rules are standards of correct usage.
Both concepts and their relevant grammars (rules of correct employment) are
human creations. As abstractions, they are not part of the natural world and are
independent of the empirical phenomena of interest to the scientist. Nonetheless,
an essential basis of any science is the ability to identify objects of inquiry, and
empirical investigation would be impossible without adequate conceptualization
of the phenomena of interest to the scientist.
It is necessary for scientists of all kinds to conceptualize phenomena of interest
in ways that allow them to conduct their empirical inquiries. Further, even though
examples of confusion between conceptual and empirical claims and aspects of
science are not difficult to find, conceptual work in science, although indispensable
to empirical inquiry, is separate from it and is a matter of human interpretive
activity, not a matter of empirical investigation per se (cf. Hacker, 2007). It is at
other levels of interpretation that differences between natural and social science
are perhaps more apparent and contentious.
Many of those who recognize the necessity in both natural and social science
of the kind of basic conceptual, interpretative work just described nonetheless
believe that there are important differences between natural and social, psycho-
logical phenomena, and that such differences have implications for the conduct
of, and yield that might be expected from, research in natural and social science.
Although expressed in different ways, such views converge on three interrelated
features of social, psychological phenomena that are said to distinguish them from
© 2009 The Authors

natural phenomena. These three features are the social constitution, uniquely
value-laden nature, and reactivity of social, psychological kinds. The combined
effect of these three features is said to be that in social, psychological science, both
the subject matter and the manner of its study are, at least in part, human
inventions. In natural science, by contrast, the conceptualization and manner of
study of focal phenomena are, as argued above, human inventions, but the subject
matter of such conceptions and methods exists independently of the activity of
human beings. Thus, the study of social phenomena, such as childhood, or psy-
chological phenomena, such as resilience, is possible not only because social and
psychological scientists have conceptualized children and the psychological trait
of resilience, but because human individuals, groups, and communities have come
to apply and understand themselves and other members of their societies according
to such conceptualizations (Hacking, 1995, Jansz & van Drunnen, 2004; Rose,
1996). When children are treated as children, their experience and actions differ
from what they would be if they were treated as non-human animals or miniature
adults. When individuals are classified as resilient, they may adjust their self-
understanding accordingly and react to problems they encounter differently from
what they might have done if they were not so classified. It is in this sense that
social and psychological phenomena may be said to be, at least in part, socially
constituted. According to many who have adopted an interpretivist approach,
social and psychological scientists who do not interpret their subject matter as
socially constituted and contextually dependent misunderstand that which they
are studying.
The value-laden nature and reactivity that have been attributed to the phenomena
of social, psychological science are related to the partial social constitution of these
phenomena. [Partial because conceptions like childhood and resiliency obviously
also require biophysical human beings in interaction with material entities and
processes in the biophysical and sociocultural world.] Unlike rocks, plants, and to
a greater degree than (and perhaps in a qualitatively different manner from) other
animals, persons react to the ways in which they are classified and conceptualized.
Because concepts such as childhood and resilience are not value neutral, such
reactivity is simultaneously intellectual, emotional, evaluative, and practical. An
adolescent recently diagnosed as learning disabled may (depending on a host of
other life experiences and circumstances) accept this diagnosis as an excuse to
stop expending current efforts at academic accomplishment, or alternatively may
be reassured that current learning difficulties are to be expected, and redouble
efforts to cope with the disability. As self-interpreting beings, persons both adopt
classifications available to them in their life experiences, and react differentially to
such classifications through their own interpretive and evaluative efforts. Physical
entities like particles, plants, and non-human animals are not similarly concerned.
[The reactivity of sub-atomic particles to the physical scientist’s methods of
observation and measurement is a different kind of reactivity that is not related
to self-interpretation and value-ladeness.] Horses and dogs may be affected by
© 2009 The Authors

