388 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
Galileo’s view simultaneously evokes hope and fear: hope in mathematics as a means of un-
derstanding; fear of the labyrinth of human meaning making. It is our hunch that many in the
social sciences still share Galileo’s hopes and fears: Mathematics is, indeed, a powerful language—
one that has proven its use in the natural sciences and produced some impressive applications in
the social sciences as well (e.g., Kanter 1977b; Martine, Das Gupta, and Lincoln 1999; Riley and
McCarthy 2003). There is an attractive purity to mathematical logic,^13 but the rub, as Galileo’s
own words attest, is that it is still a language. As such, the meaning and significance of its
symbols, models, and proofs still require interpretation and “translation” if their implications are
to be communicated beyond the few who “speak” mathematics. That interpretive act brings
forth the sorts of ambiguities, the “dark labyrinth” of ordinary language, that Galileo appeared
to fear and that still frustrate many in contemporary social science who understand it solely in
terms of “variables” research and the latter’s attendant focus on precise measurement and statis-
tical analysis.^14
Considerable time has passed since Galileo’s investigations. In the interim, interpretive re-
searchers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have assembled means of, and rationales
for, navigating the labyrinth of language in ways that claim a scientific character. That these
accomplishments continue to be ignored or discounted speaks to the allure of mathematical
tools, including their promise of incontestability in the form of universal laws. Interpretive
researchers have a historical understanding of the harms done by mathematical approaches
built on positivist presuppositions (discussed, e.g., by Hawkesworth in chapter 2, this volume)
and so are leery of their dominance. An exclusively methodologically positivist, quantitative
knowledge base is unnecessarily narrow and thin. M. Douglas and Ney (1999), for example,
argue that the overemphasis on positivism and quantitative research negatively affects public
policies by legitimizing only the thinnest knowledge of human circumstances, to the neglect of
richer pictures of “problems” and “problem people.”^15 They charge that the human dimension
is missing altogether in the social sciences, which may be an exaggeration for some disciplines,
such as anthropology, but it captures much of the character of methodological graduate train-
ing in sociology, political science, and economics, heavily focused as they are on context-free,
universalizing quantitative reasoning and modeling.^16 It may not be surprising, then, that two
of these three disciplines have been the sites of recent scholarly “movements” seeking diversity
in methodology—“Perestroika” in U.S. political science and “Post-Autistic Economics” in Eu-
ropean economics.
Characterizing the motives of these movements’ diverse participants is difficult, but one
concern voiced by many in both movements is the alienating effect of much contemporary
research practice, which emphasizes precise measurement and technical competence and ne-
glects or marginalizes normative concerns. Members of these movements have been asking:
“Is this the way I want to spend my life?” “Is this the only way to do social science?”^17 Interpre-
tive researchers, as evident in this book, offer as an alternative a human science that embraces,
theorizes, and struggles with the humanity of both researchers and those they study. As we
have argued above, interpretive researchers need not cede “science” to methodological positiv-
ism. But beyond just claiming “science,” we seek also to join that label with “human,” because
a “social” science emphasizing “prediction” and “control” can too easily use the veil of “objec-
tivity” to hide a dehumanizing impulse.^18 We are not arguing that natural and social scientists
of necessity follow such impulses, only that methodological positivism entails principles that
at a conceptual level encourage the distancing of scientists from the issue of “the use” of their
findings, whereas interpretivism expressly engages this question.