QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING

On Understanding Understanding

Thomas A. Schwandt
Indiana University

The phenomenon of understanding lies at the heart of the qualitative inquiry enterprise.
Drawing on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, this article discusses the follow-
ing four conditions under which understanding unfolds: (a) the difference between
knowing and understanding; (b) understanding as learning rather than reading; (c)
understanding as relational and hence requiring openness, dialogue, and listening; and
(d) understanding as entailing the possibility for misunderstanding. The article closes
with some brief comments on the implications of this investigation for what it means to
be a qualitative inquirer.

What does it mean to say that one understands or has an understanding of

something? What is it that one seeks to understand? These are the questions
that I wish to explore in this article. They are important questions for qualita-
tive inquirers because understanding is the very aim of that enterprise, in all
of its current forms. Moreover, I worry that with all our intramural argu-
ments about method, criteria, text, voice, representation, and the like, we are
losing sight of what understanding is all about. So I think it is wise that, from
time to time, we revisit the idea of what it means to say that qualitative
inquiry aims at understanding what others are doing and saying.
In this article, I am not particularly interested in the history of the term to
understand and the many ways it has been theorized in the interpretive tradi-
tion (but see Schwandt, in press). Rather, I am concerned first with the phe-
nomenology of understanding and then with some implications of this study
for what it means to be a qualitative inquirer and to do that kind of work. I
also ought to point out that my ideas about the phenomenology of under-
standing are drawn from Gadamer and Taylor and what some have charac-
terized as the conservative wing of Heideggerian hermeneutics, not from the
more radical wing as developed by Derrida and Foucault.

Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article, titled “The Study of Understanding
and Its Implications for Qualitative Inquiry,” was given as the second invited address
in the Egon Guba Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the Qualitative Research
Special Interest Group, American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Que-
bec, Canada, April 22, 1999.
Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 5 Number 4, 1999 451-464
© 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.

451

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452 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

Gadamer (1989) has repeatedly emphasized that the work of hermeneu-

tics “is not to develop a procedure of understanding but to clarify the condi-
tions in which understanding takes place. But these conditions are not of the
nature of a ‘procedure’ or a method which the interpreter must of himself
bring to bear on the text” (p. 263). My aim is to clarify in a rather brief way the
following four such conditions: (a) the difference between knowing and
understanding; (b) understanding as learning rather than reading; (c) under-
standing as relational and hence requiring openness, dialogue, and listening;
and (d) understanding as entailing the possibility for misunderstanding.

KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING

Please consider the following question/statements: “Do you understand
what I mean?” “I just don’t understand you,” “They understood each other
perfectly,” “I hope to understand you better,” “She felt that she was com-
pletely misunderstood,” “They reached an understanding.” Without putting
too fine a point on it and without opening a very old argument about the dif-
ferences, if any, between understanding and explanation, when we say that
we understand what others are doing or saying, we are stating something
quite different than that we know. To understand is literally to stand under, to
grasp, to hear, get, catch, or comprehend the meaning of something. To know
is to signal that one has engaged in conscious deliberation and can demon-
strate, show, or clearly prove or support a claim. In Anglo-American thought,
at least, knowing and knowledge are more often than not associated with
intellectual achievement, cognitive performance, or a special kind of mastery
of subject matter (Kerdeman, 1998)—“she really knows her stuff,” we say. We
express the difference between knowing and understanding in German with
the questions, “Woher weiβt du das?” (“How do you know that?”) and “Wie
verstehen Sie das?” (“What do you make of that?”).
In life in general, and in qualitative inquiry as a particular kind of research
pursuit, we are always engaged in trying to “make something of that”; we are
always about the business of construing the meaning of something. You are
reading this article, and you are trying to make something of it. You observe a
teacher approach a seventh-grader in a crowded hallway and put his arm
around her shoulder, and you ask, “What am I to make of that?” You see two
friends walking side by side, and he reaches out and touches her cheek, and
you ask yourself, “What am I to make of that?” You are observing in what has
been described to you by the teacher as a learner-centered classroom. You
witness an exchange between a student and a teacher in which the teacher
tells the student to put away his building blocks, get out his reading book, and
get to work. And you ask yourself, “What am I to make of that?” We are
always trying to understand the meanings that actions and utterances have in
the inhabited world, the world of everyday life, the world in which we go

