xxii INTRODUCTION
(as Mark Bevir assays in chapter 15) without attending to distinctions between the natural and the
human sciences, specifically the connection of beliefs to action. Ido Oren (chapter 11) cannot
direct our attention to historical analyses without also engaging questions of epistemology, that
is, how researchers understand what it means to do “historical” research. Patrick Jackson (chapter
14) needs to explicate the idea of the double hermeneutic in order to explain what was happening
on the floor of the Bundestag. And Pamela Brandwein (chapter 12) must elaborate on insights
from science studies concerning knowledge production processes to construct an account of the
legal community’s receptivity to anachronistic interpretations of court decisions.
There are a number of possible explanations for this general observation. To the extent that
quantitative researchers hold positivist presuppositions, they may consider epistemological and
ontological issues settled, even irrelevant (perusing the pages of many associational “flagship”
journals gives such an impression); and so there is no need to dwell on them in empirical research
reports. As important, certain writing traditions discourage or may even preclude epistemological
and ontological reflections, because the standard “formula” for writing an “empirical” (read:
quantitative) research article does not include such a component. This is evident, for example, in
the instructions to authors in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
(American Psychological Association 2001), which describes a very narrow model of how to
present research. The standard methods section, for example, is to consist of a discussion of
laboratory methods rather than a broader consideration of methodology, which reasonably could
include discussion of epistemological or ontological issues. In contrast, the writing traditions
inherited from the Chicago School or encouraged by the ethnographic tradition more generally
are much more open ended, allowing and even encouraging scholarly reflection in addition to the
“reporting” of findings. As discussed in chapter 5, self-conscious “reflexivity” has emerged as
one criterion marking good interpretive research, which explains, in part, its presence in such
works. It may also be the case that when there is a dominant method for doing research that is
not working for scholars, they may, in a sense, be forced to try to figure out at a “deeper” (i.e.,
presuppositional) level why that is the case, and this theorizing is worked out in the research
writing along with the presentation and analysis of the data. When methodological issues and
methods procedures are intertwined in this way, readers from some epistemic communities
may experience the writing as more “philosophical” than what they typically associate with
“empirical research.”
Given all these varieties, we have chosen not to force-fit contributors into our view of interpre-
tive science; and so the chapters at times produce the “wild, messy intercropping” (Tim Pachirat,
p. 376, this volume) of interpretive research.METHODS, METHODOLOGIES, AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES:
PERSONAL REFLECTIONSGovernmental, legal, organizational, communal, and other social actions and their analysis are a
human activity, and human perception is not a “mirror of nature” (Rorty 1979) but an interpreta-
tion of it. We have tried to bring together scholars whose work reflects the breadth of interpretive
approaches being brought to bear on interesting, important, and relevant concerns of various
aspects of human life. We have drawn authors largely from across the subfields of political sci-
ence, construed quite broadly: not only from international relations, comparative government,
American government, and political theory (philosophy), the four subfields that crystallized in
the twentieth-century United States as the accepted disciplinary divisions (see Kaufman-Osborn