CHAPTER 33PART I
MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
The chapters in the opening section of this book locate matters of research methods in the context
of the ideational history of the human or social sciences, from the perspectives of the sociology of
knowledge and the philosophy of science. They engage the “interpretive turn” in social science
and seek to explore its implications for thinking about knowledge claims, along with the method-
ological predispositions and practices best suited to the empirical investigation of human mean-
ing making. Such a perspective entails a degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher: If one
asks how knowledge claims are generated, the role of the researcher—her own a priori knowl-
edge, the filter of his own consciousness—in interpreting observational, conversational, and docu-
mentary evidence becomes paramount. And this leads, then, also to a consideration of the role of
writing in “worldmaking,” the matter of “rigor” in research, and questions of evaluative standards
for recognizing “good” interpretive research. These are the central themes explored by the au-
thors of these chapters.
In the opening chapter, Dvora Yanow situates methodological understandings enacted in in-
terpretive empirical methods in the context of their philosophical presuppositions. Her central
concern is the question, what does it mean to think interpretively, from the perspective of beliefs
about the reality status of the topic of study and its knowability? Looking at the central concerns
of phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies, she identifies some of the ontological and
epistemological themes that are central to interpretive research methods—the inevitable role played
by researchers’ a priori knowledge, their and their research subjects’ situatedness in a context,
and the interactions and entanglements between consciousness and the action, artifact, and tex-
tual embodiments of meaning. Identifying some of the central themes of phenomenology and
hermeneutics, she parses their distinct perspectives on human meaning making. Tracing the meth-
odological implications of these philosophies, she finds that what might be significant philo-
sophical distinctions become blurred in empirical research practices. In its totality, her discussion
shows that interpretive methodologies and methods stand on their own philosophical grounding:
they are not just “remaindered”—lesser, inadequate, “pre-scientific”—versions of methodologi-
cally positivist, statistics-based and other so-called quantitative methods.
Mary Hawkesworth looks in greater detail at the positivist presuppositions informing those
methods. In chapter 2 she analyzes Popper’s attempted rescue of positivism (known as “critical
rationalism”) as well as subsequent critiques of his position—particularly the logical failure of
the falsifiability criterion he posited, his acceptance of the fact/value dichotomy, and his narrow
rendering of scientific rationality and reason. As Hawkesworth so vividly expresses it, both
positivism and critical rationalism “render reason impotent” (40). By contrast, the alternatives,