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 453

about living our lives. This is the ground that lies before us, the quest for the
meaning of our actions as situated beings.
This is perhaps an obvious and hence all too overlooked point about what
qualitative inquiry assumes. We need to remind ourselves that empiricism—
including several varieties of interpretive sociology—is the quest to some-
how get beneath this rough ground. Empiricist theory aims to trump our
lived experience—our everyday understandings of actions and utterances—
by getting to the bottom of things, providing the last word, discovering the
real structure of human behavior and consciousness that is thought to some-
how lie beneath the terms of everyday life (Taylor, 1988). In my view, much of
the current controversy within the field of qualitative inquiry stems from the
fact that because qualitative inquiry largely sees itself as a social science, it
cannot let go of this empiricist quest for knowledge as a getting to the bottom
of things—of the pursuit of a particular kind of interpretation “that can be
reliably protected from whatever snares or obstacles might beset it and thus
put on a sound objective footing” (Dunne, 1993, p. 125).
But qualitative inquiry takes the turn to the lebenswelt—to the practical and
communal life of persons, to dialogue and language—with utmost serious-
ness. The “conversation that we are,” to borrow a phrase from Gadamer, is
about the meaning of speech and action, and meanings are expressed in lan-
guage. That language is not private but shared, and hence meaning is not sub-
jective but intersubjective. Moreover, the significance of our language use
does not reside solely in its capacity to designate, discover, refer, or depict
actual states of affairs. Rather, language is used to carry out or perform
actions and to disclose how things are present to us as we deal with them. This
is the historical, cultural, and linguistic context of our practices and our
shared being—it can never be fully objectified or grounded (Guignon, 1991).
We both start and end our efforts to answer the question “What do we make
of this?” in our best grasp, our best account, of ourselves as agents in the
world.
Moreover, to formulate our best accounts as practical agents we depend
on the world around us. We are always in and of the world and, as it is put in a
recent commentary on the significance of hermeneutics for the human sci-
ences,

There is no way to sever ourselves from our ties to the world without undercut-
ting our ability to be human at all. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, our being-in-the-
world—our involvement in contexts of significance—is the bedrock of all theo-
rizing. And to the extent that there is no external vantage point from which we
can describe this all-pervasive background of everydayness, there is no way to
make it explicit once and for all. But the fact that our quest for insight into our
being as situated agents is open-ended does not imply that everything is up in
the air, a matter of mere “play.” This seems to be Wittgenstein’s point when he
says, “The difficult thing is not to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize
the ground that lies before us as ground.” (Guignon, 1991, p. 99)

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454 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

There is a truth to the matter about what we make of things as we traverse

this rough ground. But it is not the truth that is expressible in propositions
that abstract from the meanings that actions and utterances have in the every-
day world and that take the form of an absolute account of reality (Smith,
1997). Nor is it the kind of truth that comes from standing over and against an
object that must be broken down and mastered through acquiring knowledge
of it. Nor is it the kind of truth that is the methodically achieved knowledge of
the empirical scientist and whose theoretical guarantee is to be found in the
modern conception of method itself (Dunne, 1993). Rather, it is the truth of the
best account possible. It is the truth that is disclosed by the better—the more
perspicuous, the more coherent, the more insightful—of competing interpre-
tations. If there is a kind of cognitive power to be had by doing qualitative
inquiry, then it is the power of refining our ordinary understanding of our
practices of teaching, healing, managing, learning, and so forth, rather than
any leap out of the lived reality of those practices. The question of what it
means to understand while we dwell in the life world is the second concern I
wish to address.

UNDERSTANDING AS LEARNING
RATHER THAN READING
We are in the grip of the text. Almost four centuries ago, Shakespeare
opined that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely play-
ers” (“As You Like It”). But as we stand on the verge of the 21st century, we
seem to believe that all the world’s a text and all the men and women merely
readers. Denzin (1997) has characterized the problems, prospects, and forms
of interpretive, qualitative, ethnographic work in the sixth moment of its
development as all having to do with the text. Geertz (1983) tells us that social
institutions, social customs, and social changes are all in some sense “read-
able”; Ricoeur (1981) defends the view that social action can be read like a text;
Taylor (1985) employs a textual paradigm in explaining the aim of the herme-
neutical human sciences; Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics appeals to a
textual model, and of course, for Derrida and Rorty, everything is a text. In
sum, the text is the primary model for the object of interpretation.
But, as Gallagher (1992) explains in Hermeneutics and Education, if all inter-
pretation is modeled on textual interpretation, “it follows that interpretation
must be a kind of reading, since its object is always a kind of text” (p. 321). Gal-
lagher argues that

the modern, Romantic emphasis on the interior subject, the mind as the theatre
of interpretation (in contrast to the public theatre of the ancients), goes hand in
hand with the focus on textual interpretation, where interpretation is reading
and reading is an interior process. To the extent that modern hermeneutics takes
its orientation from the text as its model object and makes interpretation a silent

