Sociology Plus
Double Hermeneutic Definition
The double hermeneutic is an idea put forward by Anthony Giddens (1984) holding that understanding in sociology and social science operates at two levels. To understand meaningful action, the researcher must grasp both the everyday knowledge of the individuals engaged in the action — the “meaningful social world as constituted by lay actors” — and the more technical vocabulary of the discipline, the “meta-languages invented by sociologists and social scientists to understand and explain social action.”
Why “Double”?
The term marks a contrast with the natural sciences, which face only a single hermeneutic task: interpreting a world of objects that does not itself interpret. The physicist’s atoms have no opinions about physics. Social scientists, by contrast, study a world that is already interpreted by the people who live in it. Lay actors possess their own concepts, reasons, and self-understandings, and any sociological account must first engage with these before translating them into technical terms. Understanding therefore occurs twice over — once at the level of everyday meaning, and again at the level of social-scientific description.
Implications
The double hermeneutic also runs in both directions, and this is among its most consequential features. Sociological concepts do not remain the property of the discipline: notions coined by social scientists filter back into the social world they describe, where lay actors take them up and act upon them, subtly changing the very reality the concepts were designed to capture. For Giddens this two-way traffic helps explain why the social sciences cannot accumulate stable laws in the manner of natural science — their subject matter absorbs and responds to what is said about it. The idea is central to Giddens’s broader theory of structuration and to his account of the reflexivity of modern social life.