"Understanding and Explaining"

Phd candidates from all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences confront the issues of understanding and explaining during their studies and later on, as academic researchers or as professionals in other fields, but what do 'understanding' and 'explaining' mean? Do understanding and explaining correspond to different knowledge domains? Why do we want to understand and seek explanations? How important are contexts to understanding? How basic are causes to explaining? How do capacities for understanding and explaining develop? Are there cases where we ought to understand, rather than explain, and vice versa? What's the significance of misunderstandings and false, or inappropriate, explanations? Both as practices and as methodological concepts (often pitched against each other as hermeneutic vs. scientific), understanding and explaining transcend the usual disciplinary boundaries and thus show the need for a multi-disciplinary approach.

Understanding and explaining are not just everyday and academic activities but also stand for two intellectual traditions. One is based in ideas of interpretation and historical knowledge. The other is founded on the success of natural science and technology. The relation between the two has been problematized in the modern world of the West at least since Giambatista Vico's 'New Science' (1725), which powerfully argued for an understanding of 'the true' through historical narratives and interpretations impervious to the universal laws and experimental methods of Cartesian science. Within Western philosophy of the 20th century, this debate translated into the conflict between continental and analytic approaches: the former, deeply rooted in hermeneutic practices of interpretation and ideals of historical knowledge, claiming to understand; the latter, modeled after the natural sciences and their methods and paradigms, claiming to explain; both claiming 'to know' in a way that was superior to the other. In sociology, a similar dynamic emerged in the opposition between qualitative research (exemplified by Weberian hermeneutic approaches) and quantitative research (exemplified by positivist approaches). More recently, these distinctions have lost some of their earlier force, at least in part due to developments in philosophy and theory of science and social science. Interpretations without links to empirical explanations are increasingly considered as problematic as explanations lacking historical or cultural contexts. As a science about the social (going back to Hobbes, Hume and Mill), social science perhaps best exemplifies the complex relation between understanding, explaining and associated values, expectations and ideologies.

On another level, philosophers and social theorists (Habermas, Luhmann, Derrida, Bourdieu, to name a few) investigate interpretations and explanations as speech acts or communications, and raise the question and critique of their possibility and validity conditions. These debates also challenge easy distinctions between knowing-that and knowing-how insofar as both understanding and explaining can be said to involve tacit capacities and practical skills resembling Aristotle's phronesis. Eastern philosophies throw into question Western beliefs in the discursivity of truth, the validity of bivalent logic, the opposition of theory and practice, and in the championing of knowledge at the expense of wisdom or enlightenment. Further distinctions that have come under scrutiny more generally include, amongst others: subjective understanding vs. objective explanation; logic of justification vs. logic of discovery; interpretations vs. truths; values vs. facts; normativity vs. causality.

Theory and Philosophy Summer School 2012 will provide the opportunity to approach the problem of ‘understanding and explaining' in a multi-disciplinary and international context in order to facilitate problem-oriented, inter-disciplinary and team-based research on the doctoral and post-doctoral level in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.