Can human actions be explained?

Yes, it can be explained using the hermeneutics

However, there is a problem, the hermeneutical circle
Critiques of the hermeneutical circle
Follesdals hypothetico-deductive method which is a plausible solution to the
problem of the circle
Human actions can be explained.
1. On the hermeneutical circle:
(a) What is it?
Heideger proposed that hermeneutic phenomenology is the method of
investigation most appropriate to the study of human action. This method is an
innovative development of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Hermeneutics involves an attempt to describe and study meaningful human
phenomena in a careful and detailed manner as free as possible from prior
theoretical assumptions, based instead on practical understanding. What is
meant by practical understanding will become clearer later. Heideggers method
is hermeneutic because there is a need for interpretation when one is explicating
experience. Hermeneutics was originally a set of techniques for interpreting
written texts. Initially it was developed for the examination of biblical texts,
carried out to uncover and reconstruct the message from god that it was
believed the texts contained but that had become hidden. Later it became
generalized to a method of textual interpretation that was not restricted to
religious works. With Schleiermacher and Dilthey, it was generalized still further
to apply also to human action. When we adopt a hermeneutic approach to
human action, we essentially treat the action as though it has a semantic and
textual structure. The philosophical hermeneutics approach rejects a
subject/object ontology in which knowledge consists of an accurate
representation of an external world in the mind of a subject. Instead, explaining
the beliefs of a culture or society, whether our own or a foreign one, entails a
kind of dialogue with it. The process of coming to understand a culture, society
or social practice is analogous to a conversation with another person, especially
one aimed at getting to know the other person. In such a conversation, both
participants may have their views challenged, their presuppositions about the
other exposed, and in the process a better understanding of themselves and
their conservation partner will emerge. This different understanding of the nature
of the object of inquiry is one of several differences between hermeneutics and
the two currently dominant paradigms of investigation and explanation in the
social sciences and in psychology in particular: the rationalist and the empiricist
approaches.
We can best appreciate the character of the hermeneutic approach by comparing
and contasting it with these two other paradigms. Within rationalism lies

structuralism and much of cognitive science; empiricism includes behaviourism

and positivist experimentalism. I will contrast these three paradigms in three
areas: their assumptions about the nature and origin of knowledge, the kind of
object they set out to study, and the type of explanation they seek.
(b) Where does it apply?
(c) Who claims that it poses a problem?
Martin Heidegger (1927) developed the concept of the hermeneutic circle to
envision a whole in terms of a reality that was situated in the detailed experience
of everyday existence by an individual (the parts). So understanding was
developed on the basis of "fore-structures" of understanding, that allow external
phenomena to be interpreted or in a preliminary way.
Gadamer (1975) further developed this concept, leading to what is recognized as
a break with previous hermeneutic traditions. While Heidegger saw the
hermeneutic process as cycles of self-reference that situated our understanding
in a priori prejudices, Gadamer reconceptualized the hermeneutic circle as an
iterative process through which a new understanding of a whole reality is
developed by means of exploring the detail of existence. Gadamer viewed
understanding as linguistically mediated, through conversations with others in
which reality is explored and an agreement is reached that represents a new
understanding.
(d) What problem, if any, does it pose?
1)
The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text
hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a
whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding
of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any
individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it
is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it
impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must
be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.
To understand an action we have to understand the intention with which persons
do what they do. This intention can be said to unify the various bits of behaviour
which realise the action. Now in order to understand this intention we have to
also understand the beliefs and desires that prompt the individual parts of the
action. But in order to understand what the beliefs and desires are that prompt
the individual parts of the action, we must also understand the overall intention
which makes the whole behaviour into an action.
The hermeneutical circle also poses a problem to the sciences that use
interpretation: can we ever test an interpretation?

