PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 7theorists and Pamela Brandwein, Patrick Jackson, and Ronald Schmidt do in theirs with respect to
jurisprudists, political parties, and legislators). In this view, the subject of social scientific study
“is not an inert fact of nature... merely there” (Said 1978, 4) and social scientific theories are not
“mirror[s] of nature” (Rorty 1979). All ideas—including those of the natural and physical sciences
—have “a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given [them]
reality and presence” (to borrow Edward Said’s words [1978, 4–5] from the context of Orient and
Occident). In this sense, then, social scientific texts do not merely present their subjects through
the lenses of their data, but represent and re-present—constitute, construct—them.
The philosophies that developed these concerns emerged in engagement with the critical posi-
tivism of the later nineteenth century and the logical positivism of the early twentieth century,
through both critique of their perceived shortcomings and positing of what proponents felt was a
more logically compelling delineation of the entailments of human social life in constituting Self,
Other, and the broader social group. “Interpretive” methodology has since become an umbrella
term subsuming several different schools of thought, including those drawing, explicitly or im-
plicitly, on phenomenology, hermeneutics, or (some) Frankfurt School critical theory, along with
symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology, among others. Many of these ideas dovetail with
late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century pragmatism^4 and later-twentieth-century feminist epis-
temology and research methods (e.g., Falco 1987; Harding 1989, 1990; Hartsock 1987;
Hawkesworth 1989; Heldke 1989; Miller 1986; Modleski 1986) and science studies (e.g., Harding
1991, Latour 1987, Longino 1990, Traweek 1988).
This chapter treats, with a rather broad brush, those philosophical presuppositions held in
common by several of these schools of thought, which provide conceptual grounding for inter-
pretive methods. Not only do these logically prior, or underlying, notions of social realities and
their “knowability” distinguish them from the positivist presuppositions with which they took
issue (discussed by Mary Hawkesworth in chapter 2). These philosophical argumentations also
provide the methodological principles shared by and manifested in the various interpretive meth-
ods of accessing, generating, and analyzing data, for all their other differences. The philosophical
terrain encompassed here is vast; discussing it in any detail would require a book-length manu-
script itself; and, indeed, many books have been written, both primary sources and secondary
analyses, on these questions. If space allowed, other schools of thought could also be more exten-
sively discussed in terms of their influence on and/or manifestations in interpretive research prac-
tices, specifically, American pragmatism, toward the more philosophical end of the spectrum of
influence (see note 3); ethnomethodology (developed by Harold Garfinkel), also of U.S. origins,
toward the more explicitly methodological end; and critical theory (both Frankfurt School and
wider ranging), symbolic interactionism (developed by George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman),
and feminist theories in the middle of the continuum (that is, combining both conceptual frame-
works and “tools”). In my reading of this history of ideas, the foundational concepts, relation-
ships, and understandings enacted in interpretive research methods are well established in the
various philosophical arguments of phenomenology and hermeneutics; the other schools of thought
articulate similar ideas, based on similar presuppositions, albeit with different orientations or
even, as with Frankfurt School critical theory, in critique. Here, I sketch out the parameters of the
arguments as engaged in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Although I am eliding differences
that from other perspectives may be crucial, for what I wish to argue those distinctions are less
central. My purpose is to show that interpretive methods do not just spring ab origine, at whim,
but rather have considerable philosophical grounding. I hope to scatter sufficient bibliographical
breadcrumbs that a reader curious for greater depth and detail will be able to follow the trail of
argument further than space here allows.