The Art of Saying No: Hermeneutic Theorizing and the Force of Negation

Abstract

Recently, sociology saw a surge of interest in practical theorizing. Many contributions to this discourse adopt an empiricist approach to theory building characterized by data centrism, a separation between discovery and justification, and an unclear or restricted role of existing theory. The article develops “hermeneutic theorizing” as a distinct approach that reconceptualizes engagement with prior theory as a central driver of novel theorizing. This hermeneutic mode has implicitly shaped the self-understanding of many classical sociological theorists and finds its roots in Hegel’s concept of determinate negation and the broader hermeneutic tradition. By explicating this way of thinking with and against tradition and showing its relevance for contemporary sociological theory building, the article aims to broaden the conception of theorizing and find a systematic place for the critical engagement with established theory in theory development.

In the past decade, sociology has seen increasing interest in theory building, owing, to a large extent, to a movement from theory to theorizing. Unlike prior discussions on theory construction, theorizing is neither bound by the rigid framework of a falsificationist philosophy of science (Stinchcombe 1987) nor confined to a mere collection of useful heuristics and “tricks of the trade” (Abbott 2004; Becker 1998; Wright Mills 2000). The ambition of theorizing is to understand theory building as an integral part of the research process rather than isolating theory as a self-contained, special discourse apart from empirical inquiry. The Peircean (Peirce 1929) notion of abduction was especially instrumental to reimagining and rebranding theory building as an accessible, rewarding, and creative hands-on activity that can be taught and learned similarly to empirical methods (Karlsson and Bergman 2016; Swedberg 2014a, 2017b; Tavory 2016; Tavory and Timmermans 2014).

Like every turn, the turn to theorizing can be understood not only by what it turns toward but also by what it turns away from. The counter-image that theorizing is almost uniformly directed against is theory as an engagement with “important” theoretical texts by prior theorists. This more classical understanding of doing theory is seen as stale, removed from empirical concerns, and unoriginal. Exegetical recapitulations of classical thought, studies in the history of sociological theory, abstract social-ontological discussions, and encompassing systems that aim to unify sociology as a science are what theorizers want to overcome. In the place of “theoretical theory” (Bourdieu 1988:744) that encapsulates itself in a self-referential theoretical discourse, theorizing is meant to transform sociological theory into a pronouncedly empirical enterprise with a clear role in empirical sociological research. Consequently, many contributions to the discourse on theorizing have an empiricist, anti-scholastic leaning, understanding theory and theoretical discourse almost exclusively from its relation to the practice of research and data.

The effort of theorizing scholars to make theoretical creativity more widely accessible and to enhance the empirical relevance of theory is a valuable impulse. Yet precisely because there is much eagerness to distance theorizing from “scholastic” understandings of social theory, theorizing risks cutting ties not only with problematic forms of theoretical self-enclosure but also with nonempiricist modes of theory development that are essential to the practice of theory building. I argue that the current discourse on theorizing is not yet a truly general discourse on theoretical method because it defines itself so strongly in opposition to “traditional” theory work. Three empiricist dogmas underlie large parts of the discourse on theorizing. I show that a more adequate and open idea of theorizing ought to move beyond empiricist theorizing to a “hermeneutic” understanding of theorizing that draws its creativity from deeply engaging with prior theory and the scientific tradition—not to worship but to selectively negate it. I then elaborate a conception of hermeneutic theorizing as a distinct form of practical knowledge for engaging in theory building, and I conclude with a case study of Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

Three Dogmas of Empiricist Theorizing

This section aims to bring out some empiricist tendencies in the discourse of theorizing. Almost every sociologist is an empiricist in the sense that it is widely recognized that sociology is an empirical science, and theories ultimately need to be judged by their capacity to make sense of our (methodically controlled) experience of the actual social world. Empiricism as a specific epistemological outlook is usually characterized as the more demanding epistemological position that “all concepts are derived from experience” (Priest 2007:5; see also Russell 1936). In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine (1951) showed that this position rests on some apparently self-evident presuppositions that can, however, be challenged. I try to do something similar with empiricism in theorizing: criticizing and negating its “dogmas” (in the sense of commonplace assumptions) to see where this leads us. Empiricism in theorizing can be characterized as the view that all theory should be derived from experience—especially the methodically controlled experience we usually call “data.”

Most scholars who contribute to the discussion on theorizing do not explicitly defend an empiricist conception of theorizing, but many are drawn to some version of it because it is the most straightforward way to fulfill one of the main goals of theorizing: to make theory more relevant to empirical research (Swedberg 2016a). To conceptualize theory as emerging from research and data is the most obvious way to inject theorizing into research. Yet empiricist theorizing is (just like its epistemological sister concept) not without alternatives. The dogmas of empiricist theorizing to be discussed and challenged here are data centrism, the separation of discovery and justification, and a disregard for prior theory. The three together constitute an internally coherent “ideal type” of empiricist theorizing (Weber 1949). Reconstructing empiricist theorizing in this way makes its foundations look more coherent than they actually are. Many authors subscribe to only one or two of the dogmas; most approaches to theorizing are individually quite nuanced, pull in different directions, and relativize their more empiricist claims with contravening discussions. Yet it should be possible to recognize that the ideal-typical description covers real tendencies in the theorizing discourse—it is not the sun that everything revolves around, but almost all positions in theorizing are affected by its gravitational pull.

The First Dogma of Empiricist Theorizing: Theory Needs to Emerge from Data

According to empiricist theorizing, theory construction should proceed from empirical data. Abbott (2011:7 in Swedberg 2014a:140) presents this data-centric view of theorizing in a strong form by claiming that “all theory worth reading arises from reflection about data.” This bottom-up view of theory as data-driven comes in different variants: as abstracting from, building on, or abductively emerging from data. Weick (2014:184–86, 194) imagines a progression from perception to increasingly abstracted and conceptually developed ways of thinking about the world (see also Swedberg 2020). Cornelissen, Höllerer, and Seidl (2021) describe research practices as a confrontation with phenomena that are lifted into theoretical discourse through initial acts of categorization. Karlsson and Bergman (2016) think about conceptualization in terms of selectively emphasizing, reducing, or extending empirical properties of empirical phenomena. However, Peircean (Peirce 1929) abduction—the idea that the confrontation with data sparks creative insight in researchers to guess underlying structures and explanations for phenomena—is clearly the most important concept in imagining the ascent from data to theory.

