PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 55CHAPTER 1
THINKING INTERPRETIVELY: PHILOSOPHICAL
PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES
DVORA YANOW
I am not a philosopher by training, nor do I read most philosophy easily: Like others who do
empirical research, I seem to need more of a grounding in lived experience, and through that I can
approach philosophical texts.
After taking a B.A. in politics, I spent three years as a community organizer in a local agency
that was part of a national government corporation. My colleagues and I felt that we had a clear
national mandate, yet on the ground, it was supremely difficult to get anything done. I wondered
why that would be so, and brought that question to my Master’s degree work, just at the time that
“policy implementation” became a burgeoning field of inquiry. It became clear that in order to
understand implementation, I would need to know something about organizations. But in both of
these fields, I found all the explanations I was reading—other than Don Schon’s arguments about
metaphors in policy and organizational processes, and Marty Rein’s insistence that the fact-
value dichotomy was false—too rational-technical to explain what I had experienced in that very
complex work setting.
I was still poking away at that question when I started my Ph.D. program a couple of years
later. In the required first semester seminar, we read chapter one of Clifford Geertz’s The Inter-
pretation of Cultures, in which he recounts the story of the Berber tradesman and the wink,^1
arguing for the necessity of “thick description.” Like Gretel, I kept following the trail of citations,
reading largely in anthropology, human geography, and urban design. I found a wealth of em-
pirical, theoretical, and methodological writings that explored human action in its expressive
dimensions—a much broader approach than the rational-technical explanations I found so con-
straining and so limited in their explanatory power for theorizing what I had lived and studied for
three years. The expressive, meaning-focused dimension just wasn’t being written about in my
main fields of study; and so I continued to read without regard to disciplinary boundaries. Re-
flecting on my field experience, which, with follow-up interviewing, observing, and document
reading, became my case study, I saw that policy implementation could be appreciated as a
process through which policy and agency meanings were communicated, and that this was done
through three types of artifacts: spoken and written language, certainly, but also acts and ob-
jects, such as the agency’s buildings. Each of these then led me to other areas of reading. I started
trying to piece together the map of Continental and U.S. meaning-oriented schools of thought as
I was writing my dissertation. This mapping continued for several years after graduating—in
many respects, I’m still reading and learning and filling in gaps in the map. But it all came about
because I experienced a misfit between the prevailing theories in my two disciplines and my own
lived experience.