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 455

reading, and thus an interior understanding, it tends to exclude explication,

pedagogical presentation, and educational experience from the interpretive
process. (p. 325)

There are two problems with modeling understanding on the reading of a

text. First, as Gallagher suggests, in such a model, understanding and inter-
pretation become private, “interior” undertakings. To be sure, at least two
current conceptions of reading—the interactive and the transactional or con-
structionist approaches (Straw & Sadowy, 1990)—define reading as a genera-
tive act involving both text and reader, yet that act remains largely internal. It
is internal (or “interior”) in the sense that understanding and interpretation
are under the control of a self-reflective, autonomous, rational subject. Read-
ing is conceived of as a mental act, an activity of an individual conscious
mind. Self-reflection and autobiography are primary starting points for read-
ing. Second, when we model understanding on textual interpretation, on
reading comprehension, we are inclined to conceive of the task of under-
standing as that of the interior, private reconstruction (or construction) of
meaning (i.e., understanding) followed by the public representation of that
meaning (i.e., interpretation).
Each of these problems are addressed if, following Gallagher, we model
understanding not on textual interpretation, reading, nor the “object” of the
text, but on an educational “process,” a process of learning. On this model,
understanding and interpretation are not acts of an individual conscious
mind but enactments, performances, or a kind of praxis. Moreover, the start-
ing point for understanding and interpretation is not the autonomous indi-
vidual self and his or her self-examination. Rather, the starting point is the tra-
dition in which the interpreter stands. Gadamer (1989) explains this as
follows:

Self-reflection and autobiography . . . are not primary and therefore not an ade-
quate basis for the hermeneutical problem, because through them history is
made private once more. In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it.
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination,
we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in
which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-
awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical
life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments,
constitute the historical reality of his being. (pp. 276-277)

Understanding and interpretation are here conceived as practical-moral

activities that have less to do with grasping a content, a noetic meaning, and
more to do with engaging in a dialogue (Grondin, 1994) with that which is to
be understood—that which makes a claim on us. Gadamer used the concept
of “play” here as a way of grasping the educational experience, the participa-
tion, the to-and-fro movement that characterizes our encounter with that
which we seek to understand.

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456 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

When we seek to understand what others are doing and saying, we simul-
taneously publicly explicate that understanding. In fact, our efforts to pres-
ent, to articulate, to pronounce, or to say what we think we understand are
inseparable from our efforts to understand. To say it more simply, there isn’t
first a silent act of comprehension followed by a public recitation, rather,
understanding and speaking meaning are intertwined.
When we seek to understand what others are doing and saying, we ask of
them in a variety of ways the more general questions of “What are you up to?”
and “What do you mean?” Consider the following example (based on an
account of conversation as interpretation found in Dunne, 1993, p. 84): My
daughter and I are talking about her current job and whether she wants to
give it up and look for something else more challenging or go to graduate
school. She says to me in a voice with a hint of resignation, “Well, Dad, they
like me here, I got a raise, it’s interesting enough.” I am listening and trying to
understand what she means, what she is telling me. In that process of learn-
ing, I do not speak back her words to myself, I speak back words of my own to her.
I don’t take what she says as the only kind of expression involved in under-
standing here. If I did, then I would be engaged only in an interior process of
understanding (of reading) what she had in mind when she spoke the words
to me. Rather, I seek to express what I hear by speaking back to her—in my
own words. I say, half-questioning, to her, “Well, I’m glad that they value
you, Sarah. But it seems to me that you are successful but not really satisfied
with what you are doing now.”
Thus, in understanding and in interpreting her, I do not merely rehearse
within myself my daughter’s speech. Rather, my interpreting is a speaking
back. In trying to understand what my daughter means, what she is up to, I
am not attempting to get behind her words to her real meaning. Rather, I am
letting her words “sow their meaning in other words” (Dunne, 1993, p. 84),
which are then spoken back to her. The interpretation that comes into being in
this exchange is tentative and provisional. We each go on listening and speak-
ing, and in so doing, we come to hear differently or better, and this is
expressed in a new, amended understanding—a better account. The crucial
point here, as Dunne (1993, p. 142) explains is that “the language of the inter-
pretation does not merely offer what is understood a means of presenting
itself. Rather, the presenting is the understanding.” And Gadamer (1997)
reminds us that

