Meaning, understanding, and interpretation
Speaking meaningfully about meaning, or trying to understand understanding, is a tricky thing to do. As one review of the different ways in which meaning has been discussed in social work discourse illustrates (see Furman et al. 2014), there is a tendency to jump to the âbigâ question of what meaning is: what gives my life meaning? What is the meaning of social work as a profession? But these questions already assume we know what âmeaningâ means in itself. Likewise, research in psychology can inform us of the cognitive processes that lead to âunderstandingâ; but only under an assumed sense of what âunderstandingâ is. The more fundamental question is a hermeneutic one: how do we arrive at these parameters of âmeaningfulnessâ in the first place? What are the conditions for us to understand meaning at all? These questions are core to the philosophy of interpretation.
If these appear as abstract questions, it is worth considering how interpretation underlies some of the most basic of tensions within practical contexts. For example, in 2014, Peter Fahy, the chief constable of the Greater Manchester police force, called for the police to have the right to access the medical records of those vulnerable people they worked with. Fahy argued that this âwould give us a deeper understanding of those we are expected to help and their problemsâ.1 Access to information â medical history of individuals, the conditions they had, their next of kin â would help to improve the service that the police offered. There are several points of contention within this claim, many of which Fahy was clearly hoping to open a discussion on: the changing role of the police in the community, the way that other professions such as social workers approached confidentiality, and so on. But while all of these are worth discussion, there is a more fundamental problem with his call, which centres on the relationship between âinformationâ, âunderstandingâ and âmeaningâ. As mental health professionals were quick to point out in response to Fahy, simply possessing the information that an individual has a condition, or has a history of violence, or has been resident in care, does not equate to understanding what these terms mean. It is no use somebody knowing that an individual has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, if they hold only negative perceptions of what that entails. It is no use somebody knowing that an individual has been in care, if this information then becomes some kind of overriding faux-scientific causal explanation for every action they perform. The word âstigmaâ, it is worth remembering, comes from the Greek word for âmarkâ or âsignâ. The kind of information that Fahy asked for was, effectively, just that: literal signs or marks by which to identify individual bodies. What was lacking in the call for access to service user records was a sense of how meaning emerges, not from such signs and marks in themselves, but from both the references and resonances they lead us to, and from the interpretation of them by their readers.
Of course, the discourses of health care, social care, policing and so on all recognise that words, signs and marks change their meaning over time. The changing categorisation of mental health conditions, shifts in the identification of social classes, and the way that racial and gendered slang can move from derogatory to self-identifying (or vice versa), are all clear examples of this. Until 1973, homosexuality was referred to as a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association; it now refers to a sexual orientation. Changes to the available information about something will affect its meaning, which is also why some words have different meanings depending on their technical context: the word âassessmentâ, for example, carries a different implication for a social worker than for an educator. Recognising the role of context can, however, still leave this relationship between meaning and information as taken somewhat for granted. It involves something of a âflatâ sense of what meaning is: there is a sense that meaning is rooted in a straightforward relationship between a recognised sign, word or symbol, and a corresponding term.
But there are two fundamental problems with this flat sense of meaning that presumes there is a simple correspondence between sign and reference. How do we recognise such a correspondence in the first place, and how is the correspondence formed? As we never simply âencounterâ a sign, or word, or symbol in isolation, but rather always within the flows of our socio-cultural practices, then meaning is at least in part tied to the social world we inhabit. As Ian Burkitt notes (2008: 59), any participation within shared meanings â such as following ethical guidelines, claiming a shared identity such as âsocial workerâ, or even expressing recognisable emotions to an interlocutor, such as âsympathyâ or âconfidenceâ â all involve a performance of whatever agreed attributes of that meaning are recognisable. As such, meaning always depends upon interpretation of some kind.