their owner’s understanding of their classifications as purebreds or mongrels, but
such classifications do not fuel self-interpretive activity on the part of these animals,
and thus make little difference to the animals themselves, other than through the
mediation of their caregiver’s reactions.
Even when the foregoing considerations with respect to the likely social
constitution, value-ladenness, and reactivity of social psychological phenomena
are recognized, some philosophers of science (e.g., Bunge, 1998) insist that the
fundamental nature of scientific inquiry is not affected by such differences in
subject matter, and remains generally the same across the natural and social (or
human) sciences, including psychology. Without necessarily denying anything that
has been said here, such well-respected scholars believe that the various distinctions
discussed above simply mean that scientific research in the social sciences is both
more complicated and less advanced than research in many branches of natural
science. Some accept that the results of social and psychological inquiry are likely
to be more tied to particular settings and periods of time because of changing
social arrangements and systems of classification and social and personal reactions
to them. For example, results from research on social attitudes to same-sex marriage
might be expected to differ dramatically from the 1950s to the present day, as might
findings of psychological research on personality profiles of gays and lesbians
over this same period of time. However, so long as investigators have plausible
explanations for such shifts in results in terms of changing patterns of social
constitution, values, and the reactivity of those studied, none of this should
present insurmountable problems to social and psychological scientists. Moreover,
defenders of a unified view of scientific inquiry, point out that even in the natural
sciences biological phenomena require different methods of study than do inanimate
physical phenomena. Further, in biophysical science, contextual and value factors
always must be investigated and interpreted. Even the basic laws of physics do not
manifest in predictable ways outside of highly specialized and scientist-created,
ideal environments such as total vacuums, nearly frictionless planes, and so forth.
And, natural scientists, no less than social scientists, may be prone to interest and
bias in ways that require the constant vigilance of both individual scientists and
the scientific community.
In response, those who believe that the social constitution and value salience of
social phenomena (to which it is necessary to add the self-interpreting nature and
reactivity of psychological persons if more psychological phenomena are the focus
of inquiry) demarcate social from natural science, remain unconvinced by such
reassurances. For John Greenwood (1991), Rom Harré (2000), and others,
psychological phenomena (understood as the experiences, understandings, and
actions of self-interpreting, uniquely language- and culture-capable beings) differ
in kind from physical phenomena. For these philosophers of social science, such
differences mean that forms of interpretation unique to the social and human
sciences are required to uncover the social meanings and personal significances
that render them intelligible. Moreover, they point out that although both social
© 2009 The Authors

and natural scientists have professional and personal interests in their scientific
work, and are not without biases, the phenomena of natural science are both
disinterested and non-reactive, in contradistinction to many social, psychological
phenomena. Insofar as social science necessarily is concerned with relations
that pertain among the collective and individual understandings and actions of
psychological persons and the social, cultural institutions, organizations, and
practices in which they live, all social science must attend to the qualitative and
ontological distinctiveness of human kinds and their inevitable reactivity to, and
interactivity with, their sociocultural and biophysical world. If interpretivist
philosophers of social science are correct, social, psychological science requires
more intensive and hermeneutical forms of interpretation in order to study and
understand its phenomena of interest.
A useful way of considering and evaluating this possibility is to examine in
some detail one of the more influential positions in support of the distinctiveness
of the social, psychological or human sciences as interpretive sciences. This
position has been set forth by Charles Taylor (1985a) in a now famous essay,
“Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” In what follows, Taylor’s text and
Thomas Kuhn’s (1991) reactions to it set the stage for our own conclusions
concerning the necessity and nature of interpretive inquiry in social and psycho-
logical science versus natural science.
AN INSTRUCTIVE EXCHANGE
In “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Taylor (1985a) argues for a concep-
tion of social reality as constituted by a matrix of practices and conventions in
which are embedded inter-subjective and common meanings. Such a social reality
not only acts as a background against which things are made evident and intelli-
gible, but is constitutive of the kinds of persons we are. We become the persons
we are by participating in the practices and conventions of our societies, and
extracting and accepting meanings and self-definitions that are made available to
us by our social embeddedness and participation. Such meanings and self-
definitions are constitutive of us as self-interpreting and self-determining beings
who value and find significance in our social world, and evaluate our experiences
and actions accordingly.
Any viable understanding of social reality understood in this way must be
hermeneutical. It cannot be founded on brute data that require relatively little
interpretive difficulty, such that their observation, conceptualization, and interpre-
tation may be formalized and verified in ways that may be, albeit with certain
well-known difficulties, agreed upon and communicated across different scientists
and scientific communities. If social science is necessarily hermeneutical, given
that any viable understanding of social reality and the persons whose psychology
it (at least partially) constitutes must involve intensive interpretations of inter-subjective
© 2009 The Authors

