Culture as a Source of Value

With this distinction between interpretationalist and naturalist approaches to social science in mind, I would like to briefly review Lawrence Cahoone’s depiction of culture which I see as largely cohering to an interpretationalist approach:

“Culture is the public repertoire of meaning-establishing and –interpreting processes and products, rooted in socially projected ends. It is the teleologically thickest layer of a society’s hermeneutic horizon. Culture is not a particular social sphere, not a rule-governed context of action. It is the indefinite repertoire in terms of which all such contexts gain their mediate significance, their ‘place.’” (54, emphasis in original)

This post will be dedicated to briefly outlining what this definition actually amounts to.

The Role of Beliefs and Desires in Social Phenomena

Perhaps the greatest difference between the naturalist and interpretationalist approaches to social science is what I have called the gulf of intentionality. The naturalist is committed to an entirely non-teleological and non-intentional account of social phenomena, for ends, beliefs and desires simply are not publicly observable entities. As such, the naturalists have appealed, with varying degrees of success to different forms of behaviorism in an attempt to adequately deal with the obvious intentional and teleological nature of social reality.