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How are contemporary researchers "present" in investigating the past, and how do they conduct research that acknowledges the reconstruction of the past without reducing it to what they already wanted to find? These perennial questions have become central to literature at the intersection of historical hermeneutics and sociological methodology. This paper provides a novel perspective on these questions by interrogating the notion of "anachronism" with the help of queer historiography and pragmatism. Queer historiographers make a case for how the present is experienced as multiple temporalities, how the sense of anachronism is dependent on dynamics of bodily identification with historical others, and how this sense may become a provocative hermeneutic strategy rather than a topic to be avoided. Pragmatists show how anachronism emerges as the socially-situated and embodied sense of surprise in encountering particular traces of the past in the actor's present, and how this surprise may prompt analyses into the past that utilize the researcher's value-commitments as a resource in sociological inquiry. The paper seeks to build conceptual tools for a pragmatic hermeneutics that can strengthen both the accuracy of our investigations into particular historical events and our democratically-inclusive ethical and political projects to reconstruct usable histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written for Dorothy Pawluch's festschrift for The American Sociologist, this paper seeks to advance constructionist conceptualization and theorizing of time. Our goal is to contribute to expanding the social constructionist toolkit by considering the role of temporality in social problems claims-making, i.e., temporal hermeneutics or time as a vernacular resource. We background this focus with a brief overview of sociological examinations of time, with a particular focus on the writings of George Herbert Mead, who developed key concepts that point to an underdeveloped sociology of time. We argue that 'hewing' to members own projections and invocations of time helps analysts to remain agnostic regarding the examination of definitional processes. Two case studies indicate potential directions forward. First is the case of the 'tank man' image/meme, originating from news coverage of the June 4, 1989 Chinese government crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square. Second, we explore the case of 'missing time' experienced by those claiming to have encountered aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFOs). These very different cases suggest the wide range of applications a hermeneutics of temporality may offer to constructionist scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a study of the International Space Station (ISS), this paper argues that – as a set of orientations for sociological inquiry – pragmatism and hermeneutics are confluent frameworks to examine valuation as a social process. This confluence is grounded on their common attunement to valuing as a problematic and relational process, their equally common updates with theories of institutions, and a further conceptual development regarding the temporalities of valuation. I advance the argument in four steps. First, looking at how the question about the "scientific value" of the ISS is far from settled, I show how valuation is always about something considered problematic and indeterminate. Second, characterizing the ISS at the intersection of different criteria of assessment, I stress the nature of valuation as a fundamentally perspectival and interpretive process, and show how a hermeneutic approach can complement some of the limitations of pragmatism in this regard. Third, I look at the question of institutions considering how some modes of assessment sediment more successfully than others. Fourth, I argue that, while providing insights towards it, pragmatist and hermeneutic approaches to valuation have not fully grasped its temporal nature as a process, and outline ways to open this line of inquiry. I conclude with some ideas for studies in sociology of science to re-entangle detailed case studies of scientific practice with the study of how institutions make claims of worth about the nature of science, I propose ways to extend these arguments to other studies of what I call iridescent institutions, and I make some considerations about our stance as sociologists in these valuation disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to point the way towards a new articulation between hermeneutics and pragmatism. The founders of pragmatism in large part ignored the hermeneutic tradition, while the founders of hermeneutics focused above all on the scholarly pursuit of textual interpretation. The textual paradigm is undeniably important; it enables us to understand, analogically, the way in which action appears to us as "meaningful" and "fixed" (Ricœur, Geertz, Alexander), but it is not sufficient for analyzing our ordinary activities in their situational context. Pragmatism reorients hermeneutics towards a stronger focus on problematic situations that call for interpretive effort. Pragmatism and hermeneutics together make it possible to rethink social theory by identifying different ways of understanding sociosigns from spontaneous understanding to the most reflective forms of understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a commentary on Christian Smith's 'The Conceptual Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Cultural Sociology.' This