<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Jul 8, 2008, at 4:34 AM, Dvora Yanow wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">One approach to social science is to try to piece together "what really happened" (whatever methods one uses to do that). Another is to problematize whether we can ever do that in light of a phenomenological-hermeneutic understanding that that can never be known -- which then shifts us to inquiring into the multiplicities of the experience or perception of that event, speech, act, etc. Both (can) entail "interpretation" -- as does the interpretation of statistical data. But what "interpretive" signifies in methodology/methods is rather different.<br><br>I suppose, Patrick, that this is why you prefer to refer to these as "relational" methods/methodologies?<br></span></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>Actually, for me "interpretive" and "relational" catch up two different things (and, full disclosure, I rarely if ever self-identify as an "interpretivist" -- I suppose I was scared/persuaded away from that term by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, both of whom argued that "to interpret" meant something like "to explicate" or "to lay out" rather than "to explain"). Both are ontological matters, but they're different kinds of ontology.</div><div><br></div><div>"Interpretive" for me lives in the realm of philosophical ontology, i.e. claims about our "hook-up" to the world and how knowers and things known are connected to one another. This is the realm of the classical Cartesian mind/body problem, and it's also the place where Derrida and other poststructuralists like to play, along with analytical philosophy since at least Kant and arguably before then (Hobbes' nominalism -- names for things are arbitrary conventions, and don't correspond to any putative essence of those things -- might be read this way, for example.) Some philosophers would argue that this is epistemology, not ontology; I'd disagree because the very notion that we can separate how we know things about the world from how we observers/knowers are connected to the world is itself a notion that only makes sense given a certain understanding of how we are connected to the world! To say "there's a world that we're connected to, and then there's how we go about generating knowledge of that world" is a dualist position, positing a radical difference between mind and world such that the world exists in some sense "out there" and our knowledge-production strategies are intended to bridge the gap between mind and world.</div><div><br></div><div>But that dualist -- or, in its contemporary idiom, "realist" (and please, please, don't repeat the unfortunate philosophical error of calling this dualism "positivist," since actual positivists like Carnap and Hempel were quite ambivalent about the status of a mind-independent world) -- ontological presupposition is far from the only one we might stand on. The ideal-typical polar opposite of dualism wold be "monism," a rejection of the separation between mind and world and the assertion of continuity instead. Note that this isn't "idealism," which would be the rejection of a mind-independent world and an exclusive focus on mind; idealism, in its way, is just as dualist as realism, except that it privileges one side of the duality. Ditto "materialism," which isn't monism for very similar reasons. Monism in this sense simply means the rejection of a mind/world split as sensible or comprehensible; mind and world are in some sense made of the same stuff, and the fact that individual minds appear distinct from the world is an intriguing puzzle in need of an explanatory solution (I still think that the pragmatist work on "experience" is the best way to go about doing this; James and Dewey suggested that we needed to start with "situations" rather than knowers or objects. Hans Joas' _The Creativity of Action_ is a marvelous contemporary statement of this position, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention John Shotter's brilliant _Cultural Politics of Everyday Life_ in this context as well.)</div><div><br></div><div>Long set-up for a very brief point: for me, "interpretive" and "monist" are virtual synonyms. Both name a way of conceptualizing our hook-up to the world that rejects a mind/body split.</div><div><br></div><div>That said, there are obviously a lot of ways to go about producing knowledge in a monistic/interpretive vein (and I'm limiting this to knowledge-production in the terms I articulated a couple of posts ago: knowledge is explanatory and directed at empirical phenomena, which means that I'm excluding normative and ethical reflection/assessment). In order to get from a general claim about a hook-up to the world to a specific set of research questions and analytical techniques, we need some kind of scientific ontology: a catalog of entities, processes, concepts, and the like which define the object of analysis. "Relational" for me is a statement of scientific ontology, not a statement of philosophical ontology; to be a relationalist is to direct attention to the dynamics of social transactions rather than, say, the decisions of actors or the functional integration of systemic principles. To know that someone is a relationalist, or is adopting a relational approach in a given study, is to know how they are conceptualizing what they are studying. To know that someone is an interpretivist is to know how they understand the status of their work, and how they are designing their research overall; philosophical ontology speaks to research design and the place of an individual research-project in a broader knowledge-producing context, while scientific ontology speaks to particular techniques for data-collection and data-analysis. Standing somewhere between these two is "causality," which somewhat partakes of both kinds of ontological assumption, since it's both about the hook-up to the world and a set of substantive notions about the world.</div><div><br></div><div>[FYI, when I teach "interpretive research" I actually teach participant-observation ethnography, plus a little qualitative life-course interviewing. but I don't do either of those in my own empirical work, which is another reason I am not comfortable self-identifying as an interpretivist.]</div><div><br></div><div>A perhaps quicker and easier way to get at these distinctions is to think about the opposites of "interpretivism" and "relationalism." To pick up on something else Dvora said, I think that the opposite of interpretivism is "realism." But the opposite of relationalism is not realism -- clearly not, because we have "relational realists" all over the place (including the late Charles Tilly). No, the opposite of relationalism is "essentialism" or "substantialism." And all of these logical combinations are possible: relational realism, essentialist realism, interpretive essentialism, and interpretive relationalism. What are not possible are positions like "interpretive realism" or "relational essentialism," because those are internally contradictory stances.</div><div><br></div><div>What you got in this post is the compressed-onto-a-microdot version of the analytical core of the book I'm working on at the moment. When chapters are ready for eyes other than mine I'll make them available, in case people are interested in commenting.</div><div><br></div><div>PTJ</div><div apple-content-edited="true"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>===</div><div>Patrick Thaddeus Jackson</div><div>Director, General Education Program, American University</div><div>Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Relations and Development</div><div><a href="http://profptj.blogspot.com">http://profptj.blogspot.com</a> | <a href="http://www.kittenboo.com">http://www.kittenboo.com</a></div><div>calendar: <a href="http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick">http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div></span> </div><br></body></html>