NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE? 81Lastly, whereas “objectivity” requires that anything knowable be capable of being stated ex-
plicitly, interpretive research opens the door to knowledge of things whose enactors cannot ar-
ticulate them in words but that are observable in their acts or in physical artifacts of their creation
and/or usage. Logical positivism, intersecting with the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell
and the early writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, argued for an unambiguous correlation between
language and its referents, insisting that all knowledge must be rational—the product of reason
(rather than emotion) and capable of being made explicit.^42 Michael Polanyi, however, argued
that there is a realm of knowability aside from the explicit: “[W]e can know more than we can
tell,” he wrote (1966, 4; see also M. Polanyi and Prosch 1975).^43 In shifting the focus of study to
human meaning, dropping the insistence on the transparent correlation between words and their
signifiers, and recognizing the possibility of accessing meanings through their artifactual repre-
sentations, interpretive science opens to the social reality of tacit knowledge. Ethnomethodological
analyses (see, e.g., Charon 1985) illustrate this, for example, in showing how a conversation
clearly understandable to its participants is full of “missing” pieces that make it opaque to an
onlooker (the stranger-“outsider”) who does not share their frame of reference. Participants make
sense of situations, events, interactions, and so on by relying on tacit knowledge that is commonly
not articulated but is nonetheless shared among members of an interpretive community (think of
a family, for instance, or a workgroup; Law and Lodge 1984, 102, provide an example). Studying
—indeed, accepting the social reality of—something that is not “directly observable” is, perhaps,
the ultimate challenge to objectivity as it is commonly used, whereas interpretive research treats
it as part of the social realities it seeks to understand and analyze.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: RHETORICAL USES OF
ARGUMENTATION
Physical-spatial and cognitive-emotional objectivities intertwine. The positivism-inflected assump-
tion is that physical distance removes social realities from the sphere of the observer’s influence:
To be physically outside of what is being studied—to hold it at arm’s length—is to be not caught
up in it cognitively or emotionally; to know without being involved is, metaphorically, to be
physically detached. The presumptive ability to “distance” oneself from one’s emotions is founded
on the Cartesian mind-body duality, with mind as a machine that reasons (much as the Artificial
Intelligence field would have it in replicating human reasoning processes in computer programs,
especially in robotics) and emotions relegated to the body’s netherworld. Neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio argues for a more Spinoza-like view, that mind and body are the same substance, inter-
twining feeling and reason, and that feeling and emotion are central parts in the development of
consciousness (see, e.g., Damasio 2001); G. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue that cognition is
possible only because the mind is embodied. This suggests a new perspective on the blurring of
personal life and researcher “distance” in interpretive research. Indeed, this formulation negates
the possibility of detachment, the body of necessity dragging the mind along, whether proximate
or distant with respect to the experience being studied.
It seems impossible today to conceive of the human sciences researcher standing outside of the
context of his study, removed, distant—“objective”—in the mode of the white-coated lab experi-
mentalist observing rats in a maze or cells in a petri dish—herself not constituting (constructing)
the idea(s) of the social reality she is studying, if nothing else, through the creation and naming of
categories that label and frame the study, thereby highlighting some elements and occluding
others. Even non-interpretive social science appears to be coming closer to a different view, seen,
perhaps, in reflecting on Charles Ragin’s thoughtful description of “fuzzy sets” (2000a, 6–7). The