[Interpretationandmethods] Article of interest

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

I'm not sure that verification is actually the issue.  I think  
verification is actually a trap that leads to a certain kind of  
science.  Once it is verifiable, then it is quantifiable, and then it  
will quickly shift from interpretavist to positivist models. I think  
if there is a a crisis it lies close to the question of legitimation  
and specifically it exists in the problem not of verification but of  
translation.  It is an issue of one study that purports to mean  
something not being able to be translated into meaningful categories  
in another study of the same thing.  This is a problem of translation  
and specifically of the mappings of knowledge.  That is the  
construction of a legitimation crisis  that we have where there is the  
huge sphere of meaning, but those meanings no longer, as a whole,  
support the system of reproduction of those meanings.

but perhaps I'm just coming at this from a different perspective as  
i've been writing a bit too much on translation in transdisciplinary  
research teams of late.

Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu 
)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.  
--Byron