Swedberg (2014a:230–48) takes up the Peirceian (Peirce 1929) concepts of abduction and “guessing” to conceptualize theorizing as the finding of new explanations for data. Theorizing is imagined as a transition from observation/data to theoretical explanations. “Don’t think but look” is Swedberg’s (2016a:15) recommendation for getting inspired by data. His view of theorizing is one of successive abductive conjectures leading in a series of creative leaps from data via names, metaphors, and preliminary concepts to theoretical explanations (Swedberg 2012, 2014a:98–123). Although Swedberg (2016b:59–60) never commits the positivist fallacy of thinking that theory can simply be found in the data, data clearly takes center stage in stimulating new theoretical ideas. Other influential data-centric forms of theorizing that build on Peirce’s (1929) idea of abduction are more skeptical about researchers’ ability to spontaneously generate theory by finding names and concepts for empirical phenomena. These scholars not only emphasize that theory prestructures the perception of what counts as surprising or interesting in the data, but they also actively encourage researchers to use prior theory, and even multiple prior theories, to understand the empirical case at hand (Abbott 2012; Tavory and Timmermans 2012; Weick 2014:190–93). Still, these scholars remain committed to the data-centric view that surprising findings in empirical data are the core experience that gives rise to new theory (Tavory and Timmermans 2019; Timmermans and Tavory 2022:31–46).

The Second Dogma of Empiricist Theorizing: Discovery Is Disconnected from Justification

There are tendencies in empiricist theorizing to emphasize the context of discovery at the expense of the context of justification. This distinction by Reichenbach between the way a theory is discovered and the way it is justified in a scientific context (Schiemann 2003) is Swedberg’s (2012) point of departure, and the distinction also frames a first theorizing anthology (Swedberg 2014b). According to Swedberg and authors who follow him on this point (Knorr Cetina 2014:30; Vedeler and Reimer 2023), traditional theory of science has focused almost exclusively on the context of justification—the parts of the research process that can be rationally reconstructed (Popper 1935)—but neglected the nonjustifiable, contingent circumstances of discovery that are still vital for the theorizing process. By simply inverting the alleged bias of the theory of science—now holding the nonjustifiable, the implicit, and the irrational in great esteem as a source of theory development—creativity in theory seems to originate from “alternative and nonformal ways of thinking” (Swedberg 2014a:24) that cannot be rationally justified (Knorr Cetina 2014). This does not imply a complete departure from rationality and scientific standards in theorizing, but the justification for theoretical ideas Swedberg mainly thinks about is ex post empirical justification: Swedberg (2012, 2014a, 2016a, 2017a, 2017b) recommends dividing projects into a prestudy phase and a main study phase, where the prestudy is primarily designed to discover novelty and the main study builds out the theory and tests its empirical validity. The possibility that a new theoretical conjecture might emerge through a process of rational deliberation falls largely outside the scope of theorizing thus conceived.

The Third Dogma of Empiricist Theorizing: Prior Theory Risks Conventionality

The third and most controversial assumption of empiricist theorizing is the view that prior theory is either of little help for theorizing or even hinders the creative development of new theory. For most empiricist theorizers, this may not be a prominently or even consciously held conviction but rather a side effect of the first dogma (data centrism). If empirical data are seen as the primary locus of theoretical creativity, it becomes tempting to disregard the role of prior theory in coming up with something new or interesting. Many authors seem hard-pressed to find a constructive role for prior theory in theorizing. In his book on theory building, Abend (2023) does not work with prior theories as wholes but only with their fragmentary remains—single words such as “culture” or “ethnicity” that drag with them connotations from different theoretical traditions. Already his influential 2008 article on the meanings of theory portrays engagement with the classics of social thought as a philological exercise, centered on reconstructing what difficult-to-comprehend authors intended with their “complex arguments” (Abend 2008:179). Of course, some people study Weber or Bourdieu with the sole ambition to learn what moved Weber or Bourdieu rather than society, but this is certainly not how the classics themselves studied their predecessors. Abbott, although at one point expressing skepticism about the usefulness of reading theory at all (Abbott and Karafillidis 2017), nevertheless concedes a role to deep or “meditative” reading in fostering creativity in theorizing. Yet he treats such reading less as a serious engagement with prior thought than as a mere stimulus for ideas that may bear little relation to the original argument (Abbott 2014:135–36). Neither approach rejects theory outright, but neither takes prior theory seriously as an attempt to say something about the social world that may still be important for us.

Swedberg, at least sometimes, seems to actively fight against the presumed stifling effect of prior theory on theoretical innovation. He valorizes building “one’s own” theory over engaging with the ideas of “others” (Swedberg 2014a:215), urging readers to “learn to develop theories for one’s own empirical work, not just someone else’s ideas” (Swedberg 2014b:2). Researchers are advised to avoid established terminology from the social science literature and instead find “a new name” (Swedberg 2016a:10), warning that if you “use the old name, there is a risk that the new phenomenon will slip through your hands” (Swedberg 2014a:56). Passages like these seem to echo the advice of classical grounded theory to “ignore the literature of theory and fact of the area under study, in order to assure that the emergence of categories will not be contaminated by concepts more suited to different areas” (Glaser and Strauss 1967:37). At other times, Swedberg (2014a:169–87, 2022) expresses a more generous stance to prior theory and theoretical traditions, emphasizing the importance of being familiar with the theoretical tradition and recognizing the possibility of combining established concepts or developing theory from them. However, he does not seem to see the systematic engagement with existing theory as a part of theorizing but rather as a prerequisite.

A natural consequence of the neglect of prior theory is the localization of creativity within the individual. Because the data do not theorize themselves and prior theory is deemed of little use, theory must somehow emanate from the minds of capable individuals. Every person is supposed to harbor an innate capacity for creativity that needs only to be liberated from the constraints of conventionality. Not only prior theory but also all forms of entrenched habits of thought are deemed problematic: Preconceptions, biases, and routinized patterns of perception bind us to familiar paths and inhibit the emergence of new conceptual possibilities. Individuals are invited to actively work against these tendencies by exploring their intuitions, mining their subconscious (Knorr Cetina 2014; Swedberg 2014a:243), or “rack[ing] their brain” (Weick 2014:178–82).

Theorizing Beyond Empiricism

Our ideal-typical characterization of empiricist theorizing selectively illuminates certain tendencies that are salient in the contemporary discussion about theorizing. The empiricist position is tempting to adopt because it delineates theorizing as a new area of study, sets it apart from the rationalist theory of science, and promises to make theoretical creativity accessible to everyone. Many contributions to the debate are empiricist in the sense they presuppose some form of the first dogma (data centrism), and others explicitly embrace the second (the separation of discovery and justification). The third dogma—the neglect of prior theory in favor of individual creativity—is the most controversial and is disputed even among theorizing scholars who stress that theory ought to be developed from data. According to Tavory and Timmermans (2012:181), experiences with half a century of grounded theory show that theoretically undirected, empiricist categorization does not lead to theoretical innovation. While expressing skepticism about “abstract” types of theory and suggesting that things that seem like “pure theory” actually “began in data surprises [italics added]” (Timmermans and Tavory 2022:43–44), their methodical recommendations are geared toward maximizing theoretically saturated interpretations of empirical cases (Tavory and Timmermans 2019; Timmermans and Tavory 2022). Abbott (2012), who apparently presupposes the first and second dogmas, criticizes an individualist conception of innovation on the grounds that creativity should be understood in relational terms as the ability to surprise a given paradigm community (see also Ignatow [2025] on “arbitrage” in sociological theory). Hammond (2018:3) criticizes Swedberg’s individualist account of creativity as “not very sociological,” and Emirbayer (2012:2) demands that the relation of scholars to their research community should be more prominent in theorizing, emphasizing the importance of the “self-insertion into an intellectual field.” Similarly, Reed and Zald (2014:87) emphasize that discovery and justification are deeply social, pointing to factors outside the individual that propel innovation, like the zeitgeist. And even if Swedberg’s recommended methodical procedure for theorizing is mostly shaped by a commitment to all three dogmas, he also acknowledges it can be useful to build on a theoretical tradition (see Swedberg 2014a:68–69, 184–86, 2022:19–20).