language is the element in which we live, as fishes live in water. In linguistic

interaction, we call it conversation. We search for words, and they come to us,
and they either reach the other person or fail [her]. In the exchange of words, the
thing meant becomes more and more present. (p. 22)

When we model understanding on learning, we think of the task of

understanding as conversation, as the expression in language of what is
understood.

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 457

UNDERSTANDING AS RELATIONAL
In a provocative essay written a number of years ago titled “If Persons Are
Texts,” Gergen (1988) argued that understanding is best understood from a
relational perspective: “understanding is not contained within me, or within
you, but in that which we generate together in our form of relatedness” (p. 47).
As his later writings reveal, Gergen will not draw an ontological conclusion
from this observation, but, following Gadamer, that is precisely what I
believe is at stake in understanding. In philosophical hermeneutics, the act of
understanding is existential, not merely, or even, exegetical. Where under-
standing is defined as an act of exegesis, we imagine it to be a kind of critical
analysis or explanation of an utterance or action using the method of the her-
meneutic circle. Kerdeman (1998) explains that, in an exegetical methodol-
ogy, the interpreter

plays the strange parts of a narrative [or some social action] off against the integ-
rity of the narrative as whole until its strange passages are worked out or
accounted for. An interpreter’s self-understanding neither affects nor is affected
by the negotiation of understanding. Indeed, insofar as interpreters and linguis-
tic objects are presumed to be distinct, self-understanding is believed to bias and
distort successful interpretation. (p. 251)

Kerdeman adds that on an exegetical account of understanding, the notions

of familiarity and strangeness that characterize efforts to make sense of some-
thing are seen as evaluations that the interpreter assigns to various parts of
the action or utterance that confronts him. And the kind of understanding
that results from the process of tacking back and forth between the familiar
and the strange has no real import for the way of being of the interpreter,
other than perhaps experiencing the thrill of discovery.
But when understanding is conceived of as relational and existential,
familiarity and strangeness are not simply cognitive or rational assessments
of aspects of our experience, but ways in which we actually experience being
in the world. The true locus of our being, says Gadamer (1989), is this being in
between familiarity and strangeness. Kerdeman (1998) explains how it is that
we inhabit the world as interpretive beings.

Defined as an existential event, the familiar is not a proximal object or something

we have grasped before. The familiar is that which we live through as an experi-
ence of affirmation and comfort. Familiarity is a condition of belonging, of being
at home in the world. Strangeness, no less than familiarity, is emblematic of
human existence. That which is strange is not an objective problem we solve or
finally transcend. Strangeness is an experience of disorientation, exile, or loss.
We live through and are implicated in a situation in which we feel confused,
unable to find our bearings. Pulled between familiarity and strangeness, we find
ourselves in the middle of an ongoing liminal experience, not quite at home in
the world, yet not entirely estranged from it. The existential tension between

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458 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

“home” and “exile” at once distinguishes our human situation and also is the
very condition that makes understanding it possible. (p. 252)

