24 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
- William James credited Charles Pierce with the coinage of the term, although Pierce did not like
James’s formulation of the philosophy and himself called it “pragmaticism” (Menand 2001). George Herbert
Mead was a point of contact for James, John Dewey, and Charles Pierce and for some of the Continental
philosophers (Menand 2001). The points of similarity are pronounced in Mead’s and Dewey’s work, among
them the emphasis on the context specificity of knowledge and the extent to which the Self is constituted in
interaction within society and its themes. See Mead (1934); Menand, relating sources (1997) and history
(2001); and Polkinghorne (1983). On James as a precursor to the later Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and
Heidegger, see Connolly (2005, chapter 3): James was arguing against the idea of “a unified world knowable
through fixed laws unconnected to any power above nature.” S.K. White (2004), indeed, argues that pragma-
tism creates the possibility of a critical social science. - This is not to say that the doing of science originated in Europe at this time. There is ample historical
evidence of what would be recognizable today as agronomy, astronomy, and other sciences in ancient Babylon,
Egypt, Greece, China, Mexico, Africa, and India and medieval Muslem Spain, all long before Copernicus
(see, e.g., Teresi 2002). My intention is not to engage in history of science debates, but to note that contem-
porary understandings of what “science” entails developed out of Renaissance-era European work. - We have, in fact, not only replaced the authority of monarchic or religious knowledge with the
authority of science, but vested increasingly more epistemic authority in technical-rational expertise, from
physicians to planners to policy analysts, removing science from “just” humans applying their powers of
reason based on lived, embodied experience (see, e.g., Jordan [1997] on the authority of obstetricians over
women giving birth, or Yanow [2004] in the context of organizational practices and managerial knowledge;
Harold Garfinkel’s point, in coining the term “ethnomethodology,” was that in everyday life, humans engage
in just this sort of science-like inquiry). I return to this point below. - One might, in fact, reach back to Aristotle to justify these arguments about what constitutes “science,”
as Alker (1996, chapter 2) does in making a claim for the study of politics as a science. There (76–7), he
draws on two distinctions: between physis (nature) and nomos (law or convention), and among techne (craft,
art), episteme (science), and phronesis (translated in the present volume as “practical reasoning”). The three
ideal types of Aristotelian political science in Alker’s articulation revolve around defining science as the
deliberative application of perception, practical reason, and intelligence in the development of systematic
knowledge concerning regularities of belief, action, practice, and so on (77–86, passim). The three types he
finds in Aristotle’s writings are distinguished by the relative place of art, science, and perfection, the latter,
as I see it, akin to the nineteenth-century idea of progress as perfectibility that became inextricably interwo-
ven with notions of scientific discovery and the scientific method. - The logical positivism of the Vienna Circle philosophers (e.g., Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Kurt
Godel, and Rudolf Carnap) is considered by many the intellectual descendant of nineteenth-century positiv-
ism (see, for example, Abbagnano 1967), although this linkage of the two sets of ideas is not uncontested. - Even chaos theorists are, by implication, arguing that recurrent and widespread chaos is a recogniz-
able pattern. - And so interpretive thought of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries is sometimes referred
to as neo-Kantian or, as Kant’s ideas were part of the German Idealist movement, neo-Idealist. - To the extent that the metaphor of a “filter” suggests simplification, it is misleading. As M. Lynch
(1990) notes, there is a transformation going on in this process, a point I do not have space to develop here
but hope to have captured somewhat in the rendering of verstehen as, among other things, proactive under-
standing from within. The willed effort may, indeed, be transformative; certainly, sense does not simply
present itself. - This is known in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The well-known story—debunked by
Steven Pinsker—that the Eskimos have multiple terms for different kinds of snow is part of this debate. The
research of Roberson and her colleagues provides empirical support for the contention that language does
structure perception, although this position is by no means uncontested. - My thanks to Mary Hawkesworth and Peri Schwartz-Shea for help in articulating this point.
- That understanding and explanation are separable and that interpretive science does not “explain” are
contested ideas that have largely been rejected by interpretivists. The rejection hinges on understanding
explanation to mean more than causal or predictive relationships (see the discussion in Mark Bevir’s chapter
15, this volume). - Parsing the term may help in grasping its meaning. Its precise etymology is, according to the German
dictionary Duden, unknown. The prefix ver means entirely, thoroughly, fully, through (Boris Ewenstein,
personal communication, December 21, 2004). Stehen is to stand, standing. “Through-standing,” then, means