10 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
world “bare”—as it is—without some preestablished “conceptual boxes” (Kuhn 1970) or catego-
ries of thought structuring that perception and “filtering” various physical sensations.^11 Roberson’s
research on colors provides an example. It addresses one of the central questions in linguistics
concerning whether language structures perception and thought.^12 Roberson and her colleagues
(Roberson 2005; Roberson, Davies, and Davidoff 2000) have found, among the groups they have
studied, that the respective presence and absence of color terms enables or prohibits the percep-
tion of those colors. Furthermore, development of additional terms enables an enhanced aware-
ness of the colors those terms refer to. In other words, the thought categories exist independently
of the sensory stimuli. In a conceptual sense, evidence is not manifest in the observational world—
it is not “self-evident”; categories of mind are prerequisite to making sense of the phenomenal
(empirical) world. If the point holds for elements whose objective reality we take so for granted as
part of the physical world, such as colors, how much more is it the case for social scientific
constructs such as “democracy” or “community”?^13
“New” knowledge, then, is understood as being produced not through disembodied reason but
through the situated context of the “knower” producing it. Admitting prior knowledge into the
realm of scientific inquiry implies a basis for knowledge claims other than the direct physical
experience of sensory stimuli. This is not an argument that dismisses the role of the senses in
perception—the senses are central to “making” sense. It is, however, an argument that sense
making is an historically and socially contextualized process and that the subject of study is itself
historically and socially situated. Understanding is not possible from a position entirely outside of
the focus of analysis: Prior knowledge is a mediating factor in sense making. This, in turn, is itself
implicitly an argument against the understanding of objectivity posited by quantitative methods
informed by methodological positivism (see chapter 4). Other interpretive philosophers, such as
Rickert, argued further that human values (themselves not sense-based), and not just “sense data,”
were the appropriate focus of a meaning-oriented social science.
It was in such conversations about the purpose of science and its natural-physical versus hu-
man subject matter that the distinction between explanation (or prediction) and understanding
emerged. Explanation (erklaren in German) was posited to be the method of the natural and
physical sciences, understood to entail a description of concepts or objects or processes in terms
of their antecedent causes, thereby leading to the discovery of universal, predictive laws. Ex-
planatory processes aim to explain human experiences in terms of natural or physical events
external to them—that is, through attending to “objective” events rather than to “subjective”
(internal) ones. By contrast, understanding (verstehen), posited as the method of the human sci-
ences, was seen as entailing making clear people’s interpretations of their own and others’ experi-
ences, leading to the discovery of context-specific meaning. Verstehen, then, concerns human
subjectivity and intersubjectivity as both subjects of and explanations for human action. First devel-
oped as a distinction in the mid-1800s by Johan Gustav Droysen, the concepts were elaborated on
by Dilthey and Weber writing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and later by
Alfred Schütz (see Beam and Simpson 1984; Burrell and Morgan 1979; Fay 1975; Filmer et al.
1972; Polkinghorne 1988).^14 In Dilthey’s framing of it, the method of verstehen was to understand
material, cultural expressions as the external manifestations of human mind: These could only be
understood “in relation to the minds which created them and the inner experience which they re-
flected” (Burrell and Morgan 1979, 229). Initially comprehended as requiring the reliving or reen-
acting of the other’s experience, verstehen was developed by Weber to mean the more detached
understanding of the research subject’s experience—that is, his or her subjective sense making.
In this approach, the individual is seen as holding membership in a community of meaning, such
that his subjective perception and understanding themselves draw on the repertoire of collectively