When we seek to understand what others are doing and saying, we are
always standing in this in-between of familiarity and strangeness. Gadamer
(1989, p. 268) argues that we are “pulled up short” when we encounter situa-
tions and people that challenge our expectations and assumptions, those
situations wherein answers to the question “What should I make of this?” are
not easy to come by. Gadamer explains that we can make sense of these chal-
lenging encounters with others in three ways. The first is to try to discover the
typical behavior of the Other and to make predictions about others on the
basis of experience. We thereby form what we call knowledge of human
nature. Here, we treat the Other as an object in a free and uninvolved way,
much as we would any other object in our experiential field. This is the meth-
odological attitude of the social sciences, the idea of theoretical contempla-
tion of an object of our understanding. In such a process, “no essential refer-
ence is made to the interpreter, to the individual who is engaged in the
process of understanding and questioning” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 135).
In a second way of understanding the Other, the interpreter acknowledges
the Other as a person, but this understanding is a form of self-relatedness.
Here, the interpreter claims to know the Other from the Other’s point of view,
and even to understand the Other better than she understands herself. To be
sure, the interpreter understands the immediacy of the Other’s claim, but it is
co-opted from the standpoint of the interpreter. This can be understood as a
form of sympathetic listening in which we interpret others in our own terms
and refuse to risk our own prejudgments in the process. Gadamer notes that
by claiming to know the Other in this way, one robs his or her claims of their
legitimacy, and he argues that charitable or welfare work operates in this
way.
A third way of understanding begins from the full acknowledgment that
as interpreters we are situated within a tradition. It is only from such a pos-
ture that an interpreter can experience the Other truly as an Other and not
overlook his or her claim, but let them really say something to us. Gadamer
(1989) states that “without such openness to one another there is no genuine
human bond. Belonging together always means being able to listen to one
another” (p. 361). Thus, it seems that it is only the person who is awake to this
living in-between that can have new experiences and learn from them. Hence,
understanding requires an openness to experience, a willingness to engage in
a dialogue with that which challenges our self-understanding. To be in a dia-
logue requires that we listen to the Other and simultaneously risk confusion
and uncertainty both about ourselves and about the other person we seek to
understand.
It is only in an engagement of this kind, in a genuine conversation, that
understanding is possible. As Gadamer (1989) states, “the miracle of under-
standing is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 459

meaning” (p. 292). That common meaning can arise only in a dialogue
wherein one does not simply defend one’s own beliefs or criticize what the
other believes, but rather seeks to become clear about oneself, about one’s
own knowledge and ignorance (Molander, 1990). It is only if an engagement
is a genuine conversation that one can engage in checking one’s own preju-
dices. For, according to Dunne (1993), “the whole point of conversation is that
I both allow some play to my own thinking and, in so doing, expose it to the
counterweight of the Other’s contribution, which may confirm me in it or
force me to amend or abandon it” (p. 117).
It follows that in such an engagement, I seek to make sense of the Other
and to reach an understanding. But, as Wittgenstein points out, all attempts to
make sense entail the risk of making no(n)-sense, and to understand is to take
the risk of misunderstanding. This leads me to the final condition of under-
standing that I wish to clarify.

UNDERSTANDING AS ENTAILING
THE RISK OF MISUNDERSTANDING
As much as we are currently in the grip of the text, we are in the grip of the
denial of the possibility of error. To read the current methodological litera-
ture in qualitative inquiry is to learn of two attitudes toward error: Either (a)
there are multiple interpretations among which no one is better than any
other, or (b) error in interpretation is possible, but to identify it we must have
the right new criteria for linking understanding to action, voice, sacredness,
positionality, community, or some such touchstone (Lincoln, 1995). In sum,
either there is no such thing as error or misunderstanding or these two
notions can only be properly grasped in light of some new set of criteria.
Through recourse to four ideas, I hope to show that both of these views are
flawed. The first is the notion of what objective knowledge means. It is com-
monplace in philosophy to argue that objective knowledge is not the result of
a process whereby that knowledge was constituted. Rather, whether a claim
is valid or objective has to do with the future, with the possibility that I might
be wrong. My belief that p is objective when, despite the fact that I might now
be fully justified in maintaining p, it is possible that I was wrong about p. In
other words, my presumptive knowledge counts as objective when, even
though I have been as careful as I can be in checking that p holds, I could still
be surprised; I could still discover that p fails. Briefly put, my belief in p is
objective when, apart from matters of language and justification, there is still
something in p about which I might be making a mistake. My belief or knowl-
edge is subjective when such surprises are ruled out. In our everyday life, we
inhabit a world with real mistakes and surprises built in and, hence, objective
knowledge built in.

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460 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

The second is the notion of what it means to be intellectually virtuous.

