Worldmaking in the Social Sciences

• In Event: What Do Interpretivists Know? Political Science in an Age of Misinformation

Abstract

The interpretive turn allows for a paradigm shift in how readers approach the word-object relationship in the human sciences. Theories in the human sciences are often conceptualized as descriptive and explanatory in such a way that the word (or theoretical account) exists largely outside the object of inquiry (or the social-political process). By contrast, interpretivism makes it possible to read social science theories inside the stream of culture and politics—not straightforwardly descriptive but instead generative of social realities. This paper explores the worldmaking capacities of theories in the human sciences, proposing various breaches of the word-object split. These include not only narrative causal forms, like top-down technocratic imposition and techno-populist upsurges, but also non-causal forms, like ideological resonances and hypothetical, as-if scenarios. Grasping the radically different relationship between word-object in the human sciences opens up new empirical topics for investigation as well as a form of social theory that has normative and critical dimensions.

Author

• Jason Blakely, Pepperdine University