On Hermeneutics: from Philosophy to Empirical Sociology

Hermeneutics, either as a gaze or "qualitative look" at social reality or as a tool to analyze the data about the sense that pervades reality, is today relatively common in empirical sociology, where it makes possible the comprehension of both discourse and behaviors in social interaction. This presence is a consequence of a translation from philosophy to sociology, that contributed to break the positivist tradition inherited fron natural sciences; in this tradition, only the measuring of quantitative data and the nomological explanation are the foundations of scientific knowledge. Nowadays, sociology has achieved a scientific statute independent of the positivist model, in which the researcher can take into consideration both the quantitative dimension of reality and the intersubjective sense of the choses sociales.