paper accepts Smith's finding of conceptual incoherence at the disciplinary level and argues that it is a symptom of empiricism in American sociology. The paper suggests we employ conceptual analysis as practiced by analytical philosophy and proceeds to show how the use of that methodology can resolve the problem regarding the meaning of culture. In the end, the paper defends a conception of culture along the lines of Archer's (1996) intelligibilia, interpreted as action and its products bearing social reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological study of political culture has made important headways. Scholars have demonstrated the significance of background culture, symbols and narratives as well as of the shared patterns of conduct. Yet, the relationship of those to ordinary people, how they become meaningful, has not been effectively explored. This paper argues that to comprehend this relationship we must understand political languages as concerning questions of being. I will show how the philosophical resources of Mead's pragmatism and Taylor's hermeneutics can enlighten the link between political languages and self, demonstrate its significance, and suggest ways in which the study of political cultures can be extended to integrate meaningful selfhood. Comparing and complementing pragmatism and hermeneutics, I will argue that political languages become meaningful along two intertwined dimensions: First, practical self-insertion in coordinative patterns, which involves the expression of concerns and senses of being. Second, self- and world clarification. Here, political languages become important when they articulate concerns and intuitions and bring moral sources into proximity. Moreover, by foregrounding Taylor's hermeneutics of self-expression and articulation, which is yet to be integrated in the social sciences, I will show how both dimensions are connected in an hermeneutical cycle and thus ought to be analysed in their relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relations between George Herbert Mead's pragmatism and Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics have been examined in recent years in a new light: based on the former's close contact with the latter during the course of his studies in Germany in the 1880s–90s. These relations seem to vanish afterward, with Mead's return to the United States. Yet the common interests they share in the formation of a new social science keeps their respective developments in parallel; from psychology to history, they both share common interests in the reformulation of the concepts of Geist or Mind of the Hegelian legacy, through an interest in meaning and symbols as keys to the interpretation of the social world. Although there are important differences in their evaluation of the definition of the scientific enterprise that keeps natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften apart for Dilthey, but are rather seen in their continuity for Mead, there are numerous points of intersection in their views. This article seeks to highlight those similarities, without neglecting the differences between Mead and Dilthey, in order to bring hermeneutics and pragmatism closer in their capacity to shed light on each other, and on the requirements of sociological analysis in contemporary society to be widened and deepened by adding the psychological and historical dimensions to its perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a sociological perspective the 'surrender and catch' expression derives, of course, from the experiential and existential basis of Wolff's epistemology and hermeneutics.'Surrender' is connected with phenomenology, and Husserl's (as well as Schütz's) writings, besides Scheler's idea of a 'relatively natural world view'.'Surrender and catch' is also a 'sociology of understanding' a definition which recuperates the German verstehende Soziologie though it makes a distinction between 'surrender' and 'surrender to'. It is not just a theory, it is a methodology too, in order to understand the otherness.Wolff was a multi-facetted scholar and this affected his conceptualizations. Furthermore, his surrender is something one experiences existentially in a number of fields, from the nature of empirical research to the art of theoretical reflection, from politics to poetry, from philosophy to history to sociology.It must also be pointed out that surrender and catch are a form of protest against the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his contribution to this issue, Smith argues that sociology's house of culture is built on a foundation of sand. In my brief response to Smith, I dispute the claim that culture is in trouble and question the methods and motives behind Smith's critique. I then indicate the common ground characterizing the work of contemporary culture scholars. Drawing upon my fieldnotes and observations of culture in action, I define culture as a suprasubjective system of signification creating intersubjective senses or ideas that are distinct from the materiality, function, immediacy, or face value of any particular people, objects, words, thoughts, and actions. I argue that this culture concept, which I see as theoretically consistent with the work of most cultural sociologists and sociologists of culture, satisfies many of Smith's requirement that an acceptable culture concept specify culture's location, powers, limits, and relationship to subjectivity, and clearly theorize meaning and its relationship to culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]