STUDYING THE CAREERS OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS 235signals. If adherents to a viewpoint defend it more zealously than did previous adherents, this
may be a signal that the viewpoint has been destabilized. Of course, it is wise to think of credibil-
ity along a continuum and not in dichotomous terms. In general, citation patterns hold major clues
about the balance of credibility that attaches to specific knowledge claims.
The significance of a win is the final thing that researchers must address, for researchers must
explain why it matters that one claim wins and not another. How, then, can the significance of a win
be assessed? By looking at what later legal actors do with this now-established knowledge claim.
What legal results are justified by legal academics and by the Court with citations to this knowledge
claim? What social groups benefit from these results? Answering these questions is another way of
connecting contests over meaning to social arrangements and the distribution of resources.
In sum, the major steps to take when investigating the career of a knowledge claim include:
- isolate the underlying interpretive framework;
- explain how it enables and constrains meaning;
- identify the balance of credibility that attaches to the knowledge claim;
- link the underlying framework to its sponsoring interpretive community;
- identify the resources and commitments of this sponsoring interpretive community;
- follow the balance of credibility over time and connect it to shifting institutional
arrangements; and - explain the significance of a win or loss at each stage in its career.
Lastly, before moving on to applications of these methods, it is worthwhile to briefly address
questions about the validity and trustworthiness of interpretive research on framing and the ca-
reers of knowledge claims. In their study of framing, Schon and Rein (1994, 41) worry that there
is “no reasonable basis for deciding among... frames, all of which may be internally consistent
and compelling in their own terms and, hence, equally worthy of choice.” They refer to these
concerns as the “relativist trap.”^18
Other theorists, however, provide ways out of this trap. In a more general context, Stanley Fish
(1989a, 1989b) has argued that there are limits on reflexivity and that these limits explain why a
researcher can confidently make knowledge claims while advancing a theory of knowledge in
which all meaning is contingent and provisional.^19 In the context of competing knowledge claims
about historical texts, the subject of this chapter, Cambridge School historians of political dis-
course (Ball and Pocock 1988; Ball, Farr, and Hanson 1988; Pocock 1985, 1987; Skinner 2002)
are perhaps more helpful. Their methods provide a way of refereeing among competing legal-
historical knowledge claims. They supply a set of criteria for establishing the trustworthiness of
certain historical readings over others.^20 The use of such methods can reveal anachronisms in the
winning knowledge claims of legal academics, and these anachronisms can serve as a valid basis
for rejecting these claims.^21
TWO APPLICATIONS
The following two applications apply, if only in skeletal fashion, the methods of frame analysis
and science studies. The legal academy is at the center of the first application, whereas the Su-
preme Court is more visible in the second application. The applications work as a pair for an
additional reason. There is an impulse to regard the recognition of a previously rejected and
historically worthy claim, such as Crosskey’s, in the first example, through a lens of justice and
fairness. The second application is offered, in part, as an antidote to this impulse.