PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 25to perceive, to recognize, to grasp with the faculties of the mind; to have a clear conception or sense of
something. Under-standing, then, might imply trying to figure out the meanings that stand under—that
underlie—the focus of one’s analysis. Verstehen connotes, in this way, a more active reaching across for
meaning than the more passive, hierarchical ordering of the English word. My thanks to Boris Ewenstein for
his assistance on this.
- This section and the next draw on Bernstein (1976), Burrell and Morgan (1979), Dallmayr and
McCarthy (1977), Fay (1975), Filmer et al. (1972), Polkinghorne (1983), Schütz (1967, 1973), and D.W.
Smith (2003). For an overview of feminist and postmodern theories, see Nicholson (1990). - The example derives from one that my Hayward colleague Dick VrMeer used in class.
- Whereas these other terms can be useful aids to understanding the phenomenological argument, it
may be necessary to sound a caution: Unlike a pair of eyeglasses that may be regularly put on and taken off
or exchanged for a different pair, phenomenological “lenses” or “frames” are not tools that may be engaged
and switched so readily. As I have tried to describe here, they are grounded—rooted, entrenched—in years
of socialization and acculturation to a community of meaning, an interpretive community, and individuals
are imbued with the “way of seeing” developed within their communities. It is this, for example, that leads
to the so-called culture shock experienced by those who sojourn for the first time in cultures not their own.
Unhappily for this set of ideas, the popularization of the notion of “paradigm” has led to a widespread
understanding that paradigms are easily replaced, something that Kuhn’s argument itself does not suggest.
The idea that these concepts can be used instrumentally, as Mary Hawkesworth notes—“pick a tool, try it
out, discard it if your hypothesis is not confirmed”—is at odds “with the depth, complexity, and tacit nature
of the lifeworld, which haunts (and structures) our perceiving” (personal communication, May 22, 2004). - Husserl drew on the Greek epoche, meaning hold up or set aside, for this method.
- This both describes the operations of the hermeneutic circle (discussed below) and Kuhn’s paradigm,
and makes them possible. - The ways in which collective knowing is mediated by and through objects is the focus of activity
theory, developed out of Leont’iev’s analysis of human conduct as object-oriented activity. This is treated in
the context of work practice and organizational studies by, e.g., Engeström, Puonti, and Seppänen (2003). - See also Hacking’s (1999) discussion—the social construction of what?—which notes the many
ways the phrase has become hackneyed and misused, as if the nouns to which the phrase has been applied—
authorship, brotherhood, child television viewers, danger, emotions, etc.—could be socially constructed,
whereas it is the ideas about or perceptions of those things, rather than the things themselves, that are
collectively fabricated over time. - The problem of “personifying” states is Milliken’s (2001, 21–23) concern as well, and she develops
a parallel theoretical analysis. In the context of organizational studies, see the essays in Nicolini, Gherardi,
and Yanow (2003) for various methodological treatments of collective action. - In biblical scholarship, hermeneutic rules for textual interpretation were stipulated in talmudic exege-
sis (those Jewish texts, codified in the sixth century, interpreting the laws of conduct articulated in what the
Christian world calls the “Old Testament”). In Christian traditions, hermeneutic rules were developed in the
context of the debate between Protestantism and Catholicism over who had interpretive authority: the Church
and its representatives, or any layperson trained in hermeneutic rules. Traweek (1988, 160) links these ideas
to natural science through the analogy of the Bible to “the book of nature”: Physicists, she writes, equating
nature with data, use their machines to read and decipher nature-data texts. For primary works in hermeneu-
tics see, e.g., Dilthey (1976) and Gadamer (1976); secondary sources include Bernstein (1976), Burrell and
Morgan (1979), and Polkinghorne (1983). - This brings us back full circle, ironically enough, to the study of rhetoric and oratory and the ancient
Greek sources of political theory. Indeed, Burke’s dramatistic literary theory (1969 [1945], 1989), which
extends literary analysis to interpretations of everyday life and has been applied widely to social, organiza-
tional, and policy acts (see, e.g., Feldman 1995, Gusfield 1989, Yanow 1996), harks back to Aristotle’s
theories of drama. - In many respects, symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology are the U.S. counterparts to the Euro-
pean schools of thought. Both are more explicitly methodological, as noted at the beginning of the chapter,
especially the latter, and both combine phenomenology’s focus on lived experience with a more semiotic
hermeneutics. On ethnomethodological analysis, developed in both its conversation and event analysis forms
in the mid-1900s, see Garfinkel (1977); on symbolic interactionist theory, see Mead (1934) and Goffman
(1959, 1974). Goffman’s work, of course, also draws on dramatistic metaphors. - This parallels the two senses in which Kuhn (1970) used the term “paradigm” in reference both to the