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SSC Sociology QUESTION #1676
Question 1
Anthony Giddens introduced the concept of 'double hermeneutics' to describe a distinctive epistemological condition unique to the social sciences. This concept refers to which methodological challenge?
  • The impossibility of achieving objective knowledge in any scientific discipline
  • The two-way interpretive relationship in which social scientists must interpret a social world that is itself already pre-interpreted by the actors within it, whose concepts in turn re-enter and reshape social life✔️
  • The hermeneutic circle in which texts can only be understood in terms of the whole, and the whole in terms of its parts
  • The double-blind methodology required for unbiased social scientific experimentation
Correct Answer Explanation
Giddens introduced 'double hermeneutics' in 'New Rules of Sociological Method' (1976) to describe how social science involves a double layer of interpretation: social scientists interpret a world that lay actors have already interpreted using their own concepts. Moreover, social scientific concepts can be appropriated by lay actors, feeding back into social reality and transforming it — a reflexive dynamic absent in natural science.