DECONTEXTUALISED MEANINGS: CURRENT APPROACHES TO VERSTEHENDE INVESTIGATIONS.

This article examines current practices in sociology and anthropology concerned with analyzing social structures as meaningful human products, and will consider in particular the work of the phenomenologists and ethnoscientists. The human sciences are not purged of common-sense rationalities by virtue of their scientism. Models of man are to be found informing much theoretical work, and debates about appropriate assumptions still consume space in the journals. Further, as sociological models have generally neglected or assumed away common-sense situations of practical choice in everyday life, and the issue of how such situations are managed, they are all implicated in implicit reification. The search to break out of this reifying model-construction has taken two distinct directions. The first is concerned with seeking out definitive answers to the epistemologically posed 'problem of meaning', the second with focusing upon formal structures of practical actions. Clearly the notion that one can discern a realm that could be called a culture's or natives' cognitive system, is akin to the old idea that language has an existence 'out there', fundamentally independent of its myriad usages, contexts, and criteria of applicability, all of which are abused, debated and so on at some stage of the conduct of everyday life.