The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

Harold Kincaid
ideas, and it is helpful to sort them out. At least the following kinds of “meaning”
might reasonably be at issue:
Doxastic meaning: what a subject believes
Intentional meaning: what a subject intends, desires, etc.
Linguistic meaning: how the verbal behavior of the subject is to be translated
Symbolic meaning: what the behavior of the subject symbolizes
Normative meaning: what norms the behavior of the subjects reflects or
embodies
While no doubt there are interconnection between these various senses of
“meaning,” they are importantly different.
Perhaps the most influential argument from the past based on meaning was the
type advanced by Taylor (1971). He argued that there are no brute or bare data
in the human sciences and that every categorization of human behavior rests on
prior understandings. This argument is regularly repeated by those in the social
sciences who want to draw a sharp distinction between quantitative and qualitative
methods. Yet this argument ignores the main developments in philosophy of
science since the positivists. Given the holism of testing, the experimenter’s regress,
the place of skill in testing, and other such phenomena widely identified in the
natural sciences, “brute data” without “prior understandings” are not to be found
there either.
The holism of testing is also relevant to two other traditional interpretivist type
arguments, namely, those concerning rationality and the subject’s categories.
Rationality is thought to make the social sciences different because the interpreter
must make normative assumptions about what is rational in order to attribute
beliefs to subjects and must assume that the subject is on the whole rational. This
principle of charity was treated as an a priori methodological rule. The holism of
testing would suggest that methodological rules are ultimately justified by their fit
with experience and can likewise be rejected when they do not. From this perspective,
the principle of charity is a contingent, defeasible rule. We should assume
that individuals are rational only to the extent that we have evidence that they are;
we should assume our standards of rationality are universal only to the extent that
the empirical evidence warrants that claim. Of course, we must make assumptions
about rationality to get interpretation off the ground. But the holism of testing
tells us that no science gathers data without prior theory. Thus assumptions about
rationality are no different than other theoretical assumptions. This general
response to the rationality debate has been ably defended by Henderson (1991,
1993). There are nonetheless still dissenters (Hollis, 1996).
The holism of testing also bears upon arguments over the subject’s selfconceptions.
How the subject views the world is one piece of evidence about his
or her behavior, but a piece that must be evaluated on the basis of everything else
that we know. Subjects can be entirely mistaken about the causes of their behavior
as a large body of work shows (Liska, 1975). To ignore the subject’s under-
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