Abstract

An important consideration which runs through the adjudication process in each dimension is that of insight vs. blindness. Whether it is a question of deciding if one description is a persuasive critique of another, or which of two rivals is more adequate empirically, or which is a more plausible and convincing narrative, one is always involved in assessing how far and how much each of the accounts permits us to see. The centrality of this notion certifies the inescapably hermeneutical character of social description adjudication. It precludes the possibility of a decision-procedure, but not of rationality. The alternative to a canonical method of description adjudication is not relativism but hermeneutics. ;My argument for a hermeneutical approach to social description adjudication is made largely via consideration of a series of examples. I look at a collection of rival accounts of the same portion of social reality and at the process of choosing between them. I consider the sorts of reasons and arguments that might be advanced for preferring one to another and I evaluate them. The descriptions I look at are accounts of the French Revolution of 1848 and they include Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte, Victor Hugo's Napoleon the Little, Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education and the works of two recent twentieth century social historians. ;I show that these descriptions are complexes of at least three analytically distinct components: critical, empirical and narrative. I show, therefore, that the choice between them can be made from at least three corresponding standpoints. But I also argue that these three dimensions are not independent of one another; each, rather, presupposes the others and none is foundational with respect to the others. Adjudicating between competing social descriptions, then, turns out to be a complex non-canonical process of weighing the relative merits within each dimension. ;I counterpose to the decision-procedure model of social description adjudication a hermeneutical model. I show that good and convincing reasons for preferring one social description or historical interpretation to another need not be strictly derivable from or translatable into a set of universal rules capable of being formulated independently of and in advance of the consideration of the particular case. I show, rather, that rational adjudication between competing social descriptions consists in creative rule-transcending judgment akin to Aristotelian phronesis or Kantian reflective judgment. ;It is often presupposed that choices between competing theories, interpretations, actions or whatever qualify as rational just in case they result from the application of some decision-procedure. I take issue with this assumption when what is at stake is choosing between competing descriptions of social reality. I argue that there is not and cannot be a decision-procedure governing such choices, but that such choices may nonetheless be rational and intersubjectively defensible