Yet the suggestive image of the creative individual who makes up theory from data is hard to replace. In an effort to escape the gravitational pull of empiricism, some researchers have sought to pluralize the notion of theorizing. They emphasize that sociology encompasses many types of theory beyond simple causal explanations of empirical data, suggest that important forms of theorizing remain excluded from an empiricist framework (Bertilsson 2016; Carleheden 2016; Krause 2016), and propose to broaden the concept of theorizing (Büttner 2024; Carleheden 2024; Schmitz and Schmidt-Wellenburg 2024). Indeed, merely looking at the plurality of theory strongly suggests that theorizing in its present form is too confined and is not yet a discourse about the full theoretical spectrum (Anicker and Armbruster 2024; Carleheden 2024; Farzin, Guggenheim, and Krause 2024; Krause 2023). However, it remains unclear how theorizing in these nonempiricist forms of theory construction is supposed to work. Most attempts to say how postempiricist theorizing could proceed are not on a comparable level of concreteness and practical applicability as the hands-on advice of empiricist theorizing (but see Brichzin 2026; Rachlitz 2026). Moreover, the tendency of these initiatives to emphasize the plurality of theoretical forms risks complicating and fragmenting the debate. Why should we assume that every particular kind of theory—social ontology, theory of society, differentiation theory, theory of social inequality, and so forth—must correspond to its own distinct mode of theorizing? To conclude that each type of theory requires a unique theorizing practice would be like believing that every new method in sociology warrants its own methods course or that teaching French demands an entirely different approach than teaching Spanish. Examining the plurality of sociological theories sharpens the sense that many of them are obviously not covered by empiricist principles (How should you come up with a theory of society just by looking at data?), but the underlying practice of theorizing cannot be easily deduced from these forms. This suggests the main way to broaden the discourse on theorizing should not be by pluralizing our understanding of theory but by explicating something more general: an alternative to the bottom-up, individualist, and nonrational view of theorizing, which is the ideal-typical shape of empiricist theorizing and which seems so much more clearly defined than any of its proposed counterparts.

I therefore propose an alternative to empiricist theorizing: “hermeneutic theorizing.” Hermeneutic theorizing will be marked by a decisive break with all the dogmas of empiricist theorizing. It does not necessarily begin with data, considers justification and critique central components of theory development, and emphasizes working with prior theory as a source of inspiration. Its main task is to sketch out the central role for the theoretical tradition as a creative force in the process of theory building. There are other sources of inspiration than data and other loci of creativity than the individual, and there is no need to oppose tradition and innovation.

The Counter-Dogmas of Hermeneutic Theorizing

There is a broadly shared understanding in hermeneutics that theory and research form a continuum rather than two separate domains (Alexander 1982:3). According to the hermeneutic view, there is no “outside” to interpretation. A hermeneutic critique of empiricism would, like Quine (1951:41), doubt that we can always tell the difference between “theoretical” and “empirical” statements, claiming these differ “in degree and not in kind.” Empirical “facts,” just like “theoretical abstractions,” are elements of interpretation (Gadamer 1960; George 2025). But if there are no “raw facts,” there is no “pure theory” either (see Rorty 2008; Sellars 1956). If we adopt this view, the apparently unquestionable thesis that we should look at empirical data to derive new theories loses its self-evidence. From the point of theorizing heuristics, it may sometimes be more fruitful to develop theories by modifying assumptions when confronted with interesting data. But at other times, it may be more beneficial to modify theoretical assumptions to better understand what kind of data would shed light on a theoretical problem. It is completely conceivable to make empirical progress by modifying abstract theoretical assumptions. All relevant theoretical modifications have empirical implications.

As a tradition of theory building, hermeneutics lacks an explicit methodological articulation. The know-how of hermeneutic theorizing remains largely implicit in the self-understanding of theorists who have made very different uses of the hermeneutic stance. The theorizing discourse is a welcome challenge to explicate this self-understanding by articulating it as clearly as possible. The easiest way into hermeneutic theorizing is to turn the assumptions of empiricist theorizing on their head.

The first empiricist assumption (theory needs to emerge from data) is countered in hermeneutic theorizing by asserting that innovative theory development can start anywhere on the theory–data continuum. Regarding the second (discovery is disconnected from justification), hermeneutic theorizing emphasizes the role of rational critique in discovering new ways of thinking. And its answer to the third empiricist assumption (“prior theory risks conventionality”) is to regard innovation and tradition as inseparably connected. The slightly reordered propositions of hermeneutic theorizing read like this: (1) Theory development may start anywhere on the theory–data continuum, (2) theoretical creativity is primarily an outcome of critical engagement with tradition, and (3) theorizing is intimately bound up with critique and justification.

Theory Development May Start Anywhere on the Theory–Data Continuum

Empiricist theorizers tend to presuppose that the spark of theoretical innovation comes from the data, not its interpretation. These scholars ultimately see theory development as data-driven rather than problem- or perspective-driven. An objection to this view, emphasizing the primacy of interpretation, has already been raised in the theorizing discourse (Carleheden 2016, 2019). Yet the implications of this thesis for the practice of theorizing need to be worked out more clearly. If data are a function of interpretation, it depends not only on the world but also on your interpretations whether the data are interesting or surprising. Theorizing should not be primarily about seeing different things (new data) but seeing things differently (new interpretations). If we consider what Goffman (1959) made of analyzing everyday interactions, what Austin (1962) and Habermas (1984) made of ordinary communication, what Garfinkel (1967) and Butler (1990) made of gendered behavior, or what Suchman (2009) made of using a photocopier—“data” that were there for everyone to see—we may get some idea about the transformative power of interpretation.

According to hermeneutic theorizing, this change of the theoretical perspective need not be data-induced. As Alexander (1987:5) remarks: “Theory cannot be built without facts, but it cannot be built only with them either.” We may extend this quote by saying that theory need not be built from facts either. Theorizing may start from finding data that contradict our expectations—but theory can also start from theoretical traditions, individual theories, or theoretical propositions that seem problematic to us. Of course, we should at some point always tie our theory to empirical research. But sometimes it is better not to start with the empirical material because only a deeper understanding of the theoretical problem directs us to the most interesting kind of empirical data to study.

