39
Concluding thoughts: Epistemic communities and judgment
“Judgment calls” … refers to all of those decisions (some big, some small, but all
necessary and consequential) that must be made without benefit of a fixed, “objective”
rule that one can apply, with precision, like a template or a pair of calipers. . . . We
suggest… …that a set of rules to replace judgment calls not only would be difficult to
fashion, but also would be dysfunctional if we had them.
Joseph E. McGrath, 1982, 13-14.
In the contemporary period, in a number of social science disciplines, the
possibility of judgment based on “a view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988) has been
replaced by the understanding that it is the responsibility of epistemic communities to
make judgments about research quality. Judgment cannot be escaped, and the desire for
templates, calipers, and algorithms for judgment may be indicative of the very human
fear of shouldering responsibility for consequences, big and small. It is psychologically
easier to point to some external standard than to say, “In my judgment, for such and such
reasons…, this study is inadequate.”
If, on the one hand, a single, coherent set of evaluative criteria is inconsistent with
interpretive presuppositions and commitments to historically grounded understanding of
the world, yet on the other hand one accepts the necessity of evaluative judgment, how is
one to proceed? What this review of the literature offers is a list of criteria developed
inductively, of value for its brevity, for its historical specificity, and for its connections to
interpretive research practices and purposes. As a suggested set of common criteria it
offers the members of the interpretive epistemic community a starting point for
discussion of research quality tied, ultimately, to the specifics of the research question
under consideration. Giving reasons for our judgments to the members of our epistemic
community is the best that we can do.
Convention