Beyond Epistemology: Qualitative Research and the Constitution of Forms of Life Packer, Martin. The Science of Qualitative Research. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 422 pp. ISBN 978-2-521-14881-8 (ppbk). Reviewed by: Gregory A. Thompson, Brigham Young University Martin Packer's The Science of Qualitative Research is a work of social theory best described as a “page turner.” Through well argued prose, Packer’s book elegantly develops a compelling narrative that includes villains, heroes and other complex characters. Rather than rehearse old debates about which epistemology is better, Packer asks: Is epistemology enough? His convincing answer is "no." In making his case, Packer moves beyond the paradigm wars (e.g., Gage 1989) and exposes the foundational (and flawed) assumptions of most qualitative research. In so doing, he offers an entirely new way of seeing what social science research can be. The book has 15 chapters divided among three sections of five chapters each. The book considers three major qualitative methods, research interviewing, ethnography, and discourse analysis. The book begins with research interviewing. Although Packer is sympathetic with research interviewers’ interest in recovering the subject’s voice, Packer points out how research interviewing, through the decontextualizing method of coding, actually obscures the subject’s voice precisely as it strives to represent subjectivity objectively. Packer show how these approaches strive for a maximally objective account by minimizing the role of interpretation which is seen as subjective. By not attending to the role of the researcher either in interviewing or in coding, these methods lose the responsive and alive nature of the subject's voice as it interacts with others. Additionally, as Mischler, Garfinkel, Denzin, and Taylor have shown, these methods involve substantial and unacknowledged interpretation that is implicitly accomplished by coders. Packer thus concludes that this approach to research interviewing is inherently problematic. In lieu of this approach which seeks to minimize interpretation, Packer proposes an approach that takes seriously the act of interpretation as it happens in interaction between researchers, subjects, and the “fixed” texts produced from research. Here Packer turns to Gadamer and his student Iser for a non-objectivist hermeneutic approach that captures this complex interaction. Packer argues that this approach opens up exciting possibilities for qualitative research as a method for understanding "the constitution of both the subjects and their subjectivity" (p. 120). In this engagement with traditional qualitative research we begin to see the outlines of the central intellectual antagonist that motivates Packer's booksubject/object dualism. Packer’s book aims to dissolve this dualism in the minds, or, preferably, in the practices of his readers. The second section of the book turns to a second mode of qualitative research, ethnography. This section first introduces three “good guys,” Taylor, Giddens, and Geertz, who bring in the argument that social practices constitute subjectivity. It is here that Packer reveals the villain behind subject object dualism, Immanuel Kant. Here Packer also provides the back story of how we got mired in subject/object dualism in the first place. His account explores two different approaches to constitution. The first approach, the villainous Kantian one, views constitution as a matter of epistemology; the mind constitutes the world. Packer traces this idea and its discontents through Husserl, Schutz, and Berger and