Embeddedness in Theoretical Traditions as a Prerequisite of Creative Theorizing

In a discourse that grew accustomed to opposing tradition to creativity, the most important move for hermeneutic theorizing is to reverse the negative image of the theoretical tradition. This requires taking the theoretical tradition in some sense as contemporary with us, not as a mere collection of surpassed thought. Instead of turning to “your own thoughts” about any phenomenon, the first realization that hermeneutic theorizers need to make is that their own thoughts are most likely not their own. Scholars already move in a tradition and inherit most of what they think and consider true from its previous development. This holds even if it is a tradition that denies its historical dimension—positivism has a history, too (Habermas 1971). This view of the role of tradition is the basis of our second counterclaim: Theoretical creativity is primarily an outcome of critical engagement with tradition. In hermeneutic theorizing, the theoretical tradition is not something scholars need to get rid of to free their minds but the most valuable resource to think more interesting thoughts. Turner (2014:147) articulated this nicely by claiming that “one’s capacity to make explicit theory depends in large part on what one knows, what one has available to make mental associations with, what is tacitly there to work with.” On this view, aptitude in theoretical traditions is a condition, not a hindrance, to theoretical creativity.

The hermeneutic relation to the theoretical tradition cannot be understood without at least a brief reference to the Hegelian dialectics that was so influential in the mobilization of theoretical thought. Hegel’s ([1807] 1989) way of looking at the history of ideas turns the past into a reservoir of learning processes that can be retraced to understand why we believe what we believe. After Hegel, the hermeneutic tradition largely abandoned the idea that history unfolds through a necessary learning process, and the Nietzschean and Heideggerian genealogies turned this idea on its head, portraying the present as resulting from a process of accumulating errors and contingencies. Yet the master idea that the present is to be understood as the result of a Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effect; Gadamer 1960) ¹ remains the guiding thread through the hermeneutic tradition. Present ideas, including one’s own, ought to be understood as outcomes of the developing historical conditions that made them possible. On the hermeneutic view, to continue a tradition does not mean to mechanically repeat old habits of thought or action but to transcend the past by adapting it in the present toward the future.

Different scholars with very different thinking styles have been influenced by this hermeneutic self-understanding. The generation that gave us modern classics like Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and Bourdieu had a very firm understanding that they are based in a tradition of thought, and they saw a great part of their intellectual task in critically confronting this tradition. This is true for Habermas’s (2004) reconstructive continuation of the discourse of modernity, Foucault’s (1970) archeological uprooting of the episteme of the humanities, Bourdieu’s (2000) auto-analysis of the formative conditions of his own habitus, and Luhmann’s (1993) ironic but intimate relationship to the ideas of “old Europe”; it is even true for postcolonial thinkers who carefully dissect the Western tradition for the hidden traces of symbolic violence and exclusion against the non-Western other (Said 1977; Steinmetz 2013). This emphasis on the liberating effect of seeing through the traditions that made us who we are unites the sociological heirs of Hegel, like Habermas or Adorno, and the heirs of Nietzsche, like Foucault.

Yet the mere awareness of intellectual traditions and the vague idea that we should somehow wrestle with them is insufficient from a theorizing perspective. Why should we assume that engagement with tradition can lead to creativity rather than a reiteration of the same old ideas? Orienting to tradition can lead to conformism instead of innovation. Everyone knows scholars who get lost in the intricacies of historicist reconstructions of classical authors without ever emerging to confront the present. We need to specify a certain type of active relation to prior theory that leads to creativity rather than a mechanical repetition of known thought. How do we get from tradition to thoughts that were not in a straightforward way contained in it? To answer this question, we need to consider the role of critique and justification in interpretation.

Turning to the Context of Justification

We now turn to the third claim of hermeneutic theorizing: Theorizing is intimately bound up with justification and critique. This goes against the intuition in the theorizing discourse that theorizing is an art-like kind of thing that does not come down to rational processes. Reichenbach and Popper are blamed for directing all attention to the context of justification (“the logic of science”) and thereby making the creative, less logical process of discovery invisible (Swedberg 2014b). However, this is already not true for Popper (1995) himself, who wrote almost a whole book about the process of discovery. Although Popper is frequently misread as a positivist, he actually comes very close to a hermeneutic view on theory discovery and its relation to justification, which is worth remembering in our context.

Popper (1995:147) has a word for theorizing that is disconnected from tradition: He calls the belief that theoretical achievements emanate from inner states of a subject “epistemological expressivism”—and he is not particularly fond of it. He thinks it is mistaken to locate creativity inside the human (be it the mind, the body, the subconscious, or whatever). Instead, Popper (1995:147–50, 153–90) assumes the creations of the human mind exist quite independently from subjective experience in a “third world” of objective culture that is distinct from the mere physical world and the world of subjectivity. Along with language, music, and art, this third world also contains scientific theories, the problems they address, and standards of justification. According to Popper’s (1995:147) conception, the theorizing process needs constant “development aid” from the third world: Everything depends on the constant exchange between human beings and their creations, “the give-and-take between ourselves and our work; . . . and upon that constant feed-back that can be amplified by conscious self-criticism.”

Popper (1935:5) indeed thought that no clear logic to scientific discovery could be epistemologically reconstructed, but he clearly believed in a learnable practice of transcending the common sense of a discipline. Popper’s (1995:148) thesis is that this practice of scientific discovery is hugely indebted to the third world at every step but especially for being innovative: “The process of learning, . . . is always fundamentally the same. It is imaginative criticism.” Imaginative criticism, as recommended by Popper, is a practical way to bridge both contexts. It is therefore misleading to conceive of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification as clearly separated spheres. On the hermeneutic view, discovery is inconceivable without critique and justification. Indeed, recognition of findings as “new” is not the business of individual researchers. That an idea appears new does not constitute evidence of its actual novelty. “Novelty” is not an absolute term; it is always relative to a given discipline and theoretical tradition, and it needs to be argued for. This means we have to turn the problematic distinction on its head: Novelty is not discovered in the context of discovery but in the context of justification. In what follows, I attempt to articulate more clearly what a hermeneutic concept of theorizing entails that sees critique as the most important driving force of creative theory development. The goal will be to arrive at a conception of hermeneutic theorizing that is on a comparable level of concreteness and helpfulness as the already existing empiricist framework.

Critical-Hermeneutic Theorizing: A Methodical Synthesis

In the following, I try to provide a condensed view of hermeneutic theorizing by explicating two methodical master ideas that guide it: first, the idea that theories ought to be interpreted as answers to questions and second, an understanding of critique as “determinate negation.” Both ideas mutually support and enhance each other. I first explicate both ideas separately and then show how they can be combined to form a method of hermeneutic theorizing.

