In Defence of Verstehen and Erkliren

Abstract

Wilhelm Dilthey's essay of 1894, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology, is the locus classicus for the distinction between `understanding' and `explanation', or Verstehen and Erklaren, in the 19th-century German tradition of hermeneutics and the Geistes-wissenschaften. This article discusses the distinction Dilthey draws there between `explanatory' psychology, based on subsumption of the behaviour of individuals under general laws, and `interpretive', or `descriptive and analytical', psychology, based on disclosure of the uniqueness of individual case-histories. It defends his conception against the objections of the Neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert and the experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, as well as neo-positivist writers such as Theodore Abel. The article also argues more generally that Dilthey's dichotomy of `spirit' and `nature' still articulates a fundamental methodological difference between the sciences, despite our contemporary recognition of the importance of interpretation in both the natural and human sciences.