CIAO DATE: 04/06

Elementos de una aproximación interpretativa a las ciencias sociales

Abstract

Statesmen address security concerns based on their understanding of the issues at stake. Such a truism becomes problematic, though, once we realize that no fact or event does inherently pose a threat to a state’s security. Threats can only be identified by silhouetting them against the background of an interpretive framework: only after we know what could count as a security threat can we recognize certain facts or events as particular instances of that general phenomena. Therefore, different frameworks of interpretation will elicit different meanings from the same facts and events, and suggest different courses of action in response to them.

This paper presents in a relatively brief but comprehensive way the constitutive elements of an interpretive approach towards social sciences. It explains why interpretive frameworks constitute unavoidable screens that sift our cognitive appropriation of the world, and how metaphors (understood as a distinctive way of achieving insight) can provide their ordering principles. It further explains how, through social intercourse, identities are constituted in relation to difference, and meanings are intersubjectively created; and how, the interpretation of those meanings must be the principal foundation of social sciences.

Full Text (PDF, 26 pages, 212 K)