Secularism, psychology, and hermeneutics.

We are fortunate, indeed, to have received such thoughtful and astute commentaries on our articles. My task is to reply briefly to Dallas Willard's remarks. It is quite a privilege to have a distinguished philosopher and philosopher of religion like Prof. Willard join a few of his thoughts to this project. His reflections on "cognitive authority" and the nature of "knowing as a human achievement and practice" constitute a valuable addition in their own right to this effort. And his remarks about how a hermeneutic approach to rethinking the interplay between psychology and religion might be strengthened will surely further that aim. Professor Willard speaks for all of us in insisting that "we cannot afford to be impatient" with the kind of "philosophical" clarifications of the assumptions, including moral underpinnings, animating our lives and inquires at their core, that this special journal issue investigates. Otherwise, we simply fail to carry out our responsibilities and are doomed to repeat the errors of the past in one form or another.

Willard accurately summarizes and clarifies our basic concern in these articles in a fresh way. On the one hand, we want to forcefully critique the sheer arbitrariness of a strictly secular approach to psychology, one that dogmatically excludes any consideration of the idea, in Willard's words, that "the human being is built to live in relationship to God." On the other hand, we oppose all such dogmatisms and want to affirm a kind of psychological inquiry that is "open to people in general," including nonbelievers. That, indeed, is our challenge.

Willard wonders why the dominant secular methodologies in psychology have "such a grip on the field." How and on what basis do they claim "cognitive authority," the authority "to claim to know and to exercise power based upon that claim?" His answer is illuminating. Secularism and naturalism have come to dominate the intellectual professions for "largely extraneous" reasons. One such reason is to protect these professions from inappropriate interference by religious or civil authorities. Another is that many of these intellectuals simply assume that religion is unworthy of serious consideration and hostile or at least irrelevant to good social science. The second of these reasons is arbitrary and dogmatic, something that has "not been proven or even rendered plausible." The first has its merits, namely to protect freedom of inquiry. Unfortunately, however, this ideal is not defended in an entirely open and honest manner, where its true meaning and relation to other ideals and values will be clarified and deepened over time. Rather it is grounded in a "disguised ideology" usually in a version of "liberal individualism" (Richardson, 2005) asserting that all moral and spiritual values are ultimately subjective or preferential except the moral principle that everyone has the right to pursue the good life as they see fit, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. It has been suggested that this approach is too "thin" even to support its own best values of equal rights and human dignity and that and its contradictions actually help generate many of the debilitating tensions of modern life and (Sandel, 1996). Just this disguised ideology produces the bizarre and tortured situation in the social sciences where investigators adopt "value-freedom" or "value-neutrality" as a firm moral principle (Slife, Smith, and Burch-field, 2003), thus building a degree of inauthenticity into the groundwork of the enterprise.

This situation has the deep political roots, Willard reminds us. They go back at least to Max Weber, I might point out, who in the early part of the last century laid the basis for a conception of social science as Wertfrei or value-free. As the philosopher Richard Bernstein (1976, p. 46 ff.) notes, however, Weber's struggle with this issue was more searching and complex than social scientists usually appreciate. Weber accepted the categorical distinction between empirical and normative theory or unbridgeable gulf between fact and value. But he feared the encroaching "rationalization" of social life that a complete "disenchantment" of the world unleashed. He was deeply troubled by our inability to assert absolute moral or spiritual values in the face of the depersonalization and shallowness of social life brought about by an unchecked advance of instrumental reason. Weber held to the conception of science as Wertfrei partly in order to protect intellectuals and civil servants from inappropriate outside interference by the state or others, a very real concern in his day. But he appreciated the impossible situation that the gap between fact and value created for moral agents and social thinkers who shared his concerns. An impossible "burden of choice" was placed upon them. With no ethical guidance available, they were left to the dictates of their own private "gods and demons."