and common meanings, such a science only can rely on “readings” that are
warranted by other and further interpretations. Such a science, according to
Taylor, only is possible through the insight and intuitions of the interpreting social
scientist, and is not amenable or reducible to “the gathering of brute data, or
initiation in modes of formal reasoning or some combination of these. It is
unformalizable” (p. 53). It follows that differences in social scientific interpretations
cannot be arbitrated by appeal to further evidence, detection of methodological
or measurement error, and the like. In a hermeneutical science, the superiority of
one interpretation over another only can consist of such things as arguing that
what is held to be the more adequate interpretation also can account for what is
valid in the alternative interpretation. Moreover, such a strategy ultimately is
dependent on particular traditions of living and understanding that may them-
selves diverge in ways that make any adjudication of alternative interpretations
extremely difficult, if not impossible—thus inviting suppression or oppression of
alternative interpretations, or at the very least, introducing an inevitably moral/
ethical dimension to the entire enterprise.
To the foregoing constitutive and value-laden account of intensively interpre-
tative inquiry in the social sciences (which he regards as hermeneutical in a
manner not shared by the natural sciences), Taylor adds a view of social science
as in principle unpredictive. In the closing pages of his essay, he attributes the
success of prediction in the natural sciences to “the fact that all states of the
system, past and future, can be described in the same range of concepts, as values,
say, of the same variables. . . . This is far from being a sufficient condition of exact
prediction, but it is a necessary one in this sense, that only if past and future are
brought under the same conceptual net can one understand the states of the latter
as some function of the states of the former, and hence predict” (p. 56). However,
social science and psychology must deal with a subject matter (i.e., a social world
of practices, conventions, and meanings, and the persons constituted and contin-
uously and interpretively active in this world) that is constantly and dynamically
changing. In social and psychological science, both persons and their societies are
constantly undergoing innovation. Language and its use, social practices and
meanings, and the self-understandings and interpretations of groups and individuals
all are moving targets making futile any search for universal laws and predictive
precision. “Really to be able to predict the future would be to have explicated so
clearly the human condition that one would already have pre-empted all cultural
innovation and transformation. This is hardly in the bounds of the possible”
(Taylor, 1985a, p. 57).
Thomas Kuhn’s (1991) response to Taylor’s essay is particularly instructive in
that Kuhn generally accepts Taylor’s depiction of the human sciences, and also
believes that the social and psychological sciences differ from the natural sciences
in important ways. However, unlike Taylor, Kuhn is not convinced as to exactly
where that difference lies, and is unwilling to accept uncritically Taylor’s conten-
tion that it is to be found in the meaningfulness, intentionality, social constitution,
© 2009 The Authors

and value laden nature of human actions. Where Taylor insists that rock patterns,
snow crystals, and the heavens, unlike negotiations or rebellions, do not require
intensive hermeneutic interpretation, Kuhn disagrees. For Kuhn, not only are
natural and social sciences alike in requiring a basic conceptual rendering of their
focal phenomena to guide their empirical inquiries, physical phenomena like the
heavens also have at least a partial social, historical constitution. “Since Greek
antiquity, the taxonomy of the heavens, the patterns of celestial similarity and
difference, have systematically changed” (p. 19). Kuhn anticipates what he sus-
pects would be Taylor’s and many others’ response, to the effect that although the
conceptualizations and taxonomic frames applied to the heavens certainly have
changed with time and place, it nonetheless is possible for observers at different
times and places to point at particular celestial bodies and describe their relative
positions. In the following passage, Kuhn summarily rejects this way of demarcat-
ing natural from social phenomena.
We [Taylor and I] part company, however, when he insists that, though social concepts shape
the world to which they are applied, concepts of the natural world do not. For him but not for
me, the heavens are culture-independent. To make that point, he would, I believe, emphasize
that an American or European can, for example, point out planets or stars to a Japanese but
cannot do the same for equity or negotiation. I would counter that one can point only to
individual exemplifications of a concept—to this star or that planet, this episode of negotiation
or that of equity—and that the difficulties involved in doing so are of the same nature in the
natural and social worlds. (p. 20)
And later,
The heavens of the Greeks were irreducibly different from ours. The nature of the difference is
the same as that Taylor so brilliantly describes between the social practices of different cultures.
In both cases the difference is rooted in conceptual vocabulary. In neither can it be bridged by
description in a brute data, behavioral vocabulary. (p. 21)
Kuhn proceeds to claim that none of what he has said implies that with sufficient
patience and sustained effort it is not possible to discover the classifications and
conceptualizations of another culture, time, or even person. However, he insists
that such discovery is required and that hermeneutic interpretation is necessary
to perform the discovering. “No more in the natural than in the human sciences
is there some neutral, culture-independent, set of categories within which the
population—whether of objects or actions—can be described” (1991, p. 21).
Kuhn maintains that all sciences are grounded in conceptual frameworks that
have been inherited from past inquiry, and that the training of contemporary
scientists effectively embeds them in the cultural history of their disciplines. What
Kuhn finds strikingly different between the practice of natural and social science
is that practitioners of natural science tend not to engage in explicit hermeneutic
interpretation as they go about their quotidian activities, whereas social scientists
do. In periods of normal science, which is most of the time, natural scientists
© 2009 The Authors

