218
PARTISAN REVIEW
mode of the cultural sciences; and revived today by Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, where the philosophical concern is with
the historicity of the human sciences .
In its broadest sense, the turn to interpretation is a move away
from positivism, with its emphasis on "naive" observation (radical
behaviorism in psychology; physicalism in philosophy) , from the
search for "laws" or "regularities" and even "causal relations" (not in
the historical sense of antecedents, but the philosophical sense of
"covering law" or general theories of the ordered relations between
variables, such as a theory of the determinate, causal relation be–
tween substructure and superstructure).
In anthropology, the theme of interpretation is associated most
directly with Clifford Geertz, in his emphasis on the "symbolic" level
of discourse rather than social-structural relations, on what he has
called (following Gilbert Ryle) "thick description" in order to under–
stand the complexity and texture of a culture, and the emphasis on
particularity or "local knowledge ."
In sociology, the "interpretative turn" is featured in the work of
Robert Bellah and his students, in their emphasis on the moral
meanings of actions, as the focal points of inquiry into society . And
it is a view that I share, in a concern with culture, in my theorem of
the "disjunction of realms," and my criticism of the functionalist and
"totality" theories which tend to look on society as a "system."
In law, and on reflection it should occasion little surprise, the
turn to interpretation has taken the strongest hold, for law consists
not only of texts but increasingly , given its activist role, of judicial
interpretation and its strong consequences in the lives of individuals.
Just as in literature, the problems of meaning, of "authorial intent"
(should one be guided by the Founding Fathers , what did they
mean, etc.) and even of the "deconstruction" of a text (if law is "only"
what the judges say, what stability of meanings is there? What is the
nature of an objective rule?) all lead, once again, to the problems of
relativism.
The turn to interpretation , in the broadest cultural sense ,
signifies the turn of the social sciences - or of those practitioners of
this art - from the models of the natural sciences and their modes of
inquiry, to the humanities . But it is also part of a glacial shift, in that
there are those who also argue that the natural sciences themselves
have lost their "privileged" status as being the mode of inquiry for
