NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE? 79In this sense, knowing and understanding are subjective processes—understood from the view-
point of the subject acting (and interacting) in and interpreting the situation; they are not “objec-
tive” processes, understood from outside, at a remove, through sense-based observation alone.
Phenomenologists and hermeneutic scholars alike emphasize the context specificity of knowl-
edge: It is created in a situation, and it is of that situation. Knowledge and practice intertwine:
Social realities are constructed by the actors in those situations, acting together—that is, the knowing
and understanding are also intersubjective; and the meanings of these acts can only be understood
through interpretation.
The certainty of knowledge about the social world being observed and judgments about the
“goodness” of that knowledge rest within the community that has established procedural rules for
generating interpretations. There is no external authority—no king, no religious leader, no deity,
no universal and independent set of rules—to which one can appeal for verification. There is only
the collective sense making of the interpretive community—whether scholars or citizens—
observing, interpreting, theorizing, and reporting about these observations in the rhetorical style
developed and accepted by that community (see Bruner 1990, Fish 1980, Geertz 1983). This
selfsame collective sense making of a research community regulates the interpretive practices of
its members, constraining researcher idiosyncrasy and, by implication, ethics.
Aside from apprehension concerning researcher idiosyncrasy, objectivity charges also touch on
questions of factual (in)accuracy, reflecting misunderstandings concerning the social character of
many “facts.” The implied logic is that a lack of physical-cognitive distance leads to bias (the onto-
logical-epistemological link) and, hence, to inaccuracy. This line of reasoning is often used to argue
for the mathematicization of observational data as a way of protecting their analysis from such bias.
Objectivity, in other words, is equated with numbers (and numbers with facts and truth).
One rejoinder to this argument rests on the questionable facticity and accuracy of measuring
and counting. Languages are full of terms now taken to be “objective facts” that have become so
through a process of social consensus, over time. Most English speakers, for example, use such
indices as “foot,” “yard,” and “inch” without attending to their (long buried) social origins, much
as few people are cognizant of the arbitrary fixing of Greenwich Mean Time.^37 American as-
sumptions concerning the accuracy of vote counts or census tallies were shattered by the 2000
presidential election snafus in Florida or the 1990 and 2000 undercounts of the homeless and
other groups. Even voting machines allow room for counting errors, although many presume that
machines are more exacting than people.
In reducing words and other forms of evidence to numbers that can be analyzed by computers,
statistical analysis appears to eliminate the human factor that is seen as the source of idiosyncrasy,
bias, and inaccuracy, such that a second researcher can (in this view) run the same database and/
or the same numbers through the computer and come up with an identical analysis. One can,
however, certainly point to the many junctures along the words-to-numbers road at which human
judgment is operative. A more interesting project is to enumerate the many circumstances in
which research on human action requires human judgment, such that without it, both accessed
data and data analysis may be seriously flawed. In such instances, the more accurate analysis and
judgment of human action is likely to come from “subjective” human “readings” of other hu-
mans’ lives than from “objective” counting. Ironically, in this way, interpretive research restores
humans to the centrality from which the Copernican revolution, at the dawn of European science,
displaced them. The challenge is to show how that centrality of human judgment can be scientific—
systematic and subject to reflection—without the pejorative meanings that attach to subjectivity:
that “subjectivity” need be neither idiosyncratic, and certainly not intentionally prejudiced, nor
inaccurate.^38