Philosophical debates
This chapter considers some of the major philosophical traditions that have established the need for an interpretive turn in the social sciences—including phenomenology, post-structuralism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and social constructivism. We reject the view that there is only one privileged philosophical route to an interpretive social science. Instead, the philosophical pluralism of the interpretive turn is defended albeit from a uniquely anti-naturalist perspective. Specifically, anti-naturalism corrects the tendency of some advocates of the interpretive turn to drift back into naturalist concepts as well as to distort the proper conception of human agency. Major philosophers of the interpretive turn are critically engaged, including Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.