According to Bernstein (1976, p. 47), nevertheless, Weber was "not a positivist." He strove to find a way that science might be relevant to a discussion of values. In fact, he saw social science as proceeding via Verstehen or interpretation. Rather than articulate general laws, it sought to construct "ideal types" or typifications of meaningful patterns and processes in the social realm. However, he believed that these ideal types, even though focused on meaning rather than brute causal relations among events, still could and should be formulated in an objective, value-free manner. (1) Apparently, he felt that somehow science might contribute to reflections about values or ends, not just the antecedents of or means to those ends, through tracing out the consequences of different moral outlooks or policies. But he never fully appreciated how inherently value-imbued any description or ideal type really is, or that identifying the consequences or results of value positions is of no help in evaluating their intrinsic merit, so long as an unbridgeable gap between fact and value remains in place. Weber struggled with the problem of how social inquiry might be both truthful and morally relevant, including retaining the power to critique disturbing social trends. Unfortunately, most social science subsequently has declined to worry as much about what objectivity really amounts to, or about addressing conventional wisdom in a forceful manner (as opposed to glibly assuming it in order to gain respectability and profit).

Willard takes a stab at formulating an "understanding of knowledge itself," one that is less colored by unacknowledged moral and political aims and "captures actual knowledge practice in human life as well as in the sciences." He suggests that we might think of knowledge as "the capacity to represent a subject matter as it actually is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience." Simple as that might sound, it is really quite subtle. It incorporates the idea of truth and of standards of evidence, but does not "restrict truth (or 'fact') to any particular subject matter or method," leaving them open to be decided on a case by case basis depending on the specifics of a given field or subject matter. This notion of knowledge ought to be helpful to critically-minded social scientists, including those interested in the psychology/religion dialogue, who are likely to despair of academic psychology's propensity to truncate its subject matter to fit its methods and, when that does not seem to work, abandon the ideal of truth altogether.

It ought to be clear, as Professor Willard indicates, that his working conception of knowledge closely parallels the hermeneutic approach (Richardson, this issue), according to which social science and theory are best seen as a "form of practice," as a kind of understanding that is different in degree, not in kind, from the sort of understanding that arises in the actual conduct of life. Thus, social inquiry is essentially, in part, an extension of our search for justice, love, and wisdom in practical life. But Willard does identify several concerns about or objections to a hermeneutic approach that he argues need modification or strengthening. I was a little puzzled by some of his remarks in this vein. I would say that the concerns he raises apply forcefully to what we might term the postmodern or social constructionist branch of broadly postmodern thought, but not very much to the kind of philosophical or ontological hermeneutics we discuss in our articles. I gather that Willard would largely agree with this point, given that he proposes Gadamer's (1989) hermeneutics, our chief source and guide in these matters, as offering one way to avoid the shortcomings of postmodern theory.

For example, Willard suggests that the notion of a "hermeneutical circle" runs the risk that one may never get out of the circle or complete the process "to arrive at a truth of the matter." This clearly applies to current postmodern or deconstructionist approaches, which like to insist that 'there is no reality outside the text." According to Guignon (1991, p. 96 ff.), what happens here is that when it becomes clear that "we can have no direct access to 'Nature as it is in itself" distinct from our interpretations, we may experience a 'feeling of loss' which seems to dictate that we are merely 'entangled in perspectives.'" Paradoxically, though, this postmodern "picture of our predicament as cut off from reality makes sense only because of the way it contrasts with the binary opposition of self vs. world it is supposed to replace." For example, the view that "signs refer only to other signs" is parasitic on the very opposition between "sign" and "signified" it is trying to discard. Thus, this approach may confusedly perpetuate the very axioms of thought it is trying to replace!

