Anti-Positivism: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Phenomenology boasts diverse heritage: rationalism was an early contributor. A largely continental movement interpretable as the pre-emptive counterweight of practical British empiricism (Locke, Hume, Mill inter alios), post-classical rationalism was the product of pre-Enlightenment thinkers including Liebniz, Spinoza, and Descartes (Coplestone, 1994). In pure rationalism, thought alone, unencumbered by the burden of observation and the suppositions of theory, reveals deep understanding. Thought (rationality), since it is confined neither to place nor time but extends to the boundaries of imagination and intellect, can be applied to any phenomenon. Hence, in experimentation, it eschews the deductive method and endeavours instead to minimize assumptions and observe or reason phenomena as freestanding, individual experiences to then be rationalised (i.e. the inductive method).

Husserl’s phenomenology is construable as rationalism reasserted. With the advent of post-modernism, rationalism has arguably acquired renewed credibility, albeit in modified guise. The philosophical genetics of phenomenology – a school born of sociology (Husserl, 1907) – reside in the C.18th and 19th schools of hermeneuticists/interpretivists such as Schleiermacher and Heidegger (Ricoeur, 1981; Grondin, 1985). Its forward-reaching influences are similarly substantial: social constructionism (Schutz’s “common sense” phenomenology (1967)) and Wittgenstein’s intersubjective theory of meaning being two.

Phenomenological researchers reject the positivist conception of theory, and substitute it with detailed description. Importantly for social science, phenomenology describes human behaviour as irreducible to elements (Blumer, 1969) and is thus in sharp contrast with positivist beliefs that proclaim behaviour to be reducible to material (atomistic) activity. This sympathetic proclivity is likely rooted in the psychological and, especially, theological roots of its hermeneutic progenitors: Schleiermacher, the original interpretivist, whose foci were speech and religious texts; Dilthey, who extended hermeneutics from the lexical to the human behavioural sphere; and Heidegger, who called for understanding to incorporate being (Dasein).

Husserlian phenomenology is premised on the assertion that the understanding of social phenomena necessitates reasoning that reflects the “distinctiveness of humans” (Bryman, 2001). Phenomenology focusses on obtaining individual and unique truths correlative with what Weber (1947) termed verstehen. Perhaps the most profound difference separating positivism from phenomenology is the phenomenologist’s assignation of significance to subjective meaning within social interaction. Unlike the positivist, the phenomenologist neither pursues nor idealizes objectivity. In practice, phenomenological researchers acknowledge their influence as unavoidable, but sometimes beneficial, when investigating ethnographically for example. Like positivists however, phenomenologists value transparency and neutrality. Also like the positivist, phenomenological researchers attempt to limit the variables at play around the phenomenon of study. Rather than omit theoretically redundant variables, the phenomenologist acknowledges them, including the intrusion of values and bias, but counters allegations of invalidity by insisting such influences are accounted for.

Consequently, the main philosophical stances endorsed by qualitative researchers are interpretivist/phenomenological (Remenyi, et al, 1998) or social constructionist (Easterby-Smith et al, 2008). Social researchers are less ready to classify and quantify than positivists, primarily because their object of study is the individuated but social human being. Their ontology is anti-positivist: they favour qualitative understanding of phenomena. Durkheim (1982) qualified the anti-positivism of social science: society is an irreducible entity whose machinations are undeterminable through psychology, biology, or any other reductionist prism.

Thus the research methods classed as “quantitative” and “qualitative” denote more than differing approaches to data collection. They expose the researcher’s ontological standing. The positivist favours quantitative research, since its genesis and philosophical justification stem from the positivist tradition; but the phenomenologist/interpretivist requires research utilities that allow exploration of a world whose ontology is subjective, so will elect qualitative methods to illuminate that reality.