Phenomenology and Qualitative Research: Amedeo Giorgi's Hermetic Epistemology

Amedeo Giorgi has published a review article devoted to Phenomenology as Qualitative Research: A Critical Analysis of Meaning Attribution. However, anyone reading this arti-cle, but unfamiliar with the book, will get a distorted view of what it is about, whom it is addressed to, what it seeks to achieve and how it goes about presenting its argu-ments. Not mildly distorted, in need of the odd correction here and there, but sys-tematically misrepresented. The article is a study in misreading. Giorgi misreads the book’s mise en scène; he misreads its narrative arc; he misreads individual arguments; he misreads short, simple passages; he misreads the philosophy of the science litera-ture; he misreads his own data; he misreads the title; he misreads the blurb; he mis-reads the acknowledgements. In addition, there are serious failures of scholarship (ironically, he demonstrates how unacquainted he is with the relevant literature at the very moment he is accusing me of being ill- informed). In this reply, I provide sev-eral examples of these errors, but my primary aim is to understand why Giorgi’s mis-reading is as ubiquitous as it is. To this end, I explain his mistakes by reference to the hermetic epistemology within which he is confined.