26 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
shared way of seeing, defining, and researching a scientific “problem” and to the community of scientists
seeing the problem in that way. See also Kuhn (1977). Merton (in Merton and Barber 2004, 266–69) briefly
discusses the differences between his and Kuhn’s uses of “paradigm.”- I describe my experience of this process in my sense making of the architectural design of the com-
munity center buildings, in chapter 20, this volume. - This list roughly follows the history of ideas in literary analysis, from seeing meaning as residing in
the author’s intentions (and hence, his own background); to the so-called “death of the author” period, in
which meaning was seen as residing in the text alone (in word choice, alliteration, rhythm, etc.); to the rise
of reader-response theory, which argued that the interpretation of texts is influenced by what the reader
brings to the reading—or in an interaction among all three elements. See, e.g., Ciardi (1959), Iser (1989),
and the discussion below and in note 37. - Indeed, this captures a central pedagogical point, especially as articulated by Freire (1972, 1973):
that an educator must start with students at the point of their present understanding and move forward
from there. - These ideas are important both for a philosophy of categories and categorizing and for understanding
various of the interpretive methods taken up in part III of this book. The passage continues: “To search for a
meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that
are alike” (Foucault 1970, 29). This is, of course, the concern of semiotics (the study of signs and their
signifiers; see, e.g., Gottdiener and Lagopoulos [1986], Manning [1977]). There are significant differences
between Foucault’s thinking and the phenomenological and hermeneutic ideas sketched out in this
chapter—he was, for example, very critical of phenomenology as a philosophy and what he saw as its
ignoring of power—and I do not mean to appear to be eliding them in citing him here and in such a brief
reference. I do not have the space to delve into these differences, which are discussed and debated at length
in other works (e.g., Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, Hoy 1986). - Psychological research (e.g., Rosenhan, Frederick, and Burrowes 1968) bears this out.
- Collins (2001, 108–9) suggests two indicators through which one knows one has succeeded in this:
“ceasing to commit faux pas during interactions with respondents... [and] the nature of conversations...
if you can get them to listen to you seriously and interestedly when you discuss their subject that means you
are getting somewhere... .” He is addressing tacit knowledge in practices, but the point holds more broadly. - This delineation of four possible interpretive moments in the research process builds on Van Maanen’s
(1995, 5–23) discussion of three “moments” in ethnography: collecting information, constructing a report,
and its reading by various audiences. - From the linguistic terms phonemic (“internal” meaning) and phonetic (universal laws).
- I hasten to emphasize that the discovery is of what the researcher saw—that is, his frames or
sense making—in his notes on observations and/or interviews, not of what was “actually” in the experi-
ence or setting. - Given interpretive methods’ treatment of acts and objects as “texts,” there is an irony, wholly unin-
tended, in my reference here to Iser’s work, since he dismisses the extension of the text metaphor to action.
In response to Stanley Fish’s comment that his method does not consider the world as a text, Iser noted the
“restrictions of the literary text that make it an unsuitable metaphor for reality” (1989, 66–67).