employ the paradigm they have learned from their teachers and get on with
solving problems involved in improving the match between theory and experi-
ment at the leading edges of their disciplines. In social science, the daily activities
of practitioners do not appear to resemble such normal problem-solving.
What Kuhn concludes from these observations is that natural scientists, even
though their inquiries occasionally yield new ways of reading the texts of nature,
spend little time actually searching for such shifts in their understanding of natural
phenomena. On the contrary, social scientists’ normal practice is saturated with
attempting to achieve “new and deeper interpretations” (Kuhn, 1991, p. 23). This
line of reasoning leads Kuhn to propose tentatively that the natural sciences,
despite requiring both conceptual and hermeneutic interpretation, “are not them-
selves hermeneutic enterprises,” (p. 23) whereas the social sciences are. However,
not only is this summative description offered tentatively, it also is accompanied
by two caveats. The first is that despite the hermeneutic character of social science
in general, it may nonetheless be possible that some parts of certain social sciences
might, with more time and greater maturity, find paradigms capable of support-
ing normal, problem-solving research. Kuhn mentions parts of psychology and
economics as perhaps moving in this direction. The second caveat is that despite his
earlier rejection of any distinction between natural and social phenomena in terms
of their basic conceptual and hermeneutic requirements, Kuhn does believe that there
is a difference between natural and social phenomena in terms of their stability.
The fact that the heavens themselves have remained the same has allowed research
in astronomy to progress in ways that the comparative absence of stability in phenomena
such as social or political systems may fail to provide a lasting basis for normal,
problem-solving science. In the case of social science, it is this absence of stability
that may mean that hermeneutic reinterpretation constantly is, and will be, required.
INTERPRETATIONS AND ACTIONS UNDER DESCRIPTIONS
We now present our own analysis of Kuhn’s (1991) agreement and disagreement
with Taylor (1985a). In our view, our earlier discussion of interpretation help to
illuminate differences between Kuhn and Taylor regarding lines that might be
drawn between natural and social sciences. Kuhn states explicitly that he shares
common ground with Taylor regarding the sort of conceptual interpretation they
believe is required in both social and natural arenas of inquiry. Both take concepts
to be socially and historically constituted possessions of cultures shared and trans-
mitted by their members. They also agree that our understanding and experience
is made possible and constrained by the conceptual resources available to us and
that grasping a concept (including both natural and social scientific concepts) is
not the result of knowing a set of defining attributes, but rather, understanding its
proper application. However, it is at the ontological and critical levels of interpretation
where their differences become apparent.
© 2009 The Authors

For Taylor, but not for Kuhn, social and natural phenomena are distinct in
ways that present differences at the ontological level of interpretation. Kuhn and
Taylor agree that social science is less stable than natural science in that its results
are more variable across time and context in ways that seem to prevent it from
achieving normal paradigmatic status in Kuhn’s sense. However, Kuhn disagrees
with Taylor that such instability results from any qualitative difference in the kind
of interpretation required in the social and natural sciences. As a nominalist,
Kuhn holds that individual phenomena are real entities in the world, but universals
exist only as concepts in the mind. In this regard, there is no distinction to be
made between natural and social scientific concepts. However, Kuhn’s nominalism
is not static. Changes in the conceptual categories that shape and organize our
understanding and experiencing of phenomena bear ontological implications for
the kind of world that is there to be interpreted. According to Kuhn, the emer-
gence of new scientific categories and conceptual systems can reveal new causal
relationships and potentialities, and lead to the invention of new phenomena. In
this sense, the world we inhabit is very different from that of our predecessors.
Given that for Kuhn, there is no legitimate line that can be drawn between
natural and social scientific concepts, the only possible difference he detects is at
the critical level of interpretation. Kuhn attributes the instability evident in social
science to the penchants of social scientists to seek deeper explanations and to be
preoccupied with consciously critical consideration of their activities whereas such
self-critical reflective activity is largely absent in the natural sciences.
To Taylor, on the other hand, the instability evident in social science is a
consequence of the unique nature of the subject matter of social science. This
difference is qualitative not quantitative and appears at the ontological level of
interpretation. For Taylor, the subject matter of social and psychological science
requires different kinds and levels of interpretation because it inevitably must
come to grips with the actions and experiences of persons, and persons are
uniquely reactive and value concerned when compared to inanimate entities and
other animals. In particular, Taylor (1985a) maintains that human actions and
experiences are the actions and experiences of self-interpreting beings who react
to the ways in which they are described, perhaps, in our contemporary age,
especially when such descriptions are conveyed by social and psychological
scientists, and are understood to be the results of social and psychological science.
One way to clarify Taylor’s conviction is to follow Ian Hacking’s (1995) use of
Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1959) analysis of human actions. Hacking uses Anscombe’s
definition and analysis of human actions as intentional behaviors under descriptions to
explain how qualitatively different forms of human action might emerge at par-
ticular points in history when they were not in existence, or even possible, at other
points in history. Notice that if Hacking is correct, such a conclusion might under-
cut Kuhn’s conviction that interpretation does not differ between natural and
social science. Human actions are focal phenomena in the social sciences in a way
that they are not focal phenomena in much of the natural sciences. Moreover,
© 2009 The Authors

