4 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
discussed under the umbrella term of “presuppositionist theories of science,” demand reflexivity
from scientists and admit (and even require) a more robust understanding of the reasoning ability
needed in the consideration and judgment of research quality. In the final section of the chapter,
Hawkesworth lays waste to the fact/value dichotomy, demonstrating how conceptions of the
political ineluctably color, infiltrate, and ride in on scholarly judgments—no matter the scientists’
claims to “objectivity” based on the fact/value dichotomy.
In chapter 3, Robert Adcock takes up the question of generalization from case specifics, look-
ing especially at researchers’ understandings of comparative and historical methods. After dem-
onstrating that these understandings are historically situated, Adcock uses the example of James
Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer’s Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences
(2003a) to analyze modernist (i.e., methodologically positivist) efforts that aim at the “sensible
middle ground” between deductive and inductive approaches while simultaneously claiming to
provide “contextual knowledge” and to be able to locate “macro causes.” Contrasting their ap-
proach with the approaches of Clifford Geertz (1995), Reinhard Bendix (1978), and Benedict
Anderson (1991), Adcock argues that the latters’ interpretive approaches to generalization re-
main open to contingency, with the result that the particularities of diverse societies’ responses to
historical change are highlighted rather than “covered” by—flattened, hidden, or subsumed under—
a general law.
Generalization is not the only “problem” put to interpretive methodologists by methodological
positivism. One of the latter’s most common claims is that interpretive research is, and can be,
neither rigorous nor objective, given what are perceived to be its procedural “idiosyncrasies” and
the researcher’s presence in proximity to his observational experience or her interview respon-
dents. Dvora Yanow takes up these claims in chapter 4, arguing that they are commonly based not
only on a misunderstanding of interpretive procedures, but also on insufficiently interrogated
understandings of what “rigor” and “objective” mean. Making clear the untenable nature of the
substance of the charges, Yanow then considers their rhetorical power, arguing that their contin-
ued use masks contemporary fears about what it would mean to admit the embodiment of those
who claim scientific knowledge through interpretive methods.
Finally, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea shows that when one moves beyond questions of generali-
zation, rigor, and objectivity, interpretive methodologies generate their own criteria for judging
the quality of the truth claims. Evaluative criteria, she argues in chapter 5, are—and need to be—
specific to the epistemic communities generating the research that they judge. That is, interpre-
tive research should not be held to standards that emerge from, and are logically consistent with,
positivist ontological and epistemological presuppositions. Moreover, we should expect evalua-
tive criteria to evolve as research communities respond to the changing world they study, through
reinventing and reconstituting themselves, their questions, and their methodologies.
Taken together, these five chapters make the point that interpretive methods will never meet
the criteria established for quantitative methods—because each of these modes of generating under-
standing and claiming it as trustworthy rests on different philosophical grounding. Indeed, ignoring
these presuppositional differences is what leads methodologists to try to make qualitative methods
fit a methodologically positivist mode, and out of this a split has developed within qualitative meth-
ods between researchers who attempt to follow that effort and those who pursue more traditional,
meaning-focused, “interpretive” research styles. The chapters in this section lay the conceptual
groundwork for the latter, which are then illustrated in the chapters in parts II and III.