Interpretation in Social Life, Social Science and Marketing

 john_oshaughnessy_139
By John O'Shaughnessy 
Professor Emeritus of Business, Columbia University
Author: Interpretation in Social Life, Social Science and Marketing


All methods used in academic disciplines involve interpretation in one way or another with interpretation on occasions being the sole methodology employed as in the humanities. 

With the recognition that contextual factors vitiate the search for universal ‘laws' in the social sciences, has come an increasing interest in interpretation and interpretive methods for understanding human behavior and meaningful action.

Not surprisingly, responding to this interest in interpretation there have been many articles and a few books devoted to the topic but all have restricted themselves to traditional techniques like hermeneutics, failing to take account of the varying nature of interpretation throughout the academic disciplines and social life. This book aims to fill this gap.

Interpretation is distinguished from logical inference. Logical inferences draw valid conclusions from given premises. This contrasts with interpretation which is never certain but always involves some conjecture to fill the gaps in the information available.

This book explores the nature of interpretation and its importance in social life, in social science and consumer explanations. It surveys interpretation in social interactions; in undertaking scientific inquiries; in causal analysis; in consumer evaluations of products and other artifacts; in interpreting problematic situations while pointing to the predilections embedded in the concepts we employ and the role of emotion in both complementing rationality and coloring the interpretations that may undermine it.

There can be no intellectual inquiry without an organizing conceptual framework and this framework is grounded in a perspective. Interpretation is in consequence never a completely bias-free process but is tied to a person's perspective and the partiality that is an inherent element of that perspective. Moving from one perspective to another in social science is, though, seldom a movement from error to truth but simply additional windows on to a problem or with the different perspectives addressing different questions.

This suggests our understanding of social phenomena is enriched by a plurality of perspectives (or paradigms in science) and a corresponding plurality of methods. Shweder (2003) in cultural psychology, words it well in saying that the world is incomplete if seen from just one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular. He goes on to advocate the view from ‘manywheres' in a diverse and interdependent world. (Ref 1.)

Methodology always entails interpretation, as methodology in science is a technology governed by loose rules that are not true or false but effective or ineffective which need interpretation in the context of application. The book debates the role of interpretation in methods based on the philosophies of positivism, logical empiricism, or naturalism and the role of interpretation in methodological stances whether methodological monism, methodological exclusivism, methodological pluralism, methodological individualism or methodological holism.

Such philosophies and stances spearhead a perspective, influencing interpretation and how we go about research in the social sciences. To ignore their presence (as generally happens) is to impoverish our understanding of what we are doing and to ignore the foundational assumptions of the methodology.

Interpretation of human action presupposes understanding the concepts (e.g., shopping) under which an action falls, while the information content of a concept is tied to its power to discriminate. Clear concepts can be viewed as mechanisms for avoiding confusion in categorization. Complicating interpretation in the social sciences is the possibility of a lack of clarity in the concepts employed since not all concepts that have sense-meaning have clear referential-meanings that lend themselves to being captured in corresponding operational measures.

Acceptance of the same sense-meaning of a concept (e.g., attitude as the predisposition to react positively or negatively to some event, person or thing), does not imply a commonality of interpretation of corresponding referential-meanings and this can give rise to problems. The concept of intentional action and other action terms are used to illustrate complications in the interpretation of human action which is concerned with both the meaning of the action and/or its explanation.

One chapter in the book deals with the notion of cause and its various conceptualizations which guide interpretations. There is the regularity view of cause and the natural necessity view, versus the more fundamental notion of cause as conceptualized by scientific realists. The conceptualization of cause promoted by scientific realism is rarely the one captured by economists and not by mathematical modelers in marketing.

Those subscribing to scientific realism conceptualize ‘causes' as mechanisms, structures or powers that cause the effects of interest. The realist does not look for single causes linked to single effects but argues that any effect is more likely to result from complex interrelations among background causal structures and processes. These causal structures and processes can be out of phase with the events they cause, with the consequence that causal relationships are often hidden.

For the realist, the causes of any effect are usually complex, unobservable structures and processes and this makes causal structural analysis in statistics problematic. Accepting that prediction is problematic (except in the ‘closed system' of the laboratory), the realist does not consider prediction the acid test of theory but seeks explanations in terms of causal necessity.

Related to this is how professional expertise dictates where to look for cause, in that people look for causes within their own area of expertise. The causes sought by the behavior researcher may have little significance for the marketing manager either because he or she does not see that cause as actionable (e.g. culture) or requires education as to why it is in fact significant.

The book sets out the role of interpretation in the methods used to track truth: induction, the hypothetico-deductive method and abduction -- sometimes described as the method of Sherlock Holmes or inference to the best explanation. Abduction should be of particular interest to those employing qualitative approaches to theory development at a rich clinical level since it is shown that abduction can be employed in theory development using case studies.

The consumer's interpretation and subsequent evaluation of artifacts like products comes under the heading of artifact interpretation. The processes rest on using prognomic indicators. These are the indicators used by the consumer to justify his or her expectation that they will reflect truth about the product. High centrality plus high perceived risk attached to any anticipated purchase makes the product highly meaningful and implies high involvement in the purchase by the consumer.

One prognomic indicator is brand name and corresponding brand image, brand persona and brand personality which induce affect-driven and/or belief-driven choices. As the interpretation of artifacts can be reduced to the interpretation of signs and semiotics is the formal study of signs, artifact interpretation can be studied through the prism of semiotics drawing on language and other symbol systems, like signals, signs, codes, paradigms and syntagms which are all discussed in the last chapter.

John O'Shaughnessy
Professor Emeritus of Business, Columbia University
Formerly Senior Associate, Judge Institute, Cambridge University

Ref 1. Shweder, Richard A. (2003) Why do Men Barbecue? Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

August 2011
 

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