Explanation or Understanding: Language and Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Chapter 3 addresses the topic of law and interdisciplinarity and the question of the meaning of the “and” in Law and Literature and Law and the Humanities. It discusses the Erklären-Verstehen controversy in the scientific and hermeneutic debate of the late nineteenth century on whether the explanatory model of the natural sciences or the methodology based on understanding text and human action of the humanities should be taken as the litmus test for what is to be called “scientific knowledge”. This debate remains important both for contemporary discussions on the academic status of law as a discipline and for interdisciplinarity as such. This chapter also draws attention to the Wittgensteinian idea of the limits of language in their consequences in relation to the concepts of determinism and free will in legal surroundings.