human actions are uniquely reactive to changing descriptions across time, per-
haps especially to newly emergent social and psychological scientific descriptions
furnished by social scientists and psychologists. Such considerations elaborate
more precisely Taylor’s (1985b) claim concerning the uniquely self-interpreting
nature of human beings, and why such self-interpretation requires different kinds
and levels of interpretation in the social and psychological sciences. To under-
stand all of this more clearly, it is helpful to begin with Anscombe’s description
and analysis of human action, and then to consider briefly Hacking’s interpreta-
tion and use of Anscombe’s conception of human action as intentional behavior
under descriptions.
Anscombe (1959) maintains that human action is acting intentionally, which
means performing an action under some description, such that one clearly
intends to act under that particular description. In fully appreciating the potential
consequences of such a position, it is important to emphasize that for Anscombe
(influenced by Wittgenstein, 1953) intentions are not private, mental entities
existing in minds. This is because the descriptions under which actions might
occur are not private, psychological entities, but public, social understandings
captured and communicated through language use. To use Hacking’s (1995)
example, when the diagnostic category of “multiple personality” emerged in
psychology and popular culture during the middle to later parts of the twentieth
century, this increasingly common public description “provided a new way to be
an unhappy person.” It became “a culturally sanctioned way of expressing
distress” that had not previously existed. “The new descriptive vocabulary [of
multiple personality] provided new options for being and acting” (p. 236). “I am
suggesting that with the new forms of description, new kinds of intentional action
came into being, intentional actions that were not open to an agent lacking
something like those descriptions” (p. 237).
In our opinion, if Hacking’s (1995) interpretation and use of Anscombe’s (1959)
conceptualization of human action is viable for his purposes, which we take it to
be, it constitutes a reasonably strong argument for understanding human action
and experience as requiring uniquely interpretive methods in their study, in ways
that many of the phenomena of natural science do not require. In particular, such
an understanding of human action includes the historical emergence of qualita-
tively different human actions over time, given changing social contexts and the
qualitatively different descriptions that are supported within these different con-
texts. The existence of qualitatively different social and psychological realities at
different times and contexts is a consequence of the different social descriptions
available at these different times and contexts. When these differing conceptions
are interpreted by self-interpreting persons as descriptions under which they
might act intentionally, we have a specific and clear description of Taylor’s
contention that humans are uniquely self-interpreting animals in ways that matter
to the conduct of social and psychological science. In order to understand human
actions and experiences, which are focal phenomena in social and psychological
© 2009 The Authors

science, social scientists and psychologists must interpret the descriptions which
persons themselves must interpret in order to act intentionally under them. Since
the self-interpretations of persons also includes reactions to, and perhaps the
taking on of, descriptions made available through the conduct, publication, and
dissemination of social and psychological science, the scientific study of human
actions and experiences is necessarily interpretive in ways that differ qualitatively
from the kinds of interpretation required in the natural sciences. Social and psy-
chological science that takes human action and experience as focal objects of
study not only must interpret intentional actions under descriptions, but also must
interpret its own classifications, categories, methods, and findings as descriptions
that might constitute newly emergent forms of human action and experience
previously unavailable. Because persons might, and do, act under the descriptions
of social and psychological science in ways that differ qualitatively from their own
and others’ previous actions, social and psychological science also requires forms
of normative and moral consideration and interpretation that are unique to the
social and psychological sciences.
It is important to note that recently both Hacking (2006a, 2006b) and his critics
(e.g., Cooper, 2004; Haslam, 1998) have suggested that a general distinction
between natural and human kinds is untenable. Hacking (2006a) now concedes
there is little gained in attempting to unite such things as “tiger, lemon, gold,
multiple sclerosis, atoms, heat and the color yellow” as a distinctive kind. In short,
the paradigms in which such concepts are put to work are so numerous and
diverse that this makes the concept of natural kinds obtuse. If there is no such
thing as a natural kind, it follows that a dichotomy between natural versus human
kinds collapses and there is thus no such thing as a distinct class of human kinds
either. However, in our view, although human kinds may not constitute a unitary
class, this does not erase the possibility of a distinctive class of persons who are
uniquely capable of reacting to their descriptions in ways that other animate and
inanimate entities are not. Whether or not persons and their actions and experi-
ences constitute part of a more generally viable class of human kinds is irrelevant
to the implications that understanding persons as uniquely self-interpreting and
reactive might have for the conduct of interpretive work in the social and human
sciences versus interpretive work in the natural sciences.
In a related vein, Cooper (2004) alleges that Hacking errs by adopting
Anscombe’s definition of intentional actions as limited to those that are entailed
by “acting under a description.” In so doing, Cooper argues, Hacking negates the
possibility of prelinguistic humans doing anything intentionally, something that
seems obviously mistaken. In her case against Hacking, Cooper asserts that it is
important to recognize Anscombe as a strict ordinary language philosopher with
antipathy toward creating new terms of expression. However, it is precisely new
terms of expression (i.e., for kinds of persons and possibilities for action) that are
the subject of Hacking’s inquiries. The mistake, Cooper discerns, is that Hacking
assumes the conditions necessary for the performance of intentional action are
© 2009 The Authors