Theories as Answers to Questions: A Problem-Based View

There is a surprisingly widely shared way of using prior theories productively for theory construction. It is based on the view that theories can be understood as answers to questions or, slightly more adapted to the scientific context, as solutions to problems. This problem-based mode of understanding theory needs to be sharply distinguished from a person-centered understanding. If we try to understand what Durkheim, Marx, or Du Bois meant to say by reassembling what they may have thought at the moment of writing and explain the content of their theories by exploring their cultural background, we suspend questions of validity, and those theories become effectively lost to our own theoretical thinking (see Lizardo and Abrutyn 2021:6; Luhmann 1983:988). The alternative approach is to understand theories as responses to enduring, objective problems within the discipline that may still resonate today. In hermeneutic theorizing, “the classics” are not historical figures or venerated texts but serve as a shorthand for constellations of problems and foundational theoretical concepts. As long as we are interested in their questions, we may learn from examining their answers and agreeing or disagreeing with them.

This problem-solution or question-answer concept of understanding theory was once widely shared in the theory of science (Gieryn 1978; Laudan 1978; Popper 1952; Toulmin 1972) and among social scientists. Weber (1922:166) believed the subject matter of any science is not constituted by the thematic relations of its objects but by the logical relations of its problems. A problem-centered understanding of theory is a common denominator between Parsons, who assembled Weber, Durkheim, Marshall, and Pareto as competing or complementary answers to the problem of social order (Parsons 1937), and one of his sharpest critics, Wrong (1961:183), who claims that “Social Theory must be seen primarily as a set of answers to questions we ask of social reality.”

From a theorizing perspective, this talk about theories as answers to problems should be taken literally: It is methodical advice on how to understand theory. In interpreting theory, it is helpful to formulate the problem the theories try to solve and to hold the text constantly accountable to the problem. The relationship between theories and their problems is circular (indeed, it is a special version of the “hermeneutic circle” of question and answer; see Gadamer 1975:352ff). According to Parsons (1937:9): “Theory not only formulates what we know but also tells us what we want to know, that is, the questions to which an answer is needed.” We understand theories by understanding their purpose: the problem they are supposed to solve. Yet theoretical problems are only accessible through the interpretation of theories. This circle is not vicious but productive: Understanding theory is the mutual refinement of our preliminary understanding of its core problem and its proposed solution.

Problems can usually be expressed in the form of a question. Every real question allows for multiple answers and thereby creates space for alternatives. For example, we may understand Weber’s Protestant ethic as an answer to the question, “In what way have Protestant sects enabled the development of capitalist structures and a materialist mindset?” This is quite a unique problem that helps us understand the specifics of Weber’s theory. But one could also see the study as a contribution to the more general questions: “How did capitalism evolve?” or “What is the relation of religious values and material interests?” or even more generally, “What is the relation of culture and social structure?” ² The level of abstraction of the problem is not given but can be varied to pursue different goals. We understand a theory most fully by specifying its problem as precisely as possible, yet we open it to alternatives by generalizing the problem. Problem generalization allows for comparing social theories to each other and for making them speak “to the same point”—and it also increases the likelihood they speak to us and the issues we currently grapple with. The decomposition of theories into question-answer dyads thus allows, in a simple and quite technical way, for the controlled internal abstraction from a theory.

For hermeneutic theorizing, the synthesizing of theories into strands that share a problem is extremely valuable because it helps us find common threads in the yarn ball of social theory and sharpens our sense for alternatives. It is also invaluable for critique, the “mother’s milk” of new theory (Turner 2014:144). Problems stand in an intricate relationship to critical standards of theory assessment. This stance is especially helpful in heterogeneous disciplines like sociology, where criteria for theory assessment do not generalize well. It is always possible to ask: “Does this theory really solve the problem it purports to solve?” A critique on this basis can hardly be discarded as irrelevant. But the scheme is also useful beyond internal criticism. Awareness of the difference between problem and solution allows us to disagree more precisely with prior theory by directing criticism either at the question it asks or at the assumptions it makes.

Critique: The Art of Saying No

Scholastic theorists have only interpreted their discipline’s history in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Interpreting prior theory according to the schema of problem and solution puts theorists in a good position, but it is not yet enough for arriving at new theoretical insights. Novelty requires difference, and this difference is a product of critique, or “negation,” as Hegel put it. Hegel’s insight into the productivity of negation is still helpful today in articulating the notion of hermeneutic theorizing. Hegel ([1807] 1977) understands the whole history of Geist as a process of the self-realization of knowledge through (self-)critique. One key concept to describe this process is “determinate negation,” which is distinguished from empty or mere negation. Empty negation is a way of saying “no” to a theory or to a theoretical tradition that rejects it outright. A sociologist may find a disagreeable passage in Weber or Durkheim and say: “Well, as this theory is obviously wrong (or cannot account for phenomenon X, or conflicts with moral value Y), I’m done with it.” Such a response exemplifies what Hegel ([1807] 1977:pp. 50–51) calls an empty negation—a mode of critique that yields nothing beyond the bare recognition that an idea is false. Hegel ([1807] 1989:56) characterizes empty negation as eitel, a term that in German means both “futile” and “vain.” It is futile because if all one takes from critique is the judgment that something is “plain wrong,” one is left with nothing to build on. It is vain because the act of negation becomes an occasion for self-congratulation; the achievement of critique is attributed to the critic rather than to the object under examination. Determinate negation, in contrast, understands the insight into the untenability of a concept of an object as revealing something true about the object. Finding out what something is not helps us draw more exact boundaries around a concept and make it more determinate. Negativity and determination are two sides of the same coin for the Hegelian way of thinking (Pippin 2020:12). This makes an understanding of our errors vital for finding a better view. In rejecting assumptions we once took seriously, we learn not only that reality is different from what we assumed—we also learn how the wrong assumption is part of how reality appears to us. Error contains “a path to the truth” (Brandom 2019:98). ³ The prior, mistaken belief about the object becomes a part of the history of finding out how things really are. Error and critique become productive forces that push us forward to new views of a topic.

Whereas Hegel thinks that new, more appropriate views of understanding emerge directly from the experience of error and from resolving the contradictions of a prior view, we should be more cautious and only commit to the thesis that seeing some theory fail due to specific reasons is an excellent condition for coming up with a new theory that does not suffer from this problem. Kuhn ([1962] 1970) emphasizes that one of the most appealing qualities of a new paradigm in science is to explain why the old paradigm led to wrong expectations (anomalies). Without a keen eye for prior theories’ anomalies, there would be little motivation and also little direction for the development of a new paradigm. To take a famous example from the history of science, for Johannes Kepler, the negative realization that the planets’ motions could not be mapped as perfect circles led to his exploration of the (limited) search space of alternative geometric figures that could be used to describe the movements of planets (Boccaletti 2001). After rejecting the circle, the ellipse is just around the corner.