To convince another of our preferred interpretation, we must bring him/her to

understand the language of the original text/the mental states behind the
behaviour as we do. To achieve this, we must show how our interpretation
coheres with already accepted interpretations and renders darker
passages/behaviours clearer etc. But we can never offer evidence that is not an
interpretation itself: to establish reading for the whole, we appeal to readings of
specific parts, yet meanings of parts also depend on meaning of whole.
Accordingly, interpretive social science is sharply distinguished from natural
science by having no obvious decision procedure. Rather we need "insight" (and
one persons insight is anothers flight of fancy).
2)
In encountering a text, especially a dense, complex text, our understanding of
each part is based on our understanding of the whole, including its personal and
cultural context; and yet we can only build up our understanding of the whole
(and its context) by understanding the different parts of which the text is
constructed. Initially, our understanding of the whole is made up entirely of a
forestructure of the expectations or pre-understandings that we have brought
to our encounter with the text we are trying to understand. Paradoxically, it is
these that make understanding possible in the first place; and yet, clearly, these
expectations or even prejudices are at the same time the major impediment to
truly understanding the text. Furthermore, this paradox is fundamental not only
to our understanding of texts, but also our coming to know any novel situation or
even other human beings. The hermeneutic circle thus raises the question of
how it is possible for human beings to understand one another.
3)
Gadamer argues that we never know a historical work as it originally appeared to
its contemporaries. We have no access to its original context of production or to
the intentions of its author. Tradition is always alive. It is not passive and stifling,
but productive and in constant development. Trying, as the earlier
hermeneuticians did, to locate the (scientific) value of the humanities in their
capacity for objective reconstruction is bound to be a wasted effort. The past is
handed over to us through the complex and ever-changing fabric of
interpretations, which gets richer and more complex as decades and centuries
pass. History, as Gadamer puts it, is always effective history. This, however, is
not a deficiency. It is, rather, a unique possibility, a possibility that involves the
particular kind of truth-claim that Gadamer ascribes to the human sciences: the
truth of self-understanding.
At the end of the day, Gadamer claims, it is not really we who address the texts
of tradition, but the canonic texts that address us. Having traveled through
decades and centuries, the classic works of art, literature, science, and
philosophy question us and our way of life. Our prejudices, whatever aspects of
our cultural horizon that we take for granted, are brought into the open in the
encounter with the past. As a part of the tradition in which we stand, historical
texts have an authority that precedes our own. Yet this authority is kept alive

only to the extent that it is recognized by the present. We recognize the authority
of a text (or a work of art) by engaging with it in textual explication and
interpretation, by entering into a dialogical relationship with the past. It is this
movement of understanding that Gadamer refers to as the fusion of horizons. As
we come, through the work of interpretation, to understand what at first appears
alien, we participate in the production of a richer, more encompassing context of
meaningwe gain a better and more profound understanding not only of the
text but also of ourselves. In the fusion of horizons, the initial appearance of
distance and alienness does itself emerge as a function of the limitations of our
own initial point of departure.
Obtaining a fusion of horizons requires us to engage with the text in a
productive way. This, however, is not something we can learn by coming to
master a certain doctrine, method, or theory. It is more like a tacit capacity,
which we acquire by following the example of others. The knowledge at stake is
like a practical know-how; it resembles the Aristotelian phronesis. It is a
knowledge that can neither be deduced theoretically, nor be fully articulated, but
that rests on a kind of tact or sensitivity that is only exhibited in the form of
exemplary judgments and interpretations.
This co-determination of text and reader is Gadamer's version of the
hermeneutic circle. As important as the interplay between the parts and the
whole of a text is the way in which our reading contributes to its effective history,
adding to the complexity and depth of its meaning. The meaning of the text is
not something we can grasp once and for all. It is something that exists in the
complex dialogical interplay between past and present. Just as we can never
master the texts of the past, so do we failnecessarily and constitutivelyto
obtain conclusive self-knowledge. Gaining knowledge of tradition and knowing
ourselves are both interminable processes; they are tasks without determinate
end-points. This is the philosophical gist of Gadamer's humanistic ontology: that
our being, historically conditioned as it is, is always more being (Sein) than
conscious being (Bewusstsein).
4)
Understanding is a process continuously changing over time. There is no final
state resulting in divine insight to all knowledge. Recall the example of baking a
blueberry cake. Early in the learning process of baking a cake, understanding
involves the ability to follow a recipe. At a later point, understanding consists in
profound knowledge of how adding a certain ingredient will enhance the taste of
the blueberry cake. Understanding requires the ability to identify a relevant
relation in a domain, which provides the possibility to understand more complex
aspects of the domain.
Gaining new knowledge requires going back and forth between hypotheses and
the material until a fit is achieved (Fllesdal, 2001). The fit between the
hypothesis and the investigated material must be suitable both for the whole and
for the parts of the investigated material. The interpretation of the material is
always affected every time a new viewpoint is considered. This is called the