isomorphic with the conditions under which an observer can infer the actor’s
intention. However, demanding that an actor explain his or her actions is only
one way to identify what he or she intended. Intentions can be identified in other
ways—by observation and inference, for example. A caveman can intend to make
a fire without any descriptions being required. The caveman may not be capable
of offering a description of his action, but this doesn’t mean we aren’t. Cooper
argues that while some actions are defined by their link to explicit contingent
descriptions (e.g., making a promise), not all are. If we take “acting under a
description” to mean simply that (as, in fact, Anscombe does), then there is no
reason to regard intentional action as logically dependent on the actor’s explicit
description. In Cooper’s analysis, socioculturally shared and sanctioned descrip-
tions may oblige us to perform, or even cause, certain acts, but it does not follow
that they are necessary for the logical possibility of intentional action.
We are willing to grant that Cooper may be correct in her view that Hacking’s
reading of Anscombe is narrow and problematic. However we also suggest that
her criticism does not rule out the existence of a unique potential for persons to
react to their classifications in self-interpretive ways that are not granted to other
animate and inanimate kinds. It may well be the case sometimes, or even often,
that human actors are unaware of the classifications that influence their lives and
their conceptions of themselves. Their lives are altered irrespective of whether or
not they are aware of how they are classified (e.g., changes in consumer behavior
as a consequence of life-style research and advertising) or their ability to give a
description of their action. And, yes, there are indeed many, many instances in
which even mature persons act without explicit intentions. Nevertheless, these
observations do nothing to diminish an exclusively human possibility for self-
transformation that can occur though self-conscious awareness and reactivity. We
are saying simply that such transformation is potentially available to persons but
not to other kinds.
Moreover, for our purposes, it is important to emphasize that the activity and
reactivity of persons that constitutes acting under descriptions, goes well beyond
the linguistic and the subjective. Such activity and reactivity are instantiated in
actual social practices. Our use of Hacking’s adaptation of Anscombe’s thought
does not turn on the idea-dependency of human actions, so much as on their
practice-dependency. It is this practice-dependency that requires interpretation by
psychological scientists. Persons are both constituted within practices (including
practices of description) and transform practices through their activities within,
and reactions to, them. To understand persons, and their actions and experience,
psychological scientists must interpret such processes of constitution and transfor-
mation. Thus, for example, contemporary teenagers who are “raving,” are not
necessarily angry, but are participating in an underground dance party fueled by
the recently available street drug, ecstasy. The phenomenon of “raving,” and the
personal identifications associated with it, arise through acting under a newly
available description, but the description itself is realized in social practices of
© 2009 The Authors

movement, communal engagement, and drug use that give it a social objectivity
capable of supporting particular interpretations and not others—interpretations
that go well beyond the subjective intentions of the actors.
CONCLUSIONS
In this concluding section of our essay, we use our own critical interpretations of
the positions and arguments of Taylor (1985a) and Kuhn (1991), and our analysis
of Hacking’s (1995) use of Anscombe’s (1959) conception of action (as intentional
acting under a description) to indicate the possibility of emergent social and
psychological realities, to propose what we regard as a reasonable approach to the
question of interpretation in the social sciences, especially in psychology. Our
position is that much debate concerning the intensive hermeneutic character of
social, psychological science depends on the purposes that these human sciences
are understood as serving, and the way in which they interact with the social,
psychological lives of persons. However, before coming to this conclusion, we
begin with a slight disagreement with Kuhn concerning the extent to which
Taylor’s view of social science admits of no conventional phase of “normal science.”
Here, we follow Nicholas Smith (2002) in noting that Kuhn’s interpretations of,
and differences with, Taylor (together with related but different criticisms by
scholars like Michael Martin, 1994 and James Bohman, 1991), tend to under-
stand Taylor’s examples in essays such as “Interpretation and the Sciences of
Man” as normal cases of interpretive disputation rather than limiting cases. Like
Gadamer (1995), after whom he patterns some, but certainly not all, of his
thought, Taylor’s desire to open up the matter of truth in social science is
purposefully attended by a rejection of formalized truth that is the outcome of the
correct application of a method or procedure. Nonetheless, an examination of
Taylor’s work in the philosophy of social science and psychology, in our view
warrants the following conclusions.
Of particular relevance to the matter at hand, Taylor, in essays such as
“Neutrality in Political Science” (1985c), does indeed seem to make a distinction
between more or less normal and more limiting cases of social scientific inquiry.
Whenever interpreters share a sufficient background, this common perspective
allows agreed upon evidence to adjudicate the relative superiority of one interpre-
tation over another on bases such as resolving contradictions, answering open
questions, or explaining more elegantly or coherently propositions in the rival
interpretation. In the social sciences, Taylor (1985c) regards work of this kind as
“narrow gauge discoveries . . . compatible with a great number of political frame-
works” (p. 90). Of course, the instability of social and psychological phenomena
recognized and emphasized by Kuhn, means that the results of any such normal,
problem-solving science in social and psychological realms are likely to be limited
to relatively local contexts, vocabularies, and temporal periods. [It perhaps should
© 2009 The Authors

