Verstehen

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wiktionary:Verstehen

Verstehen is (German for understanding and interpretation of meaning, pronounced fair-SHTAY-en), used as an adjective in Interpretative Sociology (verstehende Soziologie). It was brought into social science (Geisteswissenschaften) by Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber to describe a process in which an outside observer of a culture (such as an anthropologist or sociologist) relates to an indigenous people or sub-cultural group on their own terms, rather than interpreting them in terms of his or her own concepts. Verstehen involves a kind of empathic or participatory understanding. In Anthropological terms this would be referred to as cultural relativism. In sociology it is an aspect of the comparative-historical approach, where the context of a society like twelfth century "France" can be better understood (Besserverstehen) by the sociologist than it could have been by people living in a village in Burgundy. It relates to how people in life give meaning to the social world around them. This concept has been both expanded and criticized by later social scientists. Proponents laud this concept as the only means by which researchers from one culture can examine and explain behaviors in another. While the exercise of Verstehen has been more popular among social scientists in Europe such as Jürgen Habermas, Verstehen was effectively introduced into the practice of sociology in the United States by Talcott Parsons, an American follower of Max Weber. Parsons incorporated this concept into his 1937 work, The Structure of Social Action. The study of hermeneutics is very closely related to Dilthey's ideas concerning Verstehen. There is a tendency in modern English to not follow the German-language practice of capitalizing nouns.

Critics of the concept of Verstehen such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Dean MacCannell counter that it is simply impossible for a person born of one culture to ever completely understand another culture, and that it is arrogant and conceited to attempt to interpret the significance of one culture's symbols through the terms of another (supposedly superior) culture. However, such criticisms do not necessarily allow for the possibility that Verstehen does not involve "complete" understanding. Just as in physical science all knowledge is asymptotic to the full explanation, a high degree of cross-cultural understanding is very valuable. The opposite of Verstehen would seem to be ignorance of all but that which is immediately observable, meaning that we would not be able to understand any time and place but our own. A certain level of Verstehen is necessary for our own cultural setting, however, and it can easily been argued that even the full participant in a culture does not understand it one hundred percent in every regard.