process of the hermeneutic circle. The fluctuation between the whole and the
part is one part in the hermeneutic circle. According to Fllesdal (2001) there is a
question-answer circle and a subject object circle as well. He describes these
circles in relation to the interpretation of texts. However, I claim that these
circles can be applied and used for describing what happens when understanding
occurs. The question-answer circle can be applied to understanding a knowledge
domain, like the French revolution, and changes occurring as we gain more
understanding of the material. In the same way as an interpretation changes
when a text is studied, the same occurs with understanding.
5)
Given his extension of the domain of hermeneutics from texts to all
manifestations of the human spirit, the hermeneutic circle affects also the
understanding of what humans do: their action. Here we can perhaps
reformulate the problem in out terminology as follows.
To understand an action we have to understand the intention with which persons
do what they do. This intention can be said to unify the various bits of behaviour
which realise the action. Now in order to understand this intention we have to
also understand the beliefs and desires that prompt the individual parts of the
action. But in order to understand what the beliefs and desires are that prompt
the individual parts of the action, we must also understand the overall intention
which makes the whole behaviour into an action.
The hermeneutical circle also poses a problem to the sciences that use
interpretation: can we ever test an interpretation?
To convince another of our preferred interpretation, we must bring him/her to
understand the language of the original text/the mental states behind the
behaviour as we do. To achieve this, we must show how our interpretation
coheres with already accepted interpretations and renders darker
passages/behaviours clearer etc. But we can never offer evidence that is not an
interpretation itself: to establish reading for the whole, we appeal to readings of
specific parts, yet meanings of parts also depend on meaning of whole.
Accordingly, interpretive social science is sharply distinguished from natural
science by having no obvious decision procedure. Rather we need "insight" (and
one persons insight is anothers flight of fancy).

2. What is the hypothetico-deductive method? (What relation, if any,

does it bear to the deductive-nomological model of scientific
explanation?)
As the name indicates, it is an application of two operations: the formation of
hypotheses and the deduction of consequences from them in order to arrive at
beliefs which - although they are hypothetical - are well supported, through the
way their deductive consequences fit in with our experiences and with our other
well-supported beliefs.

The hypothetico-deductive method aims at establishing a set of hypotheses

concerning the subject matter that we are studying. Together with our beliefs
these hypotheses form a comprehensive hypothetico-deductive system which is
logically consistent and fits in with all our experience. The beliefs that make up
such a hypothetico-deductive system are not justified from above, as they are
in an axiomatic system, where the axioms are supposed to be justified by some
special kind of insight or necessity. Instead, they are justified from below,
through their consequences. In a hypothetico- deductive system, the hypotheses
are never known with certainty.
From a system of hypotheses an infinite number of consequences follow and
there is always a risk that some of these consequences may turn out not to fit in
with our experience. Some of the consequences relate, for example, to our future
experiences, these are the predictions of the theory, and only time may show
whether they are true. Further, even if all the consequences should fit in with our
experience, the same consequences may be derived also from other hypotheses,
as was observed by several philosophers already in antiquity and the Middle
Ages, as e. g. Simplicius and Thomas Aquinas. The question then arises as to
which of these hypotheses we should believe. As you know, the simplicity of our
total set of hypotheses, i. e. our theory, is generally considered decisive. The
notion of simplicity includes several different factors that we regard as important
for the evaluation of a theory, as for example the variety of different data that
are accounted for by the same set of hypotheses.
3. Follesdal claims that the hypothetico-deductive method can be
applied in the interpretation of meaningful materials. How close is the
analogy between the use of the HD-method in science and in the
interpretation of meaningful materials ?
(a) Are the hypotheses that are to be established of the same logical
form? (Are they universal sentences (as in HD-method applied to DNmodel)?
(b) Are the consequences of the interpretive hypotheses established by
(strict) deduction?
4. What is a reflective equilibrium? How does the use of the HDmethod help us in reaching such a reflective equilibrium?
When our theories change, then also many of our intuitions change, so that we
often must go repeatedly back and forth between our intuitions and our theories
before we arrive at a reflective equilibrium, as Rawls has called it, where our
theories and our intuitions fit in with one another.
This is also the case when we interpret literary texts. Our interpretation of the
words and sentences is influenced by our interpretation of the whole work, but
the interpretation of the whole work depends of course on the interpretation of
the individual parts, so that we often have to go for a long time back and forth
between whole and part before we arrive at a reflective equilibrium, that is, a

satisfactory interpretation, where the interpretation of the whole and the

interpretation of the parts fit in with one another. This movement back and forth,
which is so conspicuous in the humanities and the social sciences, is what is
usually called the hermeneutic circle. It is particularly striking in the
humanities, but as we noted, we find it in the natural sciences as well.
5. What are the conditions that Follesdal offers for when a hypothesis
concerning meaningful material (an interpretation) is to be accepted?
6. Do you think that Follesdal provides a plausible solution to the
problem of the hermeneutical circle?
Another solution
The answer to this puzzle turns out to be repeated careful readings, which means
that the hermeneutic circle is really more of spiral, as we circle deeper and
deeper into understanding a text, qualitative interview protocol, or another
human being. This is because each encounter or reading brings us into contact
with new aspects of the text or person, deepening our understanding. Our
reading moves tentatively at first in a kind of dialog, back and forth, gradually
both deepening and opening up the text or person to us. Although this process is
never really complete, it eventually reaches far enough to satisfy our immediate
purposes, as researchers or fellow human beings.