We have seen that there are different ways of giving an account of policy, and have distinguished between first-, second- and third-order accounts. This section asks the questions: Do these different accounts speak to each other? And if so, how or, how should they speak to each other? This reflects the notion of applying of the ‘double hermeneutic’ to policy. This is a well-known strategy in the social sciences whereby the social practices and the terms that scientists use to describe them, have impact on one another. Policy scientists interpret the language and actions of policy workers; scholars describe these interpretations for practitioners; and practitioners talk to each other, often in the terms introduced by the policy scientists, but they also talk back to the policy academics – and the fact that it is, generally speaking, the policy practitioners who finance the work of the scholars makes these exchanges particularly relevant for an understanding of policy work.

The founding fathers of the policy studies approach in the 1950s and 1960s would have considered this an odd question. Policy science is usually traced back to Harold Lasswell's endeavor to systematically and methodically link the (social) sciences to the needs of long-term, strategic, public policymaking. The first ‘policy analysts’ saw themselves as simply drawing on scientific knowledge (concepts and theories), and giving objective advice to decision makers. This is well expressed in Wildavsky's ‘speaking truth to power’. In subsequent decades, society began talking back louder and louder to science's claims on ‘truth’, a development known as the move from Mode-1 to Mode-2 science, or from normal to post-normal science, or from mono- to multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary science. For policy studies this implied a move from ‘speaking truth to power’ to ‘making sense together.’ Of course, there are still some who believe in objective policy advice that rests upon evidence-based analysis. But changing views on the nature of rationality from monologic to dialogic, and from the scientist as a privileged advisor to just one of the many different voices informing politics, have ushered in many new modes of argumentative and interpretive policy analysis.