Code (1983, p. 538) argues that there is more to the matter of “getting it right,”
as Wolcott calls it, than simply having a “good score in terms of cognitive
projects which come out right.” In her view, our efforts to navigate a world
full of mistakes and surprises requires a particular intellectual virtue that she
characterizes as

a matter of orientation toward the world and towards one’s knowledge-seeking

self as part of the world. The intellectually virtuous person values knowing and
understanding how things really are. S/he renounces the temptation to live
with partial explanations where fuller ones are attainable and the temptation to
live in fantasy or in a world of dream or illusion. (pp. 538-539)

What Code (1983) is claiming is that our concern with getting it right has
“more to do with our relation to the world than with the ‘content’ of particular
actions or knowledge claims” (p. 538).
A third notion borrowed from Taylor (1988) helps us understand what it
means to live this particular orientation in a world full of mistakes and sur-
prises. In a well-known argument, Taylor claims that we are self-interpreting
beings. This means that “there is no answer to how things are with us that is
quite independent of our interpretations” (Taylor, 1988, p. 55). Stated some-
what differently, our finding an answer to the question “What shall I make of
this?” in part, constitutes the kind of persons we become. But this does not
mean that problems of misunderstanding or error are irrelevant to the task
of interpretation. Consider the following example that I have adapted from
Taylor: My brother and I have an argument, and I am angry and resentful. My
brother tries to get me to explain why I resent him, and perhaps in the process
he is able to answer the story that I am now unfolding with his own version of
the events. Perhaps he convinces me that there’s another way of seeing
things, one in which he is not as culpable, insensitive, and uncaring as I have
portrayed him. Perhaps things go well, and I lose my resentment. Then the
whole thing will fit into a certain story for us, the story of an original hurt, my
smoldering feelings, and our talking it out to a new understanding.
Taylor (1988) argues that this negotiating of a new scenario is not at all
incompatible with there being a fact of the matter of how I felt, of how my
brother felt. On the contrary, the negotiation presupposes these facts of the
matter. He puts it this way:

The basic constraint in which we live is not just that any interpretation was pos-
sible. . . . The founding assumption under which [this negotiation] proceeds is
that there are answers to these questions about how people feel, what they want
or think, what they meant by that gesture, and so on. (pp. 55-56)

In other words, this effort of my brother and I to make sense of the matter
(to reach an understanding) presupposes, as a very condition of engaging in
the activity, that we can be wrong. Although what will count as a successful

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 461

negotiation or sound understanding here (as elsewhere) cannot be fixed in

advance of the contingencies of this actual engagement, we nonetheless have
a way of understanding error and an incorrect interpretation. To be sure, we
have no theory of error that specifies criteria or standards of right and wrong
interpretation, but we do have a theory of understanding that assumes we are
seeking interpretations that are mutually understood and adequate for find-
ing our way about the world. This is a theory of dialogue, about how to move
together in a direction where all sorts of misunderstanding and error will be
detected, found, and addressed (Molander, 1990).
Finally, a fourth notion that helps us think about error and misunder-
standing is suggested by Sokolowski’s (1997) exploration of ways in which
this conversation or dialogue can fail. First, a partner in the dialogue may be
too immature or mentally incapable of engaging in a conversation. Second, a
speaker may understand the discussion but find the topic too disturbing and
impulsively introduce a different issue. Third, a person may stay with a con-
versation but simply repeat the convictions that he has brought to it. Fourth,
the words of a partner in the dialogue may be deceptive, seeming to move the
conversation forward when they are in fact part of a strategy to mislead. Sok-
olowski (1997) holds that examining these possibilities (and others) for failure
makes it more clear that hermeneutics “does not legitimate any and every
projection of fantasy as valid” (p. 230). He adds that

The very description of failure and success in hermeneutics, the description of

how a conversation can stall as well as move on, shows that the thing [meaning]
being manifested in a particular instance is not just any thing at all. A conversa-
tion is not merely a human interaction, it is also a display of something, and the
success or failure of the conversation is a success or failure in the manifestation
of the thing in question. The fact that failure can be recognized indicates the pos-
sibility of recognizing success and hence of recognizing the identity of the thing
being brought to presence by the conversation. (Sokolowski, 1997, p. 231)

Previously, in the pages of this journal, I have written on the theme of

“farewell to criteriology” and the notions discussed above are a means of
revisiting the claim that one can have theory of understanding that embraces
the distinct possibility of misunderstanding (of getting it wrong, so to speak),
yet requires no criteria (Schwandt, 1996). The ways of misunderstanding
noted above are not criteria for determining whether an interpretation is cor-
rect. Moreover, we cannot possibly decide in advance of any particular effort
to engage in a conversation which of these ways may help us understand
whether that conversation is going wrong. This is so because the conversation
is an unrehearsed practical-moral adventure with no way of predicting how
it will turn out or what will turn up. Thus, these ways of understanding how a
dialogue might fail are just that, ways or possibilities of misunderstanding,
not standards for what it means to have a correct understanding. There are no
standards, no criteria of right and wrong, for dealing with the question of

