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All research clearly requires a discussion of epistemology, or the “theory of what constitutes valid knowledge” (Johnston et al. 2000, p. 226), as it is this position that underlies all claims to truth made in relation to empirical research. This is of course a highly contested issue and a discussion could run to considerable length. However, in the context of the current investigation it is primarily important to establish the basis on which data, analysis and findings have been presented, and thus provide the reader with an opportunity to jud ge the validity of research practices and conclusions appropriately.

The primary interest of this investigation is how different actors interpret, construct and negotiate the meaning associated with the term ‘fair trade’ in both its discourse and practice. This thesis takes discourse as any form of communicative medium, but will concentrate on textual constructions composed of formal language (policy documents, websites etc) and verbal discussion (derived from firsthand interactions with stakeholders). This research interest reflects the ontological position (concerned with the categorisation of entities in human reality) that the meaning of language is not unitary, naturally given or fixed. Such a perspective draws on the view of language primarily established by Saussure ([1916] 1983, p. 67) who proposed that pairing of “signifiers” (images/words/sounds) and the “signified” (concepts that they represent) are “arbitrary” or “unmotivated”⁴⁴. Based on this view, it is argued that signified concepts are created within the perceiver/user, and while individuals are acknowledged to share concepts, they do so only via signifiers to leave meaning

44 It should be noted that at other times, the signified concept is labelled as the “referent” (for example Jackson 1988, p. 50).

78 reliant on individual “ontologically subjective”⁴⁵ understanding (Searle 1996) and

“local conventions” (Gergen 1999, p. 15). This constructivist position is particularly associated with what John Searle (1996) has called “social kinds” or abstract nouns – such as “democracy”, a “cocktail party” or, to add another example, “fair trade”.

These concepts “are only facts by [the] human agreement” made possible through the existence of a communicative medium (Searle 1996, p. 1)⁴⁶.

While early structuralists postulated that the signified meaning of all words would become increasingly fixed over time (Lévi-Strauss 1972, p. 91; Saussure [1916] 1983, p. 69), this is evidently not necessarily the case. The first two chapters of this thesis have already provided examples of singular terms that have a simultaneous array of different meanings and work elsewhere demonstrates the “fuzziness” (see Lakoff 1973) of meaning associated with concrete nouns such as cups and bowls (Labov 1973). For this reason, post-structuralist thinkers posit that meanings are never fixed, always open to degrees of modification and always temporary (Mills 1997, p. 53).

While some have gone as far as to argue that “meaning is always contestable…[where]

the meaning of a term, a passage in a book, or a question addressed to us is always ‘up for grabs’” (Burr 2003, p. 54), clearly arbitrariness “applied without restriction…would lead to utter chaos” (Saussure [1916] 1983, p. 131). It follows that existing understanding must form the starting point for any modification of meaning (Searle 1996; Toulmin 1972) – and where individual concepts have multiple dimensions, some can be emphasised while others backgrounded or disregarded to provide different understandings and interpretations of their meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

45 Searle (1996, pp. 7-9) differentiates between ontologically and epistemically subjective-objective knowledge. The latter comprise the interpretation in which the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are traditionally applied: namely the difference between empirical and normative statements. For example: the difference between noting that Rembrandt is a better artist than Rubens (normative), and stating that Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year of 1632 (empirical). The former category however, parallels the difference between social and brute facts in ascribing modes of existence: either as entities independent of the human consciousness (such as mountains), or those dependent upon it, such the fact that they are called mountains, as opposed to hills or something totally different. The difference between epistemic and ontological objectivity-subjectivity can be underscored by the ability to make epistemic subjective/objective statements about both ontologically objective and subjective entities. For example, “‘Mt Everest is more beautiful than Mt. Whitney’ is about ontological objective entities, but makes an epistemically subject judgement. On the other hand, the statement ‘ I now have a pain in my lower back’ reports an epistemically objective fact that is not dependent on any stance, attitude, or opinion of observers. However, the phenomena itself, the actual pain, has a subjective mode of existence” (Searle 1996, pp. 8-9).

46 Also see Anscombe (1958).

79 The ability to shape meaning within a given community introduces the question of how the ability, or power, to influence change is distributed between actors. For Saussure ([1916] 1983, p. 68), “any means of expression accepted in a society rests in principle upon a collective habit, or on convention”. However, many argue that some actors within a community of language will have more ability than others to influence what meanings are accepted into collective usage and that, in turn, this ability rests on both linguistic resources – for example, the status attributed by certain labels/titles (Searle 1996) – and non-linguistic resources – such as preferential access to spaces where discourses are constructed and financial capability to fund the projection of certain interpretations (Van Dijk 1993).

As research explicitly recognises that the meaning of language is open for negotiation – or a continuous and gradual process of give-and-take in which the meaning of terms shifts between interlocutors (Wenger 1998, p. 53) – a complementary theory of knowledge is required. At the extreme of the possibilities are those who reject the existence of a reality outside of language (for example Rorty 1980). However, as a compromise between this extreme relative position and that of traditional positivism (which disagrees with the idea that the inter-subjective nature of human understanding generates a problem for empirical investigation, beyond the necessity to use scientific method to minimise subjectivity and arrive at an epistemically objective truth), is the position usually labelled as “critical realism” (see Danermark et al. 2005; Sayer 1992).

This perspective bears out the ontological position that a single term is capable of representing many meanings (Danermark et al. 2005, p. 1). In this perspective, concepts which people develop in their everyday understandings of the social world are socially and inter-subjectively constructed. More specifically, this approach recognises a fundamental difference between the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences. The former targets the intransitive objects of the natural world (Sayer 1992) – the study of which involves a “single heuristic” relationship to the researcher (Giddens 1993). The social world, on the other hand, is “at every moment a world that others have already interpreted and allocated meaning and significance to, and which they will continually interpret, and reinterpret though often in different ways” (Danermark et al. 2005, p.

34). As such, social sciences involve a “double heuristic” (Danermark et al. 2005, p.

80 34) where “experience is at once already an interpretation and is in need of [further]

interpretation” (Scott 1992, p. 37). While such a position can lead to extreme relativism, critical realism moves beyond the recognition that reality is conceptually and socially mediated to maintain that there are deeper processes of causality which anchor meaning in an independent external reality. Taking this perspective, it is possible to concentrate on the examination of inter-subjective conceptual development and, at the same time, to generate interpretations of other causative processes.