ractical activities. As I discussed in my position paper, my approach centers on the role played by prereflective understanding, or a familiarity with things that is prior to any efforts aimed at thematized knowledge. In our everyday example of figuring out how to teach a class to read, the teacher's'' investigation'' takes place against the background of his or her sense of what counts as progress (eg, reading with some indications of comprehension, unless this is a class in reading Hebrew aimed largely at preparing students to sound out words in order to recite prayers in the synagogue). This background is not primarily a matter of how the teacher thinks about things. One way to put it is that the relevant background is what comes prior to what the teacher thinks about.1 This point holds for psychological research as well. The process of inquiry is always embedded in our ways of life. Research is indexical in the sense that every aspect of what we do as investigators, including what we take as important problems to explore and what we learn from our inquiries, always refers beyond itself to our prior involvement in the world of practical activities. Although it is not clear to me what Stam meant when he said that both Yanchar and I used the term'' interpretation'' in two different ways, for me, the use of the term that refers to investigators 'prior familiarity with practices-which may be what Stam (2006) refers to as a'' rather ordinary'' use of the term-is the crucial one.
I should note that although Stiles and I agree on many points, my guiding perspective is quite different from his experiential correspondence theory of truth. Stiles focused on what seems to be a subjectivist matching notion:'' A statement is true for you to the extent that your experience of the statement corresponds to your experience of the event (object, state of affairs) that it describes.'' He talked about good research as inquiry that effectively shares experiences. As I see it, these ideas depart markedly from a view of research as practical activity, although Stiles (footnote 2) also said he agreed with this view. For me, the key criterion of truth is pragmatic (ie, what works, but taking this in a broad sense that includes whether something we believe we have learned contributes-not necessarily in any simple, direct way at all-to our ways of life) and research, ultimately, is not learning the way things (including my experience of things) are, but an activity that is part of doing things.
2. If not'' real'' measures, then what?
Stam argued that my view of quantitative research is problematic because such research should be based on'' real'' measures, that is, assessments that'' refer back to some concrete feature of the world,'' whereas what I call measurement amounts to nothing more than...