The situation is quite different with hermeneutics, however. It decisively breaks with any sort of sharp division of things into subjective and objective realms of being and with overly hasty postmodern rebellions against the same. We can't get entangled in perspectives or trapped in the subject, because no such isolated subject ever existed in the first place! We are partners in relationships with the past, others, and our social world that are essentially open to them and their influence as we influence them, in turn. As Taylor (1971) puts it,

It is not just that people in our society all or mostly have a set of
ideas in their heads and subscribe to a given set of goals. The meanings
and norms implicit in these practices are not just in the minds of the
actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which
cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but are essentially
modes of social relation, of mutual action. (p. 27)

On this account of hermeneutics, I don't believe there is hardly any of the "built-in anti-realist bias" that Willard worries about. I am sure that a hermeneutic ontology is not the only way to philosophize helpfully about this important question. But I do think that it represents a distinct and appealing alternative to both modern naturalism and the fashionable sort of postmodern relativism that often is aligned against it. According to a hermeneutic realism, human actions and emotions, indeed our very selves, unlike events in the natural world, are symbolically structured aspects of social reality. They are constituted by their location within the practices and norms of "language games," traditions, or forms of life. Thus, they would have a different reality if these practices and norms were different. As a result, as Taylor (1985, p. 121) says, "personal interpretation enters into the very definition of the phenomenon under study." In Willard's words, such an approach manages "to retain the openness of thought to a world not of its own making" while "doing full justice to the concreteness of the inquirer and his or her existential situation."

From this perspective, I suppose I would recommend softening Willard's statement that "a text is a radically different kind of thing from realities generally." Our experience, practices, and texts are all meaning-imbued and intimately interlinked through such meanings and norms. Thus, I can have a very real sort of "conversation" with Plato through his dialogues, one in which both I am changed and enlightened and the very meaning of his life and work are reinterpreted and at least slightly altered for me, others, and our world.

Finally, I do think it is worth paying attention to Willard's observation that hermeneutics has been "more concerned with meaning than truth." When Taylor speaks about the model of "speech partners coming to an understanding" as the cornerstone of Gadamer's (1989) hermeneutics, he might just have well spoken of a "coming to truth." Not final or certain truth, but truth, indeed. As Willard puts it, "knowledge requires truth, not infallibility." This is a side of hermeneutics that we probably need to stress and amplify more than we do. Willard provides us in his brief commentary with several rich reflections on this matter, for which as a reader I am grateful. For example, he writes that in the "actual knowledge practices of life," people "generally know most of what they do know without any idea of whether they know it or not," and points out the "mistake of thinking that, if you know, then you could not be wrong." We need all the sophisticated yet down-to-earth observations of this sort we can get to put us back in touch with the concrete business of living and inquiry. We need them to help us break the grip of the distorting naturalism, and its flip side the narcissism, that pervade our world.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, R.J. (1976). The restructuring of social and political theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gadamer, H-G. (1989). Truth and method. Second revised edition. J Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (Trans). New York: Crossroad.

Guignon, C. (1991). Pragmatism or hermeneutics? Epistemology after foundationalism. In D. Hiley, J. Bohman, & R. Schusterman, (Eds.). The Interpretive Turn (pp. 81-101). Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Richardson, F. (2005). Psychology and modern dilemmas, In B. Slife, J. Reber, & F. Richardson. Critical thinking about psychology: Hidden assumptions and plausible alternatives. Washington, D. C: APA Books.

Sandel, M. (1996). Democracy's discontent: America in search of a public philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Slife, B., Smith, A., & Burchfield, C. (2003). Psychotherapists as crypto-missionaries: An exemplar on the crossroads of history, theory, and philosophy. In D. Hill & M. Krall (Eds.), About psychology: At the crossroads of history, theory, and philosophy. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Taylor, C, (1971). Interpretation and the sciences of man. Review of Metaphysics, 25, 1-48.

Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

AUTHOR

RICHARDSON, FRANK C. Address: Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, 1 University Station D5800, Austin, TX 78712. Title: Professor of Educational Psychology. Degree: Ph.D.

FRANK C. RICHARDSON

University of Texas

Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Frank C. Richardson, PhD, Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, 1 University Station D5800, Austin, TX 78712. Email: [e-mail].

(1) Thus, he adopts a "descriptivist" view of social science inquiry (Richardson this issue) that links his view to many phenomenological and qualitative research approaches over the years.