16 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
and interpreting, and the community of “readers” (interpreters) engaged in that process and shar-
ing the interpretation of the text under study.^27 As a description of the process of meaning mak-
ing, it departs from a linear model (such as the steps of the scientific method), instead depicting a
circular, iterative sense making in which initial interpretation starts at whatever point is available
or accessible, with whatever one’s understanding is at that point in time. One makes a provisional
interpretation of the text (or other focus of analysis), with the reflexive awareness that one’s
interpretation is likely to be incomplete and even possibly erroneous. One then engages the mate-
rial in further study, at which point one revises one’s initial, provisional interpretation. Additional
analysis yields further revised interpretation; and so on and so on.^28
A slightly different explication of the hermeneutic circle emphasizes the contextual character of
interpretive processes. Much as a word in a sentence needs to be (and is) understood in relation to
the whole sentence (its grammatical structure, other words, the tone and context of utterance), a text
can only be understood within its “con-text,” whether this is the author’s intent and personal back-
ground, the history of the times, other associated or contrasting texts, or something else.^29 The
hermeneutic circularity resides in reading back and forth, iteratively, between text and context. This
process description gave rise to the understanding that “intertextuality”—the way in which one text
invokes another through the repetition of a unique or key phrase, thereby drawing the other text’s
meaning into the understanding of the focal one—is operative among text analogues as well. An
agency building might invoke a Greek temple through architectural details, for example, thereby
bringing the meanings associated with antiquity or the classical period into the present context,
affecting how the agency is perceived. This has been common, for instance, in certain periods with
the architectural design of public buildings, such as libraries, courthouses, and museums.
And so it goes, on and on: Further layers of understanding are added as each new insight
revises prior interpretations in an ever-circular process of making meaning. Interpretations are,
therefore, always provisional, as one cannot know for certain that a new way of seeing does not
lie around the corner (the “1491 problem” in respect of certain truth—the certain knowledge in
1491 that the world was flat). There is no more absolute and definitive an end point than there was
a starting point. Certainty rests on other elements (see chapters 4 and 5); finality is only temporal.
This understanding is recapitulated in a vision of scientific research as ongoing and recursive—
and why doctoral students (and others) are commonly directed to conclude their dissertations
with “directions for subsequent research.” The hermeneutic circle, then, enacts the attitude of
doubt or testability that is one of the hallmarks of scientific practice.
The idea of the hermeneutic circle could be seen as a conceptual shift from phenomenology’s
emphasis on prior experience as shaping understanding to the conception of prior reading in that
knowledge-shaping role—literally, when working with written texts; figuratively, in considering
hermeneutic applications beyond the literal to text analogues. Gadamer’s hermeneutics brings it
closer to phenomenology. One of Gadamer’s departures from Dilthey was his observation that
the hermeneutic circle describes all sense making processes in general, not just text-based ones.^30
For Gadamer, verstehen is the process through which researcher and researched come to under-
stand each other’s frame of reference, with language playing the central mediating role in inter-
pretation (Burrell and Morgan 1979, 238).
Combining the hermeneutic focus on texts as vehicles for conveying meaning with the phe-
nomenological consciousness that researchers, too, act from an experientially informed stand-
point has led to an awareness of the ways in which writing, itself, is a way of world making.
Research designs, formulations of questions, choices of observational sites and persons interviewed,
analytic frames, and writing all construct perceptions of the subject of study, rather than objectively
reflecting it. Interpretive research reports increasingly include researchers’ reflections on this