PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 19Individuals and collective entities also use language, whether written or spoken, to communi-
cate meaning. When word and deed conflict, we tend to trust the deed as the more “accurate”
reflection of what the actor actually means.^32 Asked directly to explain their acts and/or beliefs,
research-relevant publics are likely to report what they think the researcher wants to hear, or what
they believe is socially acceptable, or simply what they think they believe or value. Governmental
or organizational statements, likewise, may express an ideal or desired state of affairs, rather than
the experienced values of enacted policies-on-the-ground. The tension between desired states and
experienced ones reflects what Argyris and Schon (1974) called “espoused values,” as distinct
from “theories-in-use” manifested in acts or interactions, a distinction echoed by parents admon-
ishing their children to “Do as I say, not as I do.” In this sense, spatial design and other physical
artifacts are a form of deed: a nonverbal enactment of underlying values, beliefs, and/or senti-
ments (the first presupposition).
Researchers seeking to understand human meaning can have direct observational access to
artifacts—to what people and organizations do. (I mean this as a statement about capability, not
permission.) Meanings cannot be observed directly. We infer meaning(s) from their manifesta-
tions in or expressions through the more directly observable, more tangible artifacts that embody
them. Analysis proceeds through a constant tacking back and forth in ongoing comparison be-
tween the nonverbal data of objects and acts observed and “read” and actors’ explicit pronounce-
ments, whether in formal or informal speech or in writing.
This process points to one of the strengths of interpretive research: its utility for studying
situations in which the meanings of words and deeds are not or are not likely to be congruent.
Such interpretations are customarily treated as provisional, subject to corroboration, or refuta-
tion, through further observation and/or conversational interviewing. This is a common use of
interviews—for clarifying, corroborating, and/or refuting the researcher’s provisional meaning
making derived from observation, reading, and/or other conversations, with the same or with
other conversants. Because of the word-deed tension, efforts are made to ground such interview-
ing in the details of lived experience (see Schaffer, chapter 7, this volume).
Interpretive Moments
Related to this is the question of making interpretations: who does it, and when?
Interpretive researchers argue that the meaning they are after is that made by members of the
situation; and so one would privilege those members’ meaning making over the researcher’s.
Extreme versions of phenomenology (so judged by many, if not most, empirical researchers, as
they border on solipsism; see Burrell and Morgan 1979, 238–40) argue that it is impossible to
understand another’s meaning without reliving it. This position has been rejected by most in
favor of the notion that we live in an intersubjective world in which empathetic understanding
of another’s meaning is possible. This latter idea is what undergirds ethnographic and participant-
observer analyses in particular (and even more so analyses of built space, as noted in chapter
20, this volume): that the researcher draws on a basic commonality of human experience and
processes of understanding, and that through learning the language of the setting and its cus-
toms, the researcher can acquire sufficient familiarity as to be able to understand events that
transpire, while at the same time drawing on sufficient “stranger-ness” to make the accepted,
unspoken, tacitly known, commonsensical, taken-for-granted, local “rules” of action and inter-
action stand out as, in some way, different, thereby opening them up for reflection and exami-
nation.^33 This means that researchers are drawing on themselves—their Selves—in significant
ways.