Critical Theory Criticized: Giddens’s Double Hermeneutic and the Problem of Language Game Change

Anthony Giddens argues that theoretical analysis in sociology can demonstrate why lay agents can have only “partial” and “confined” understandings of the larger structures in which they are embedded. His notion of double hermeneutic rests on the assumption that such partial and imprecise knowledge shared by the social agents can be corrected through the injection of the sociological knowledge “from without.” In this article, by juxtaposing and comparing Giddens’s externalist approach to the change of language game—his double hermeneutic—with what the author would call the internalist approach, the author will show why Giddens’s theory of double hermeneutic fails to do what it professes to do.