… interpretation both on the part of the researchers, as well as the groups they study, is involved in determining what is to count as political facts in any particular situation. For Taylor this is emphatically not the case in the natural sciences, in which the latter’s objects are not — and in principle cannot be — self-interpreting (GH cite Dreyfuss 55.)
In sum, then, the hermeneutical criticque of positivist approaches to social and political analysis proceeds from the affirmation that our interpretation of reality is constitutive of reality, not merely a view on reality which can be ‘bracketed’. In other words, hermeneuticiists accord language and meaning a privileged role, insofar as they necessarily mediate all experience. The move from the study of nature to the study of society thus requires that we take into account this insight by noting how in the latter case both the subject and the object of research consist in meaningful behaviour. The central point is that interpretation ‘goes all the way down’: interpretaton cannot somehow be by-passed in the establishment of facts and correlations, because the interpretations of both researcher and researched are essential in determining what is to count as a fact.