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462 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 1999

whether our concepts (our understandings) are understood and adequate for
finding our way about the world (Molander, 1990).
To sum up, there are ways in which we can make sense of the fact that
every effort to understand runs the risk of misunderstanding, that every
effort to interpret faces the possibility of misinterpretation. And we can prof-
itably deal with this situation without having a theory of error and a set of cri-
teria that specify in advance what constitutes getting to the truth of the matter
in answering the question “What shall I make of this?”

CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS
FOR QUALITATIVE INQUIRY
The hermeneutic phenomenology of understanding previously sketched
is not translatable into a set of methods for the human sciences. It is possible,
as Gadamer demonstrates, to show that achieving understanding is similar to
acquiring the kind of practical wisdom called phronesis and to model a theory
of understanding on practical philosophy, but neither of these efforts are
closely related to the kinds of concerns with method that characterize qualita-
tive inquiry as a social science.
I have been discussing how understanding happens, and I claimed that
that happening can best be grasped when we think of notions like learning,
conversation, and the possibility of misunderstanding. The phenomenon of
understanding is not a methodological accomplishment, it cannot be cap-
tured in terms of a procedure or method, and it is not governed by a set of cri-
teria. Thus, one cannot take what I have been talking about as any kind of pre-
scription for “how to do” qualitative inquiry. For what I have been describing
is not a methodology, but an existential philosophy—understanding as char-
acteristic of our “being” in the world—an account of a practice that we all
engage in called the art of understanding, and the art of making something
understood to someone else.
Given that, it is reasonable to ask, “So what is the import of all of this for
our thinking about qualitative inquiry?” I can only offer some provisional
and modest responses at this time. For one thing, grasping the phenomenol-
ogy of understanding can make qualitative inquirers more wide awake to
what it means to “struggle to understand ourselves and our human situation
clearly and fully as we try to construe meaning in experiences and situations
of which we are a part” (Kerdeman, 1998, p. 252). In other words, the study of
understanding can help qualitative inquirers more fully appreciate the her-
meneutic task that lies at the heart of their work.
Yet, qualitative inquiry is largely a scientific undertaking, and, therefore, it
is not surprising that, as a field, qualitative inquiry is preoccupied with posi-
tioning itself as a legitimate, alternative means of educational and social
research. Nor, given this orientation, is it particularly unusual to find the field

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 Schwandt / UNDERSTANDING 463

deeply concerned with fundamentally epistemological matters that so thor-

oughly characterize the contemporary search for social scientific knowledge.
Of late, these matters are taken up in the trinity of the crises of legitimation,
authority, and representation. The hermeneutic tradition provides a rich
source of ideas for coping with these crises. Yet, I would like to suggest fur-
ther exploration of how qualitative inquiry is related to educational strategies
and practices that support the lifelong struggle to find meaning—and this is a
distinctly pedagogical, rather than a scientific, undertaking.
Qualitative inquirers schooled in the tradition of philosophical hermeneu-
tics ought to be among the best teachers we have for the task of explaining the
risks and promises of understanding. They specialize in listening to others
different from themselves for the purpose of understanding what they are
doing and staying. The stock-in-trade of this kind of qualitative inquirer qua
teacher is the moral-practical experience of understanding others. The subject
matter, as it were, of utmost concern to this qualitative inquirer is the very act
of construing meaning as risky, situated, disturbing, and relational. Hence,
this kind of qualitative inquirer is uniquely suited to help us understand what
it means to understand. To me, this suggests a notion, expressed in the follow-
ing question, that I am endeavoring to work out more clearly: Might not we
better grasp the significance of qualitative inquiry if we worried less about
justifying and locating it as a particular form of research and more about link-
ing it to the practices of teaching and learning?

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Thomas A. Schwandt is a professor and associate dean for graduate studies in

education at Indiana University, Bloomington. His teaching and research
address the philosophical assumptions of interpretive, constructionist, and
hermeneutic traditions.

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