PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 9century (especially strong between the two world wars) under the name logical positivism (also
known as the “Vienna Circle” because of its proponents’ main location; on this history see, e.g.,
Abbagnano 1967, Passmore 1967, Polkinghorne 1983).^8 It was primarily against the claims of the
logical positivists that interpretive philosophies developed (see, e.g., DeHaven-Smith 1988;
Hawkesworth 1988; Jennings 1983, 1987; Mary Hawkesworth’s chapter in this volume takes up
the critique more fully).
Despite disagreements on ontological and epistemological matters, scientists working out of
interpretive presuppositions, speaking broadly, share in common with those working out of posi-
tivist ones the two central attributes of scientific practice (what it means to “do” science or to “be”
scientific) named above: an attitude of doubt, and a procedural systematicity. Where they differ is
in how these are enacted. Interpretive scientists share the appreciation for the possible fallibility
of human judgment characteristic of post-Popperian science (discussed more fully in chapter 2).
Maintaining the attitude of doubt or testability toward their subject matter that derives from this
orientation, interpretive researchers enact that doubt in other, nonexperimental ways. They con-
test the concept of universal and regular generalizability embedded in the notion of “law,” al-
though they typically proceed from the assumption that human activity is patterned.^9 They also
have a different understanding of what it means to prosecute “rigor” in research (see the discus-
sion in chapter 4); yet interpretive research, following its own canons of practice, is no less sys-
tematic than positivist-informed research, which renders the work “methodical” in different ways
from that prescribed in the steps of the “scientific method.”
The research practices undertaken by scientists conducting their work, knowingly and con-
sciously or not, in ways informed or influenced by interpretive presuppositions enact ideas devel-
oped during the first part of the twentieth century in two schools of philosophical thought,
phenomenology and hermeneutics. These engaged the same sorts of questions concerning knowl-
edge and social reality that occupied positivist philosophers. Interpretive philosophers argued
that the analogy drawn by positivists between the natural and physical worlds and the social
world (and calling, therefore, for a single form of scientific practice) is a false analogy. The latter
cannot be understood in the same way as the former because of an essential difference between
them: Unlike (to the best of our present knowledge) rocks, animals, and atoms, humans make,
communicate, interpret, share, and contest meaning. We act; we have intentions about our ac-
tions; we interpret others’ actions; we (attempt to) make sense of the world: We are meaning-
making creatures. Our institutions, our policies, our language, our ceremonies are human creations,
not objects independent of us. And so a human (or social) science needs to be able to address what
is meaningful to people in the social situation under study. It is this focus on meaning, and the
implications of that focus, that the various interpretive methods share.
UNDERSTANDING VERSTEHEN: INTERPRETIVE GROUNDING
Phenomenology and hermeneutics took as points of departure first the fact that the researcher’s
perspective shaped the generation of knowledge, and second that the way to study human actors
was through verstehen—understanding—as that concept was developed initially by Wilhelm
Dilthey and Max Weber.
In addressing the question of how things might be known, early interpretive thinkers (e.g.,
Johan Gustav Droysen, Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert) turned to
Kant’s central idea that knowing depends on a priori knowledge.^10 The individual was under-
stood to bring prior knowledge to his or her experiences, thereby giving shape to the myriad
sensate stimuli (such as light and sound) vying for attention. That is, humans do not perceive the