The second, and related, problem is that, if we focus exclusively on the idea that meaning is an external process of sign referring to signifier, we overlook our own role in constructing sense out of the world around us, and the interaction between our own interpretations and the production of culture and society around us. In other words, interpretation is an active part of the creation of meaning. Whether at the micro level of interpersonal interaction, the broader levels of multi-agency working and linking available resources to client need, or at the macro level of socio-political critique, social work is embedded within multiple sites of continuous and active interpretation. Indeed, it could be argued that from the earliest days of social work, trappings of casework such as the Charity Organisation Societyâs âflow chartsâ for decision making (Humphreys 1995: 113), or their methods for âtaking down the caseâ (Lymbery 2005: 37), were designed to direct the interpretative nature of the social workerâs inquiries into a reasonably systematic order. But of course, such methods, and their analogous forebears (assessment tools, eligibility criteria, etc.) would not remove interpretation. Not only would the details of the âcaseâ often be far from self-evident, and therefore requiring interpretation on the part of the worker, but also the line of questioning employed â as is the case for any assessment tool â is geared around the illumination of a particular perspective, predicated on an underlying sense of how problems should be ordered, what problems take priority, and how they might be approached. As then, so today: even assessments, interventions and monitoring all still require sometimes complex interpretation in order to be put into practice (White and Stancombe 2002).
It is for such reasons that Gray and Webb argue that, contrary to appearances, social work is not simply the carrying out of âcommon senseâ responses to problems, but rather an activity which is âabout âmaking senseâ of human realityâ (2013: 2, my emphasis). Relating the immanence of practice to the wider contexts that both shape and give meaning to the everyday, and vice versa, all involves active interpretation. Meaning is never simply âgivenâ: as they note, we âspeak a language we did not create, we use technology we did not invent and we claim rights we did not establish and so on. Even feelings that appear completely spontaneous, such as the anger expressed at certain types of crime, are, in reality, the product of a social contextâ (2013: 2). It is clear, then, that interpretation is central to not only the formation of the âmeaningsâ which underlie practice (the concepts, identities, classes and typologies that give social work its language), but also to the activity of social work at all its different levels; and that âthis adds up to what we might call the hermeneutic worker â the worker acting within a reflexiveâinterpretive process of self and otherâ (McBeath and Webb 2002: 1016). But what is perhaps less clear is what, exactly, constitutes interpretation in this sense.
Defining interpretation: some questions
As well as being an act of relating everyday instances to the wider social contexts which give meaning to actions, feelings and words, Gray and Webb also offer this by way of a more specific definition:
Interpretation in social work requires the recovery of meaning or intention of clientsâ actions. As a client may describe her action retrospectively in ways which she did not, or could not describe before it was completed, interpretation has a privileged position in social work. (Gray and Webb 2013: 3)
Social workers, therefore, utilise a âspecialisedâ form of interpretation, which involves drawing on specific communication skills and broader knowledge. Interpretation becomes crucial to this specialised practice â what Gray and Webb describe as the âdifference that makes a differenceâ (2013: 2) between the phronetic character of social work knowledge and the theories they draw this from. If we are to take seriously this âprivileged positionâ, though, we might also note how this brief passage raises several immediate questions:
- Can we ever recover a meaning or intention fully?
- If it is true that âwe speak a language that we didnât createâ (as Gray and Webb suggested earlier), can we ever actually mean what we say?
- Are we recovering meaning, or are we instead translating one meaning into a different meaning recognised by practice â that is, into the appropriate terminology of the service, or the language of assessment, or the vocabulary which is understood by management and stakeholders? Is this done in the sense that Jan Fook suggests âworkers might see part of their role as transforming bureaucratic culture by valuing and translating between different discoursesâ (2002: 147â8, my emphasis)?
- Is such a language of practice based on the belief that there are universal conditions of experience that can legitimise such translation? Are we translating for the sake of matching client action to our models? If so, what are these conditions and where did we find them? Or are we (as Fook suggests) problematising categorisation itself, by introducing new and distinct forms of description? If so, then how do we link each of our interpretations in such a way that we arrive at a single occupation of âsocial workâ?
- Indeed, if we speak a language that we didnât create, how reliable is the âweâ that such a language provides us to speak with? To what extent does the language we use define the âweâ who speak, and how does this representation of âusâ invoke both political and cultural implications? This question is raised in work such as Gai Harrisonâs, which has argued that far greater recognition needs to be given to how âlanguage politicsâ affects personal and professional identity in social work, especially in terms of recognising how inequitable relations are maintained through âlinguistic otheringâ (Harrison 2009).