Thus, the “intellectual genealogy of the present” (Turner 2014:148) is a vital resource for theorizing. The realization that a particular belief or category is flawed already indicates a direction for developing a revised and superior theory. For example, convincing yourself that the tradition of sociological theory is problematic due to an overreliance on European, male, White, bourgeois voices can be a reason to deny its contemporary relevance, leave it behind, and start all over (empty negation)—but this critical insight could also be half of your job description as a theorist. A determinate negation would require working out precisely which inherited assumptions and concepts in sociological theory carry Eurocentric or bourgeois biases and thinking hard about concepts that determinately negate them—keeping their insights while getting rid of their flaws. On the hermeneutic view, one comes up with something new not by blocking out prior theory and everything that has been said about a phenomenon (empty negation) or trying to talk to oneself in the private language of the subconscious but by critically engaging with a scientific tradition—by seeing whether, how, and why some of its aspects or broad tenets that shaped much of its history are no longer tenable in our current situation.

The Method of Hermeneutic Theorizing: Transformative and Radical Theory Development

The two schemes—the interpretation of theories as dyads of problems and solutions and critique as determinate negation—are not only compatible but also mutually enhancing. Hermeneutic interpretation of a text means to do everything in one’s power to, in Gadamer’s (1975:253, my translation) words, let the text “say something to you.” Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting a text to maximize its chances to be an adequate answer to a problem—not only for the time when the text was written but also to us now. Only if we take a text seriously enough to be disappointed when the application of its insights fails will we have the productive force of negation on our side. A deep hermeneutic interpretation of a scientific tradition supercharges our ability to be fruitfully disappointed.

When we combine the concept of determinate negation with the understanding of theories as answers to questions, we arrive at two distinct forms of critique: Determinate negation may be directed against a theory’s content (the theoretical assumptions and concepts used to articulate them) or its problem (the question it addresses). The first variant leads to a “reformist” type of critique and theory development and the second to a more radical form of critique that is not so much directed against a theory’s conceptual assumptions but against the premises that legitimize the theoretical enterprise in the first place. The first form is “transformative critique”; it arises from negating some of the theoretical assumptions. The second form of critique, “radical critique,” is a negation not only of prior theories’ concepts or assumptions but also of their orienting problems—the goals theory is supposed to solve. The two types of critique simply derive from the combination of the question-answer concept of theories and determinate negation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Transformative and radical critique.

Both types of critique have been indispensable in the history of social theory. Virtually every major theorist uses both in the process of confronting the intellectual traditions they engage in, but many scholars lean more to one form than the other. Prominent examples of transformative criticisms are provided by Parsons and Habermas, who explicitly understood themselves as being engaged in theory development as transcending prior theories’ questions and answers (Anicker 2025). ⁴ Also, empirically oriented criticisms of theory usually follow the strategy of transformative critique. To show that a theory’s empirical expectations are false, the interpreter needs to buy into both the orienting problem of a theory and its conceptual apparatus to make observations that can be problematic for a theory by its own standards. Negative case methodology (Emigh 1997), theorizing from neglected cases (Krause 2023), and the strategy of contrastive casing (Tavory and Timmermans 2014) all recommend this procedure of transformative critique to arrive at a criticism of a theory. If the critique is successful, it may help “identify changed circumstances, additional dimensions, or misguided preconceptions” (Tavory and Timmermans 2012:179). This procedure usually leads to an extension or revision of theory, not a complete shift in theoretical orientation.

But even negating the problem—that is, what prior theories considered worth knowing and asking about—can be used productively to propel one’s thinking forward. A critique of problems rather than theoretical assumptions allows for a more radical “no” to tradition while still keeping some contact with it. In many cases, radical critique does not engage deeply with prior theory on a conceptual level because the negation of its problem can make the theory’s conceptual apparatus appear obsolete (see Bourdieu’s superficial treatment of “subjectivist” sociology analyzed in the last section). Foucault’s (1970) genealogical approach to the history of thought is paradigmatic of a radical form of critique that negates both prior theory and the problems they address. Genealogies problematize the conditions that make it plausible to ask questions; they help gain critical distance from the epistemic and social conditions that render a particular discourse intelligible and authoritative. This can be immensely useful for theorizing, as was realized by subsequent scholars who built on Foucault’s approach to describe “problematization” as a theorizing and research strategy (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011; Deacon 2000). A certain intellectual tradition is analyzed not to immerse oneself in it but to see more clearly how it works, what it would mean to reject not only some of its assumptions but also its understanding of the goals of theory, and thus probing “whether there may be value in resignifying our forms of understanding in alternative yet coherent ways” (Cornelissen et al. 2021:10).

We can decompose both types of hermeneutic theory development in the form of quite simple methodical steps. Such a schematic representation has the advantage of delivering a clear recipe for critical-hermeneutic theorizing, but it needs a disclaimer: Almost everything depends on the adequacy of the interpretation and the justifiability of the critique. The methodical rules cannot be followed mechanically to arrive at theoretical innovation but serve as a heuristic.

The first step is interpretation. Interpret an existing theory (or a set of prior theories) as a solution to a problem. You need hermeneutic goodwill: Try to interpret the theory so it is an optimal solution to a problem and refine your understanding of both problem and solution as much as possible to understand the theory by its own light and as objectively adequate for its purpose.

The second step is critique as determinate negation. Think with the theory about some problem and see where it breaks down. This breakdown can occur around the problem the theory is explicitly addressing or a problem that interests you. There are multiple ways to try to find the limits of the theory in its current form.

Types of transformative critique include the following: (a) Negate empirical expectations. Find facts or problematic cases that seem to contradict the theory’s expectations and ask: What aspects of the theory are responsible for forcing me to misconstrue this case—and could they be changed in a way that would lead to a more adequate conception of empirical reality? (b) Negate the theory’s conceptual content. Analyze the history of the concepts a theory uses and the justification given for using certain concepts. Does it stand up to scrutiny? Which alternatives were left behind? (c) Negate the problem scope. Consider the problem the theory addresses: Could the theory be understood as an answer to a more general or a more specific question? What would you need to change in the theory to adjust the scope of the problem? Radical critique leads us to negate the problem. Think about the adequacy of the theory’s problem: Is this the right question to ask? If you want to challenge the problem, investigate its genealogical history and uncover its epistemic interest and the prior assumptions that are presupposed in its formulation.

The third step is theory development. Whatever type of critique you use, it will orient your theorizing. Try to find out what you implicitly said “yes” to when you negated a certain theoretical proposition or the theoretical guiding problem. For theory development, you need to come up with modifications to the theory or to the problem that would answer your criticism satisfactorily. You may return to the first step and critically examine whether your innovation stands up to scrutiny.

The purpose of the heuristic is to use prior theories and intellectual traditions as a resource rather than a restriction on thought. Thinking possibilities do not grow only out of the ideas we accepted but also of those we rejected. Sociological theory and theorizing should be about engaging with existing theories and the theoretical discourse of the present—not to mechanically repeat the pronouncements of “classical” theorists but to learn to think unlike them. The stance toward prior theory advocated here is to treat it more like a piñata than a sacred object: Beat it to get something out of it.

