In order to construct a valid social explanation of human activity, hermeneuticists claim that
our interpretation of ourselves and our experience is constitutive of what we are, and therefore cannot be considered as merely a view on reality, separable from reality, nor as an epiphenomenon, which can be bypassed in our understanding of reality (Taylor in Glynos, Howarth 2007: 53.)
They stress the incoherence of the causal law paradigm in social science, Charles Taylor for instance says that the reason for the failure of the prediction and causal laws paradigm is the ontological world-view it presupposes. At the root of empiricist and rationalist epistemologies including behaviourism is a positivism that “treats everything, including human beings, as an ‘object amongst others'” (Taylor in Glynos, Howarth 2007, 52).
Glynos et al. some it up nicely by saying that the hermeneutical critique of positivist approaches to social and political analysis is based on the affirmation that our “interpretation of reality is constitutive of reality, not merely a view on reality which can be ‘bracketed’ (55).
Both the subject and the object of research consist in meaningful behaviour … interpretation ‘goes all the way down’: interpretation cannot somehow be by-passed in the establishment of facts and correlations, because the interpretations of both researcher and researched are essential in determining what is to count as a fact.