Meaning in culture [antikvár]

Preface One important view of social science — represented by thinkers like Dilthey, Collingwood and Weber, among others — holds that the critical thing about human phenomena is that they are intrinsically meaningful. This is taken as grounds for distinguishing human affairs sharply from natural phenomena, for the latter are deemed to lack inherent meaning. This book attempts to work out the logic of a social science which purports to explore the intrinsic meaning of human phenomena; more specifically, it is concerned with a particular form of such a social science, which will appear before too many pages are past under the label 'institutional analysis.' My argument will be sympathetic to institutional analysis because, properly laid out, I think it is a legitimate and important way to study human phenomena. In addition, it is the way which happens to appeal to me most. A claim that human phenomena have intrinsic meaning — which meaning should be a major object of our investigation — immediately confronts a series of questions which are ultimately philosophical in nature. The chapters which follow are attempts to frame those questions clearly and to resolve them. One such question asks where this meaning is located. Is it entirely with the agents, so that a human event can have neither more nor less meaning than is attributed to it by its perpetrator(s) ? Or is there also some meaning in culture of which natives are unaware? And if so, does that imply that culture is some kind of superorganic entity with ends of its own? These issues are discussed in Chapter 1. Then there is the question of cultural relativism. If human phenomena are intrinsically meaningful, presumably to be fully understood that meaning should be grasped internally, in its own terms, rather than according to alien criteria. But can we possibly grasp the intrinsic meaning of events in cultures radically different from our own? How can we evaluate the morality of deeds or the