Hermeneutic Theorizing as an Empirical-Theoretical Omnivore: Theorizing and Criticizing on Different Levels

The technique of thinking with a theory about a problem and developing it from experiences of fruitful disappointment through determinate negation is not limited in scope. It can guide theory building anywhere on the theory–data continuum: Deriving empirical expectations from theories that do not accord with reality, demonstrating that a theory contains residual categories, or showing that a theory produces contradictory statements at a higher level of abstraction that call for resolution—these and more are legitimate departures for theorizing. Residual categories—that is, categories that are not easily derived from the systematic core of a theoretical program but that theoreticians believe they need to include to respond to the “nagging worries” of having “ignored some crucial point” (Alexander 1987:16)—might be especially interesting because they simultaneously point to the theoretical and the empirical limits of a theory. In such cases, there is something the theory recognizes it ought to address but is reluctant to confront. By pulling at these residual categories, one can unravel a theory’s main distinctions and find new ways of disagreeing with it, for example, by making things central that previously lay at the periphery. Mauss (1973) deliberately created residual categories for his own theory building, collecting phenomena that were not easy to classify in a “miscellaneous” category—one of which helped him come up with the notion of “habitus.” Likewise, collecting data after thinking about theoretically relevant problems can be much more fruitful for theory building because we get to pick the data that are relevant to us, and we may ask questions of it we had not thought about before. For example, Garfinkel’s (1967) highly original studies in ethnomethodology would have been inconceivable without his critical reading of Schütz. Only with a sharpened eye for the manifold presuppositions of “normal” courses of action was it possible to systematically test what happens when these are infringed.

Critique, regardless of whether empirical or theoretical, ultimately needs to be justified to the scientific community one wishes to address. In hermeneutic theorizing, the basic form of critique remains the same across the theory–data spectrum—it is always about the capacity of a theory to really pose the right questions and to provide the right answers. Yet the criteria for justifying this critique need to be contextually adapted. In rather loosely integrated disciplines like sociology (Abbott 2006), the standards that can be mobilized for critique vary between different subcommunities (Becher and Trowler 2001; Toulmin 1972:231; Whitley 1984). But even in pluralistic disciplines, some problems have clear methodical standards to measure theoretical performance against (e.g., refutations of a theory’s causal hypotheses in quantitative sociology). Nevertheless, finding the right standards to appeal to when criticizing a theory is a hermeneutic effort. In many cases, in a diverse discipline like sociology, there will be no hard and fast criteria for establishing the validity of critique. Theorizing through determinate negation may require convincing readers of the relevance of the problem, the criteria for critique, and the epistemic goals to which these hark back. One methodical advantage of hermeneutic theorizing under these difficult circumstances is that it establishes an internal relationship between innovation and justification. The most elegant solution to the problem of justifying critique is to criticize a theory on its own grounds, in light of goals it itself deems valuable (e.g., “Marx’s economic determinism conflicts with his theory of the revolution”). Another possibility is to criticize theories for failing to deal with a problem they should address given the centrality of the problem for the discipline (e.g., “Neoinstitutionalism cannot explain social change”). The following case study shows how Bourdieu used this technique when developing his theory of practice.

Case Study: Bourdieu’s Radical Critique of Subjectivist and Objectivist Social Theory

The discourse on theorizing purports to explicate methods and strategies of how to theorize, but it rarely backs these claims up with an actual analysis of the theoretical practice of recognized theorists (Ignatow 2025). Even though this article does not allow a deeper dive into the practice of hermeneutic theorizing, I show that its tools are actually used in groundbreaking theory developments. It would probably be easy to show the effectiveness of a hermeneutic self-understanding and methods in figures such as Habermas, Parsons, Foucault, or Derrida, who, in very different ways, explicitly considered their own work a critical engagement with theoretical traditions. I pick a slightly more challenging case: Bourdieu’s development of his theory of social practice.

Bourdieu made a point of describing his methods of theory development in a way that clearly set it apart from what he dubbed “theoretical theory” or “scholastic” ways of doing theory. He aimed to present himself as a “hands-on” researcher-theorist who gets his impetus from careful empirical analysis but who also holds some distance from “positivist” research (Bourdieu 1990, 1999; Bourdieu, Passeron, and de Saint Martin 1996). In a recent analysis of Bourdieu’s theorizing practice, Heilbron (2011) mostly followed this preferred self-characterization, but he also showed that Bourdieu was deeply concerned with theoretical and metatheoretical questions. As early as 1968, Bourdieu was interested in a “theory of sociological theory” and called for a metatheoretical reflection not only to achieve an “adequate understanding of objectivist and subjectivist theories but also for defining an alternative theoretical program” (Heilbron 2011:197). One could follow Bourdieu’s preferred self-description and understand his theory development as a result of empirical research, but it is equally possible to describe core concepts of his theory as a synthesis of theoretical traditions (Sapiro 2015) and his theory development as strongly indebted to his Marxist teachers, especially Althusser (Steinmetz 2011). I show that the way he develops his perspective by setting it apart from prior tradition closely conforms to the schema of hermeneutic theorizing—more precisely, the schema of radical, problem-directed critique of two theoretical traditions.

In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu (1977) portrays the theoretical landscape of his time as divided into two camps: subjectivism and objectivism. This broad-brush depiction identifies phenomenological approaches (often labeled subjectivist) on the one side and objectivist approaches on the other (p. 3). Bourdieu does not understand these traditions in terms of their theoretical assumptions (solutions) but by characterizing their epistemic goals and their theoretical questions. Both traditions are defined by a specific type of problem and by the presuppositions that are the grounds of posing these questions. He describes the problem of phenomenological approaches as trying to “make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social world,” whereas objectivist knowledge is oriented to the problem of constructing “the objective relations (e.g., economic or linguistic) which structure practice and representations of practice” (p. 3). Bourdieu cites ethnomethodology and interactionism as examples of subjectivist perspectives and anthropological structuralism and structuralist linguistics as examples of objectivist approaches.

Bourdieu engages little with subjectivist approaches, treating them mostly in terms of their supposed shortcomings; objectivist approaches constitute the main tradition from which he seeks to develop his own theory. This becomes clear from the way he connects the two traditions. He claims that objectivist approaches ask for the “conditions of possibility” of practical knowledge and that it can be understood as a break with (or a negation of) subjectivist theory. In this view, objectivist approaches break with subjectivism’s “unquestioning apprehension of the social world which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its own possibility” (Bourdieu 1977:3). Whereas Bourdieu thinks it is a latent presupposition of subjectivist/phenomenological theory that the social world is of the actor’s own making, ⁵ objectivism presupposes that a complete break with this practical knowledge is possible and desirable. So, objectivism is supposed to arise from a negation of an unquestioned presupposition in subjectivism: Objectivism negates the validity of practical knowledge that subjectivism presupposes. The rupture with this assumption by objectivism is so radical, however, that it disregards practical knowledge entirely—it is an empty negation of practical knowledge that learns nothing from explications of the subjective experience of acting. Because objectivism eliminates practical knowledge, it is condemned to see action as a mere “execution of a model” (Bourdieu 1973:63; for a critical assessment see Lizardo 2010). This empty negation, according to Bourdieu (1977:4), leaves a hole in the objectivist account of social reality, precisely because it lacks an account for the role of practical knowledge:

Because it produces its science of the social world against the implicit presuppositions of practical knowledge of the social world, objectivist knowledge is diverted from construction of the theory of practical knowledge of the social world, of which it at least produces the lack.

