PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 13of past experience, education, training, family-community-regional-national (and so on) back-
ground, and character. These constitute, for each of us, the contexts that give rise to our lifeworld;
both lived experience and lifeworld, in turn, shape the way that we understand our “Selves” and
the world within which we live (Schütz 1967, 1973). Sense making—interpretation—with re-
spect to a specific event or experience is done through retroactive reflection on that event or
experience informed by prior knowledge. It is as if all human actors enact the words attributed, in
Yogi Berra’s telling, to a baseball umpire speaking about pitched balls crossing the home plate
being “balls,” or “strikes.” “They ain’t nuttin’ ’til I call ’em.”
The point holds, as well, for social scientists with respect to their subjects of study. This ren-
ders the researcher, as well as the researched, a situated entity: Meaning making and the specific
meaning(s) made by each one are contextualized by prior knowledge and by history and sur-
rounding elements (other events, other experiences), a position shared by critical theorists and
echoed in feminist “standpoint theory” (e.g., Hartsock 1987, Hawkesworth 1989). The implica-
tion of this argument is not only that universal or cross-case laws are not possible in the same
way in which positivist laws claim generalizability (see Adcock’s discussion, chapter 3, this
volume) but also that social “reality” may be construed differently by different people: The
social world we inhabit and experience is potentially a world of multiple realities, multiple
interpretations. Discovery of some external, singular reality, a requisite of methodological posi-
tivism, is not possible in this view.
The process of sense making is, in this way, iterative: Prior experiences shape one’s under-
standing of new experiences, and new understanding derived from these experiences itself may
refine the a priori knowledge brought to bear on subsequent experiences. All knowledge, in this
sense, is social knowledge, as Karl Mannheim noted (quoted in Burrell and Morgan 1979); obser-
vation and “facts” are theory-laden; and what we take to be objective “facts” may well be shaped,
if not affected, by the observer.
The focus on the lifeworld as the core of experience and, hence, of the researcher’s analysis
positions individual subjectivity at the center. As Bernstein (1976, 145) wrote, describing Schütz’s
views on this subject:
A human actor is constantly interpreting his [or her] own acts and those of others. To under-
stand human action we must not take the position of an outside observer who “sees” only the
physical manifestations of these acts; rather we must develop categories for understanding
what the actor—from his [or her] own point of view—“means” in his [or her] actions.... [I]n
focusing on action, we can and must speak of its subjective meaning.It is for this reason that interpretive researchers focus on methods of understanding from the
perspective of the actor in the situation. At times, this renders the relationship between the actor’s
meaning and the researcher’s meaning problematic: How do we reconcile the researcher’s cat-
egory construction with the actor’s situated meaning? (I return to this point below; see also chap-
ter 4, on faithful rendering, and chapter 5, on evaluative criteria.)
Applied to social situations, phenomenology has been called upon to address not only the
individual Self, but Selves in social encounter with one another: how it is that in communal,
political, organizational, and other collective settings and encounters, people manage to under-
stand one another without necessarily making explicit the “rules” for living that they, by and
large, adhere to. P. Berger and Luckmann (1966, part II) provide an extended and detailed discus-
sion of a hypothetical situation, starting with Persons A and B as aboriginal creators of rules for
living in the same setting. Over time, the rules are submerged into unspoken practices, becoming