A Third Path leads beyond modern and postmodern methodological debates in the social sciences, history, and the humanities. It turns out that choices between the routes of science and interpretation, history and theory, objectivism and relativism are more illusory than real. Even radically opposed methodologies for creating knowledge are only relatively autonomous of one another.

These are not conclusions I set out to reach when I first envisioned this book in the late 1980s. I began with an interest in bringing epistemology – the study of knowledge – into stronger relation with questions about the diverse styles of actual research. I wanted to explore the alternative cultural logics of what I will call “sociohistorical inquiry” – encompassing historical investigations, interpretive analyses, field research, and quantitative studies. The idea for how to do so came as I was completing a book on Jim Jones' s Peoples Temple, Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (Hall 1987). Reflecting on the methodological rationale of that study, I began to think more broadly about the relationships between what I call “forms of discourse” and “methodological practices of inquiry.”

The more I read exemplars and the more I combed epistemological and methodological writings, the more I became convinced that virtually all kinds of inquiry about the social world are amalgams that combine the resources of four different kinds of discourse – value discourse, narrative, social theory, and explanation/interpretation.