8 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
TRUTH CLAIMS: EVIDENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE CHARACTER
OF SCIENCETextbook discussions of methods (of any sort) rarely begin with reflective inquiry on the practice
of science, on the historical situatedness of what it means to “do” science, to “be” scientific. As a
result, methods appear to be free-floating tools unmoored in conceptual space (unless one reads
also in the philosophy of science literature). But criteria for assessing the knowledge claims made
by a study (such as reliability and validity)—indeed, the very act of claiming to know something
with some certainty—reflect an understanding of the practice of science that has emerged over
the last two centuries, as “science” has parted company from “philosophy” (e.g., natural science
from natural philosophy) and developed its own identity. To situate interpretive methods as a
scientific undertaking requires a brief excursion into the context of contemporary understandings
of science as a practice.
To be “scientific” is, first off, to reflect a particular orientation toward the world in asking
certain kinds of questions, and this involves claims making about the subject(s) of study. Built
into this questioning practice is, at its core, as a character trait of the profession, an attitude of
doubt. A reader of a scientific report can reasonably inquire of its author about the bases for its
claims. “How do you know that which you are claiming about this event, or this government, or
this organization, or this community? What is the foundation [or ‘truth value,’ in philosophical
language] for your claim(s)?” Since the early 1700s, thanks to Newton, metaphysical accounts to
explain an apple falling from a tree, such as Zeus and Hera throwing thunderbolts, are increasingly
less likely to be invoked in modern and “modernizing” communities than “scientific laws”—in
this case, gravity. Newton’s observations and those of other late-fifteenth- to early-eighteenth-
century European thinkers, such as Copernicus and Galileo, laid the foundation for a conception
of “science” that, for many, replaced religion as the source of certain knowledge. That conception
still holds today and actively shapes understandings of what it means to do science or to be
scientific.^5
It rests, first, on the understanding that humans possess powers of reasoning that they can
apply systematically to the world surrounding them: They need not rely for explanations on the
authority of tradition (or charisma, in a Weberian view) vested in religious or monarchic leaders.^6
Second, the application of that reasoning yields a set of “laws” or principles considered to be
universal—that is, holding at all places at all times for all persons (i.e., regardless of class or
religion, race or gender, paving the way for non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and women to be
understood as having personhood). Third, this universality implies a certain regularity or order
inhering in natural and physical events (and it is discoverable, point one above). This, in turn,
means that these events can be predicted—and, hence, controlled (for more on this history of
ideas, see, e.g., Bernstein 1976, 1983; Dallmayr and McCarthy 1977; Rabinow and Sullivan
1979). The extension of this understanding of what “science” entails from the physical and natu-
ral world to the social or human world was the foundation of nineteenth-century positivist thought
(first as social positivism, reformulated mid-century as evolutionary positivism, and evolving
toward the end of the century into critical positivism or empirio-criticism).^7
The differences among the versions of positivism are not central to the present argument, save
for one point that becomes key to the interpretive philosophies that began to develop in engaging
critical positivism. In the view of critical positivists, certainty of knowledge could be entrusted
only to claims based on the senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell); to eliminate error, science
had to be limited to sense descriptions of experience. Although this school of thought petered out
toward the end of the nineteenth century, a resurgence of related ideas grew in the early twentieth