be noted in passing that such limitations have nothing to do with whether or not
quantitative or qualitative research methods or strategies are employed.]
What Taylor, however, also recognizes is that it is not uncommon in the social
sciences, especially when alternative interpretations are separated by cultural
context, historical time, or radically different frameworks and descriptions, that
normal and “narrow-gauge” means of arbitrating them will fail to produce agreement
based on warrants such as resolution of contradictions or superior explanatory
yield. It is at such breaking points that intuition and insight may be appealed to.
Such appeals arise in limiting, not normal, cases. However, in social and psycho-
logical science the frequency with which limiting cases are encountered is likely
to be much greater than in natural science. Interestingly, Taylor also makes it
clear that even in these limiting cases, appeal to intuition or insight is not the final
move that can be made.
As we have mentioned, scientific explanations must make sense from within,
and serve, particular purposes and descriptions, and the times and contexts in
which these purposes and descriptions are manifested. Although this is true of
theories in both natural and social science, it seems as if many theories in social
science, and perhaps particularly in social and applied areas of psychological
science, differ from the vast majority of theories in natural science in a way that
Taylor, correctly in our view, attempts to make clear by noting that most social,
psychological theories introduce, albeit often tacitly, descriptions and standards of
normativity by which societies and the persons within them may be said to be
functioning well versus badly. In other words, theoretical frameworks in social
psychology, such as social comparison theory or attribution theory, offer concep-
tions and descriptions of human flourishing and evaluative standards by which
such flourishing might be judged. This aspect of social and psychological science
is not commonly found, even implicitly, in the theories of natural science, which
posit more technical standards for success, such as their capacity to predict, control,
and manipulate their objects of study. It should be noted that some have argued
that normative standards enter into physical explanation in ways similar to the
way in which they enter into psychological explanation (Yalowitz, 1997). For
instance, in order for an electron to be an electron, it must act in ways consistent
with the set of physical laws that refer to electrons. However, as we already have
indicated, in contrast to the reactivity of human beings, ascriptions of normativity
do not promote self-interpretive activity on the part of electrons and other non-
human entities (particularly with respect to their own flourishing).
If this is correct, then social, psychological theories, unlike natural theories,
themselves provide us with orientations for choosing between them on the basis
not only of their evidential fit or even their clarification of the meanings of com-
mon “texts,” but (especially in limiting cases) on the basis of how our practices
and descriptions of living fare when informed by particular theoretical frame-
works. Moreover, because individual persons and social groups react to their
theoretical classifications and other applications of social theorizing and framing,
© 2009 The Authors

every application of social scientific theory and research offers us a test case that
may be interpreted in terms of the extent and kind of human flourishing, even
emancipation, that is enabled by the instantiation of that theoretical description
in the life world of human individuals and groups. Applications of natural
scientific inquiry also may have profound consequences for persons and their societies.
However, such consequences tend not to be constitutive of persons and their
valuations in the way that applications of social and, in particular, psychological
theories are. Applications of research in nuclear physics or microbiology may have
life and death consequences for us as biological beings, but they do not constitute our
personhood and provide fodder for our reactivity in the way that research in
personality or community psychology may do. Of course, applications of natural
science may occasion strong reactions from any number of people, some of whom may
alter their lives to combat or promote them, with consequences that may be profound
for their psychological lives. However, such consequences are likely to flow directly
from social, political, and ethical interactions that are associated with natural
scientific applications, and only indirectly from the scientific findings and descriptions
per se. In contrast, results and descriptions of research on psychopathy, parenting,
or social intelligence (like those of research on multiple personality) may interact
more directly with (even constitute) our self-understanding, actions, and experiences.
Much of our personhood consists in taking up and acting in terms of the
descriptions made available to us. Such descriptions are the result of our historical
and sociocultural condition as persons in relation to and interaction with others.
The developmental necessity of getting on with others carries with it strong impli-
cations for moral conduct, and the descriptions by which personhood is achieved
are suffused with values and moral content. The examination and understanding
of values and moral concerns, however, is not simply a matter of critical interpre-
tation. Because such values and concerns become part of what we are as self-
interpreting beings, ontological interpretation is required. In this light, Kuhn’s
critical epistemological orientation toward interpretation is insufficient for the
special case of self-interpreting beings for whom psychological descriptions, and
their reactions to them, are ontologically constitutive.
In our opinion, there clearly are certain areas of psychological science (e.g.,
some work in cognitive neuroscience) that approach the everyday hermeneutical
forgetfulness and evidential, explanatory warranting of Kuhnian normal science.
[In “Peaceful Coexistence in Psychology” (1985d), Taylor discusses such inquiries
under the heading of “infrastructure studies,” where the term refers to “studies
on the psycho-physical boundary” (p. 129). In this same essay, Taylor also
acknowledges a likely, but far from exhaustive role for a natural science approach
to what he terms “competence studies” (p. 130)—i.e. correlative studies of human
capacities that may be used to adjudicate theories of the formal structures
underlying such competences.] However, in most social, developmental, personality,
educational, and clinical psychology, normal science of this sort is unlikely, especially
in contemporary democratic, pluralistic societies guided by values of freedom,
© 2009 The Authors

