PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15opposition to a methodological individualism that denies the significance, if not the very existence,
of historical-cultural-social constructings other than those made through the choices of individuals.
In sum, phenomenology focuses attention on the deeply embedded frameworks of tacitly known,
taken-for-granted assumptions through which humans make sense of their lives. Research based
on or influenced by a phenomenological outlook seeks to highlight the problematic character of
such framings, as Ellen Pader does, for example (chapter 8, this volume), with respect to the
everyday concept of “crowding,” a taken-for-granted, “commonsensical” assumption about ap-
propriate spatial relations among people sharing a household, which, as a public policy concept,
polices all manner of activities and regulations. Phenomenologically inflected methods seek to
make explicit the lens or frame or way of seeing—the lifeworld—that makes such perceptions
make sense. Reflecting on them and making them explicit potentially enables both understanding
and action in their regard.
THE EXPRESSION OF MEANING: HERMENEUTICS AND ARTIFACTS
For hermeneutic scholars, by contrast, among them Dilthey and Gadamer, the focus of social
scientific study was to be the cultural artifacts people created and vested with their values, beliefs,
and/or sentiments—that is, the material manifestations or objectifications of mind, conscious-
ness, and so on, rather than consciousness itself.
Hermeneutic thinkers focused on the fact that human meaning is not expressed directly. Rather,
it is embedded in (or projected onto) artifacts by their creators, and it can be known through
interpreting these artifacts. Initially, this meant interpreting the written word: Given its origins as
a set of rules for interpreting biblical texts, hermeneutics’ initial concern in its application to the
social world more broadly was with written artifacts (including, e.g., fiction, poetry, and nonfic-
tion; here is where the linkage between interpretive methodologies and mid- to late-twentieth-
century literary theories emerges).^24
Hermeneutic modes of thought were extended first to text-like objects: other forms of creative
expression that were or could be rendered in whole or in part on paper, in two dimensions—art
(paintings, drawings, prints), design, drama; subsequently, this grew to include photography,
film, and so on, as well as three-dimensional materials, such as sculptures and built spaces (e.g.,
agency buildings). By even later extension, acts also came to be treated as “text-analogues” (Tay-
lor 1971) under the reasoning that in seeking to understand daily behavior, we treat human acts,
too, as if they were texts (for example, the act of voting; see also Ricoeur 1971). This greatly
expanded the realm of application of hermeneutic methods, to include such things as conversa-
tions, speeches, legislative acts (and their transcriptions), and nonverbal communication.^25 Eth-
nographic, participant-observation, ethnomethodological, and semiotic analyses—indeed, any
method that seeks to elicit meaning by rendering spoken words and/or acts as written texts and
applying to them forms of textual analysis—are based on this conceptualization of speech, act,
and meaning.^26 In this volume, the chapters by Joe Soss and Frederic Schaffer on interviewing,
Clare Ginger on environmental impact assessments, Cecelia Lynch and Jutta Weldes on gov-
ernmental documents, Dean McHenry and Ronald Schmidt on words and categories framing
political action, and my own on built space could be seen as examples of hermeneutic analysis.
The chapters analyzing the meanings of historical documents—by Ido Oren, Robert Adcock,
Mark Bevir, Patrick Jackson, and Pamela Brandwein—could also be seen as forms of herme-
neutic analysis.
Kantian notions of a priori knowledge were manifested in hermeneutic thinking in the idea
of the hermeneutic circle. The term has been understood as meaning both a process of reasoning