- Is the space for interpretation limited to interactions with clients and the documentation of that interaction, or are there interpretative acts going on at every level â including the sense of whether there is such a thing as a clear definition of what social work is? Given the âdifference that makes a differenceâ which Gray and Webb also note is key to social work knowledge, to what extent is the interpretative basis of social work fundamental to its responsively dynamic identity?
Thinking through the possible responses to these questions will help to unpack the hermeneutic commitments within the claim that social work is about interpreting and making sense of human reality. It is in this sense that Nancy Moules terms practitioners âbrokers of understandingâ: âsituated in the middle of ongoing and multifarious negotiations of mutual and self-understanding, [âŚ] making sense of particulars, putting them in context, assigning relevance and meaning, and acting on the implications of that meaningâ (Moules et al. 2011: 2). Interpretation underlies this all. The use of any formal mechanism to ascertain the ârealâ meaning of whatâs going on â an assessment tool, or a decision-making heuristic, for example â certainly does not remove interpretation from the scene. Rather, it simply prioritises certain interpretations, and certain meanings, at the expense of others.
Thinking through Practice
Apply the questions above to reflections on your own cases. How would you answer them all? Do any strike you as more significant to your own practice than others? Why?
Of course, prioritisation has to be made. Even if we are aware of a whole range of possible meanings, the contexts of practice will often demand that we commit to one over others. This means that, beyond the general directives that social work practice and education has built itself for discerning what is âmeaningfulâ (such as âstarting where the client isâ, empowerment, cultural sensitivity and so on (see Furman et al. 2014: 74)),2 professional practice âin reality is messy, problems are not well definedâ, and that âthere exists in most situations a variety of options, each involving trade-offs among competing goals and valuesâ (Lynton 1990: 13).
Before exploring the philosophical responses to this problem, though, I want to consider two of the more common uses of the word âinterpretationâ, as both may come to mind in reaction to the inherent messiness of practice. First, in recent times, âinterpretationâ has often come to be used to infer simple âopinionâ. âThatâs your interpretation!â is often used in our day-to-day conversations as a way of ending discussion rather than opening it: it points to an impossibility of agreement, as well as a more general suggestion that the full âtruthâ of the matter canât be achieved from one personâs viewpoint alone. There are obvious problems with any application of this notion of interpretation to practice. I would term this a âthinâ sense of interpretation, as it would sit on the thin end of a wedge that then thickens out in accordance with the more objective, evidence-based, usually quantitative, and certain our knowledge becomes. Interpretation, in this case, is seen effectively as the opposite of âtruthâ. This is, however, simply a misuse of the term. Interpretation is not the same as opinion; it is a far more fundamental part of meaning which prefigures any form of evidence or opinion. Incidentally, this misuse can also arise when the act of interpretation is seen as a âvalue-judgementâ (see Folgheraiter 2004: 28), whereby values are seen â again, wrongly â as somehow inherently subjective, therefore inferior to âfactsâ.
Second, interpretation can be used to mean something like an instrument towards discovering a more certain or secure truth. This is grounded upon the notion â which, as John Heritage remarks, is âa pervasive and long-standing viewâ â that language ultimately serves a representative function. âWithin this view,â Heritage continues, âthe meaning of a word is what it references, corresponds with, or stands for in the real world. [âŚ] [This] view of language has remained a tacit assumption for generations of social scientistsâ (Heritage 1984: 137). As a tacit assumption, it of course carries an immediate obviousness. Signs refer to things which give them meaning. For example, if the social worker is concerned with reconstructing the lost or fragmented sense of the service userâs actions and experiences, then the task is to match their words with the reality they are trying to express. Or, perhaps a less âethicalâ example: a social worker visiting a service userâs home may find themselves implicitly conducting a kind of forensic inquiry â detecting particular signs (unwashed laundry in a clientâs house? out-of-date food in their fridge?) will suggest a specific form of living (are they a neglectful parent?) that in turn informs the appropriate action for the practitioner to take.
This correspondence account of meaning sees interpretation as simply an instrument or tool to be picked up, used, and dropped as required. For some, this underlies the...
