MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 269situation (Kondo 1990). Such research has as its primary goal to make explicit and visible the
prosthetics at work in a given situation, to “denaturalize” them and make them less transparent
(Weldes 1999a, 241–42)—that is, to make them more apparent and less taken for granted. In
addition, research of this sort should illustrate how those prosthetics interact and concatenate so
as to produce practical outcomes, and it should do so in a way that respects and preserves creativ-
ity and contingency both for the social actors under investigation and for the scholarly researcher
conducting the investigation.
By deploying appropriate conceptual and theoretical prosthetics, an analytic that takes the
double hermeneutic seriously can preserve agency in a way that other approaches to the study of
social life cannot. But this is surprisingly difficult to do.
NEOPOSITIVISM
Consider, for instance, the way that a “neopositivist” research methodology would approach the
parliamentary exchange between Schumacher and Adenauer. The neopositivist explanatory ap-
proach aims “at showing that the event in question was not ‘a matter of chance,’ but was to be
expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions,” and it seeks to identify sys-
tematic connections between factors that hold true across cases (Hempel 1965, 235; see also
King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 55–63, 76–82). Public rhetoric in a neopositivist account is
primarily an expression of underlying “ideas,” understood as subjectively held “beliefs,” which
are also variable attributes amenable to comparative hypothesis testing (Goldstein and Keohane
1993; Laffey and Weldes 1997).^9 In order to demonstrate the causal effect of some factor (say,
nationalist beliefs that permit an opponent to be characterized as a mere pawn of the occupying
powers), it is necessary to figure out in advance what such beliefs imply, so that the actual out-
come can be compared with the hypothetical prediction.
In this conception, Schumacher simply matched his underlying preferences with the efficiently
predicted effects of accusing Adenauer of betraying the German nation—and any actor with a
similar preference structure placed in the same situation would inevitably have made the same
choice. But this means that the theoretical capacity to do otherwise, along with any creative
aspects of Schumacher’s action, has been effectively eliminated from the account. The scholar’s
action in specifying the character of particular social actions in advance (or at least in supposed
isolation from the data) ends up depriving the actors under analysis of much of their agency. An
actor selecting from among solid, stable “ideas” whose determinate character is specifiable in the
abstract is reduced to the role of a supermarket shopper selecting from among competing brands.
Individual agents may be preserved, but agency is sacrificed.
The neopositivist approach to public rhetoric is a kind of “necessity individualism” (see P.T.
Jackson 2003) and is not really designed to preserve agency. In effect, it downplays both aspects
of the double hermeneutic: The actors under investigation are less active producers of their situ-
ation than passive consumers of it, and the scholarly researcher is not a creative interpreter of the
situation so much as an accurate reflector of it.
SINGLE HERMENEUTICS
Methodological approaches that are more focused on the question of agency often emphasize one
or the other of the two hermeneutic circles implicated in the double hermeneutic. By doing so,
they introduce some measure of agency into their accounts, but end up restricting that agency
somewhat arbitrarily.