fairness, respect for persons, and human well-being that permeate our social and
psychological inquiry, particularly at ontological and critical levels of interpreta-
tion. This is especially true when the aims of social and psychological science are
self-understanding and emancipation, as they so frequently are (if not explicitly,
then certainly implicitly) in so much social and applied psychology. As Taylor
(1985d) notes, such “performance studies” attempt to understand and explain
“fully motivated performance” (p. 132), and as such, inevitably must take account
of meanings, intentions, actions, and strong evaluations.
With the foregoing reflections in mind, it seems to us unlikely that anything
approaching lawful, universal claims in the social and applied psychological
sciences is likely to result from inquiry in these areas. What such a realization still
leaves open are (1) the possibility of “narrow-gauge” empirical research that
adopts conceptions and descriptions extant in (or consistent with) those in vogue
within particular spatial-temporal locations, and aims at providing relatively
low-inference, largely descriptive data that speak reasonably directly to local con-
cerns and problems where those involved share common values and interpretive
orientations; and (2) theoretical inquiry (conceptual, ontological, and critical) that
attempts to clarify, interpret, and critically consider conditions that might be
argued to support the existence of more general psychological phenomena such
as mind, selfhood, and agency, with due respect for the inevitably varied forms
that such phenomena might and do take under different historical and sociocul-
turally constituted descriptions and ways of life. In psychology, at least in the more
social and applied areas of psychology, the empirical arm of inquiry is likely to be
short, but with specific utility to local communities and their members, while the
theoretical arm of inquiry is likely to be long, but with a general utility that
requires instantiation in a variety of locales with a view to enriching our descriptions
and understandings of ourselves as social, psychological beings—i.e. persons.
None of what we have said here should be read as an attempt to remove
persons from the natural world, or to deny the possibility of a scientific under-
standing of them. We simply wish to emphasize that persons are uniquely emergent,
both ontogenetically and phylogenetically as situated, embodied self-interpreting
beings whose actions and experiences require (depending on the exact nature of
the questions being asked) levels of interpretation that go beyond those required
for the scientific study of inanimate and animate entities/beings without the kind of
reactive, self-interpretive capabilities displayed (at least some of the time) by persons.
Jack Martin
Jeff Sugarman
Department of Psychology
8888 University Drive,
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, Canada, V5A 1S6.
jack_martin@sfu.ca
© 2009 The Authors

NOTE
1
Given the vast literature that exists on this topic, we make no attempt to survey it. Nor
do we claim to advance an entirely original position with respect to our topic. We do,
however, believe that our synthesis of the ideas and positions we examine constitutes a
reasoned and defensible approach to the challenge of interpretation that attends the
scientific study of persons as uniquely psychological beings.
REFERENCES
Anscombe, G.E.M. 1959. Intention. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Bohman, J. 1991. New Philosophy of Science: Problems of Indeterminacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bunge, M. 1998. Social Science under Debate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Cooper, R. 2004. Why Hacking is wrong about Human Kinds. The British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, 55, 73–85.
Gadamer, H.-G. 1995. Truth and Method ( J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, Trans.)
(2nd, rev. ed.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1960)
Greenwood, J. 1991. Relations and Representations: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social
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Hacking, I. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton,
NJ: University of Princeton Press.
Hacking, I. 2006a, February 17. Natural Kinds: Rosy dawn, Scholastic Twilight. Paper
Presented to the Royal Institute of Philosophy. London, UK.
Hacking, I. 2006b, April 11. Kinds of People: Moving Targets. The Tenth British Academy
Lecture. London, UK.
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guage: Philosophical Papers 1 (pp. 45–76). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
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Taylor, C. 1985c. Neutrality in Political Science. In C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human
Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (pp. 58–90). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
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Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford,
England: Blackwell.
© 2009 The Authors


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Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39:1

Does Interpretation in Psychology Differ From

Interpretation in Natural Science?

JACK MARTIN AND JEFF SUGARMAN

The necessarily interpretive nature of science is widely recognized. The theory

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WHAT IS INTERPRETATION AND WHAT KINDS OF INTERPRETATION DO

In general, interpretation is a way of understanding that discloses the meanings

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INTERPRETATIONS AND ACTIONS UNDER DESCRIPTIONS

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Anscombe, G.E.M. 1959. Intention. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

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