242 ANALYZING DATA
advocates, on the other hand, saw housing as a legal entitlement enforceable in a court of law.” There is no
analytic way here to isolate the divergent sets of baseline assumptions that led to these divergent definitions
of the situation.- Woolgar (1988) offers a good introduction to the science studies literature, situating science studies
in relationship to both the classical sociology of knowledge and the classical sociology of science. - In NHI studies of the Supreme Court, Kahn and Kersch (2006) put the terms “internal” and “external”
in brackets in an attempt to signal the mutually constitutive nature of legal reasoning and social and political
factors. - The term “extending agents” is meant to recognize agency in individuals, that is, their capacity to
achieve modification and change in concepts they have received. For a discussion relating interpretive frame-
works and agency, see Sewell (1992). - Schon and Rein (1994, 41–44) offer several ways out of this trap: appeals to a shared larger reality,
appeals to shared criteria for evaluating frames, and frame translations, which involve attempts to under-
stand conflicting viewpoints. - Fish is responding to the perceived crisis in truth triggered by anti-foundationalist epistemology, that
is, a general account of knowing in which all meanings are contingent and provisional. Speaking to those
who worry that there is a contradiction between making knowledge claims and supporting an anti-
foundationalist epistemology, Fish explains that there is no contradiction because none of us, positivist and
anti-foundationalist alike, can escape our local truths. It is these local truths (taken-for-granted assumptions
and beliefs) that shape a researcher’s perception of a legitimate research goal and perception of relevant and
weighty evidence. It is these assumptions and beliefs, too, that give the researcher confidence in her research
product. The whole of these assumptions and beliefs, however, is not subject to self-examination because
some set of assumptions are necessary in order to “see,” i.e., in order to construe meaning, and these are not
subject to reflexivity. There is no contradiction, then, between advancing knowledge claims and supporting
an anti-foundationalist epistemology because it is impossible for any researcher to enact a stance of general
openness and general indeterminacy.
Fish’s work is important here because it points to the limits to reflexivity. Reflexivity may take a variety
of forms, and we may speak of levels or degrees (personal, institutional, etc.) of reflexivity. A scholar may
reflect on her own personal experience and consider how that experience shapes her research questions or
her response to research subjects. A scholar might also identify hegemonic assumptions in his discipline that
shape the production of institutional knowledge. For example, Ido Oren can explain how hegemonic as-
sumptions in political science generated the “democratic peace” axiom (see chapter 11, this volume). How-
ever, Oren cannot identify the taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs that underwrite his own sense of
relevant and weighty evidence in support of his critique. This is not a criticism of Oren, for it is impossible
for any researcher to be fully cognizant of the sources of his own practice.
Consider, too, my study of the career of Fairman’s knowledge claim. I can identify the hegemonic as-
sumptions and standard concepts among legal actors that made Fairman’s claim persuasive in the 1950s.
Indeed, like Oren, I historicize institutional discourse, which is one form of reflexivity. But the set of as-
sumptions that make me deeply confident that Fairman was wrong remain outside my view. Of course, my
assumptions do remain subject to evaluation by others, just as all scholarly assumptions do. The point, then,
is that a researcher reaches the limits of reflexivity when it comes to identifying the sources of her own
confidence in her research product. - Pocock (1985, 10) explains that confidence that an idiom existed for actors in history increases to the
extent “(a) that diverse authors employed the same idiom and performed diverse and even contrary utter-
ances in it, (b) that the idiom recurs in texts and contexts varying from those in which it was at first detected,
and (c) that authors expressed in words their consciousness that they were employing such an idiom and
developed critical and second-order languages to comment on and regulate their employment of it.” See,
generally, Skinner (2002). - The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines anachronism as “the relating of an event, cus-
tom, or circumstance to a wrong period of time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Fairman, for
example, assumed that the vocabulary for debating incorporation in the post–Civil War era was the same as
the contemporary vocabulary of the 1940s and 1950s, and this led him to misunderstand the meaning of
many speeches. Crosskey did a better job at recovering the historical idiom in use during the Reconstruction
debates. For a complete discussion of the variety of anachronisms in Fairman’s account, see Brandwein
(1996, 304–24). For a discussion of anachronisms in conventional legal and historical accounts of the Four-
teenth Amendment doctrine of state action, see Brandwein (2006).