| In the cultural sciences, interpretation and explanation are sometimes seen as interchangable and sometimes as incommensurable. The present work argues that when culture is a product of rational activity the first view is acceptable, whereas when it is expressive, semantically rich, and of unclear etiology, interpretation has a fictive status often without bearing in science. An argument defining "rich" structures and indicating why they are difficult to explain is used to show how the interpretive strategies of semiotic and structural anthropology fail to explain culture. Several sociological examples of successful explanation are then used to show that culture can be conceived as mapping intentions into cultural forms; and that this evades some methodological difficulties posed by the indefinite interpretability of rich phenomena. Intentions map the circumstances in which expressive phenomena are produced into semantic forms--conceived here, on analogy to rhetoric, as "tropes." By a tropological strategy we both define expressive phenomena and code them for their expressive properties. Once developed, this method is tested on structuralism itself, viewed as a trope whose historical career gives some access to the intentions figured through it. The example shows both that interpretation is crucial to the explanation of rich phenomena and that reliance on it weakens our empirical grasp on tropes; raising a general question as to how far we can go in understanding culture. The practical difficulties encountered along the way to this question are used in a methodological critique of reason in the cultural sciences which should have application in literary studies, history, and the social sciences. |