Figure 2 depicts Bourdieu’s resulting view of the two traditions in terms of their orienting problems and their relations.

Figure 2.

Bourdieu’s setting up of two traditions.

Bourdieu’s theory development arises quite naturally from this way of setting up the theoretical situation. Bourdieu generates the problem of his theory of practice by recursively asking of both forms of knowledge what they silently presuppose (“conditions of their possibility”). Objectivist knowledge, according to Bourdieu, arises from a kind of epistemological rupture (see Bachelard 2002) with the naïve presupposition of subjectivist theories (i.e., that the social world is indeed as it appears to its participants). Bourdieu attributes to objectivism an analogous excluded presupposition: that objectivist analysis depends on a break with practical experience and that it must suppress or disregard practical knowledge.

In a more elaborate presentation of the theory of practice from 1973 (which is closer to the French original of the Outline), Bourdieu (1973:54) describes the movement that brings him from this theoretical point of departure to his own theory as a double “translation”:

[The praxeological form of knowledge] is the product of a double theoretical movement of translation: . . . Just as objectivist knowledge poses the problem of the conditions of possibility of practical experience, thereby demonstrating that this experience is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it does not pose this problem, so praxeological knowledge sets objectivist knowledge on its feet by posing the problem of the conditions of possibility of this problem (theoretical, but also social conditions) and, at the same time, makes it apparent that objectivist knowledge is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it excludes this problem.

Bourdieu breaks with the objectivist break with practical experience. This translation is “double” because it is a negation of the objectivist negation. He diagnoses a similar failure of objectivism and subjectivism: an inability to reflect on the (social) conditions that make them possible. According to Bourdieu (1973:56), objectivist anthropological science has an inherent tendency to project formal rules into the heads of actors because this is its own modus operandi. His ensuing empirical criticism of objectivism is that its empty negation of practical knowledge has led it to reify objective structural concepts, ascribing to them “some mysterious cerebral and social mechanism,” which have nothing to do with the lived experience of acting subjects and therefore “slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model” (p. 62). He accuses objectivists of “placing in the consciousness of individual agents the theoretical knowledge which can only be constructed and conquered against practical experience” (p. 63). His empirical criticism of subjectivism is that phenomenological approaches treat all order as spontaneously resulting from situational factors (p. 72).

If Bourdieu had distinguished the senses of determinate and empty negation, he could have described his theory development as a substitution of objectivism’s empty negation of subjectivist knowledge with a determinate negation. The orienting question of the theory of practice just is the question of how to simultaneously say “no” to phenomenological reconstructions of practical experience and to objectivist models of social regularities in a way that preserves what is right about the two traditions. Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a search for a model that explains the reproduction of social regularities through actions that are subjectively experienced as free and spontaneous. With the tools of hermeneutic theorizing, we can see that Bourdieu arrives at his theoretical problem by determinately negating the latent presuppositions of objectivist and subjectivist knowledge. Figure 3 depicts the resulting self-positioning of his theory.

Figure 3.

Emergence of the theory of practice from determinate negation.

It should be easy to see now that Bourdieu’s theory development can be reconstructed as a radical critique of subjectivism and objectivism in the precise sense that we gave this term in the previous section. Bourdieu reconstructs the traditions he wants to wrestle with in terms of the problem-solution schema. He relates these two traditions by relating their questions to each other; claiming that objectivism arises from asking for the conditions of possibility of practical experience. For his own theory development, Bourdieu negates the presuppositions of both traditions. But it is a determinate negation that tries to keep what is right about both perspectives—and we saw that his issue with objectivism was precisely that it only provided an empty negation of subjectivist theory. Bourdieu’s theoretical argument is both implicitly and explicitly structured by hermeneutic techniques of theory development.

Conclusions

The goal of the theorizing discourse is to make social theory easier to learn and teach and to make theory more relevant as an element of research. Empiricist approaches to theorizing have contributed to this goal by tying sociological theory more closely to the empirical concerns of the discipline, thereby strengthening sociological theory’s place in research. However, although empiricist theorizing has successfully countered the image of theory as an antiquarian exercise, it has often done so at the cost of marginalizing the importance of prior theoretical work. Hermeneutic theorizing determinately negates the latent assumptions of empiricist theorizing to arrive at a different understanding. The basic tenets of hermeneutic theorizing are that theorizing can proceed from anywhere on the theory–data continuum, theoretical traditions are vital sources of theoretical creativity, and rational critique of the adequacy of theories is the most important driver for propelling theoretical thought forward.

Sociological theorizing, on this account, is not “staring at data”—it requires wrestling with the theoretical assumptions, presuppositions, and epistemic interests that set the stage for empirical questions in sociology. Advising emerging scholars to disengage from the theoretical discourse in favor of data-centered thinking is like kicking away the ladder needed to climb to think more interesting thoughts. The right way to do it, if we trust Wittgenstein (2001) on this, is to climb it first and kick it away afterward. Saying “no” to tradition is much more forceful if it is a determinate negation instead of an empty rejection. Creatively disagreeing with prior theory is the most important impetus of theorizing from the hermeneutic point of view.

The two most important theoretical techniques to reach this creative disagreement are problem-based reconstruction and determinate negation. In combination, they give rise to transformative or radical critique. Both forms of critique require taking prior theory seriously by interpreting it, in a first step, as a valid answer to a question that is still relevant for us. Understanding prior theory is not about understanding what its author meant but understanding how it validly answers questions that speak to our concerns. In this way, we can learn enough from adopting a certain theoretical perspective to be fruitfully disappointed when it fails. Only in the second step do we criticize the theory, trying to find out in the most exact way possible why the questions a certain theory poses or the assumptions it makes seem inadequate to the matter at hand. A critique that negates a theory’s questions will usually lead to a more radical break than a critique that negates some of its assumptions. The third step, the theoretical innovation, benefits enormously from a precise critique of prior theory because determinate negation of the problematic assumptions is the best guide we can get into our own thinking.

This article is itself an exercise in hermeneutic theorizing. It could not have been written without deeply engaging with prior concepts of theorizing, understanding the importance of switching from theory to theorizing, criticizing it by negating its problematic presuppositions, and trying to see what is on the other side. It is important to see this is a determinate negation that remains indebted to what it ultimately rejects. Illuminating empirical questions and making sense of empirical data continue to play a crucial role in hermeneutic theorizing. Hermeneutic theorizing points beyond the false alternatives of either revering or rejecting tradition, either dealing with facts or with interpretations, opening a path to theorize about the empirical world from prior theory rather than without it.