PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 11created and sanctioned meanings particular to that community and shared within it by its mem-
bers. The community’s traditions, practices, language, and other cultural elements provide the
material out of which individuals craft their meaning making of everyday events. Understandings
of “race” and “ethnicity,” for example, are specific to political communities and sanctioned and
maintained through institutionalized state practices. “Race-ethnic” categories in Australia, for
example, are based on language of birthplace, whereas U.S. categories reflect continent of (an-
cestral) origin (Yanow 2003b). These collective understandings provide the backdrop for indi-
viduals’ constructions of their own meanings; individual subjectivity, in other words—the contents
of individual consciousness (or mind)—is embedded within social practices and collective pre-
suppositions. Verstehen denotes the intentional ferreting out by another person of that mental
framework—the framework that “stands under” the individual’s actions. “Far from being ex-
otic,” as Hawkesworth notes (personal communication, May 22, 2004), “verstehen underlies our
most basic comprehension of others’ meanings and actions, such as the ‘road rage’ that is so
comprehensible to commuters.” It generates explanation that is context specific, rather than a set
of generalized predictive laws.
A central implication of Kant’s thinking is that if a knower comes to a study with a priori
knowledge, and that shapes or filters what she apprehends, then knowing cannot be said to pro-
ceed through direct, unmediated observation alone. Something intercedes or filters between sen-
sory perceptions and sense making. Verstehen developed against the notion that the meaning of
sense-based “facts,” seen by positivists as external to human actors, was readily apparent and could
simply be grasped (Begreifen, in Weber’s terminology) by an external observer. In the reasoning of
Weber, Schütz, and others, to the extent that human acts and other artifacts are the projections or
embodiments of human meaning, they are not, then, completely external to the world of their cre-
ators and of others engaging them (including researchers), and so their meaning must be understood
(or interpreted). Verstehen is in this sense not “understanding” simply put, but a proactive, inten-
tional, willed effort to understand from within—in some instances, not only addressed to the
other’s meaning, but also to one’s own (“the Self,” as the German-language writings put it).^15
With these positions as shared points of departure, phenomenology and hermeneutics empha-
size different focuses for study, differing on what each sees as the central locus for the expression
of human meaning.
THE MEANING OF MEANING: PHENOMENOLOGY’S LIFEWORLD
When put under oath in a Canadian court
to testify about the fate of his hunting lands
in connection with a case concerning a hydroelectric plant,
a Cree hunter is reported to have said,
“I’m not sure I can tell the truth...
I can only tell what I know.”
—James Clifford (1986, 8)Tracing the development of phenomenological thought from its early articulations in Edmund
Husserl’s writings in the latter part of the nineteenth century to Alfred Schütz’s in the mid-twen-
tieth century is tantamount to observing social philosophy develop into social theory and sociol-
ogy. The further one moves in time, the more grounded the theorizing becomes in explaining
human life in all its dimensions. Moreover, reading the work of these two thinkers alone makes it
clear that phenomenological philosophy itself diverges epistemologically, although its proponents
hold similar ontological presuppositions.^16