Automatic assumptions of automaticity.

the primary sources of knowledge. Rather , knowledge is considered to originate in what is called the ready-to-hand mode, a specific kind of nonconscious or automatic voluntariness that involves our engagement in "direct, everyday practical involvement with tools, artifacts, and people" (Packer, 1985, p. 1083). Engagement in practical activities is experienced as a synchronous whole, because our automatic actions are simultaneously related to a larger web of meanings a larger web of interrelated possibilities. No real division exists (except theoretically) between the subject (e.g., the mind) and the object (e.g., the environment) because meaning necessarily requires both. However, that this larger web of meanings is a web of interrelated possibilities implies that people contribute some type of voluntary or agentic component to their meanings (Slife & Fisher, 2000). Because people are directed voluntarily toward larger patterns of meaning and behaviors (e.g., complex objectives, worldviews), smaller components of these larger patterns seem automatic. Still, these automatic behaviors are not involuntary-though they may be nonconscious-because they ultimately serve larger objectives and worldviews (see Polanyi, 1958, for a separate but similar account). Even from these brief sketches, it is apparent that either rationalism or hermeneu-tics is capable of explaining the automaticity data. However, Bargh and Chartrand's (1999) position exemplifies a philosophical favoritism where psychologists are aware of only one philosophical position and thus continually interpret their data (i.e., research findings or clients) in light of that stance. This is the reason that data often seem to point to only one interpretation-scientists have limited themselves to only one philosophical or theoretical tradition. Philosophers of science, however, demonstrated long ago that theoretical interpretations are always, in principle, tmderdeter-mined by the data (see Curd & Cover, 1998; Slife &Williams, 1995). Good science, then, requires scientists to know all the relevant philosophical traditions, so that they can know all of the viable interpretations of their data. Bargh and Chartrand (1999) either were not aware of alternative interpretations of their automaticity data or chose not to acknowledge the host of viable alternatives. The upshot is that the conclusions scientists reach about data are driven as much by the philosophies they implicitly affirm as by the data themselves. Whether automa-ticity is viewed as unconscious involunta-rism or unconscious voluntarism depends on the theoretical spectacles one is wearing when interpreting the data. Therefore, before a particular interpretation of auto-maticity is adopted, psychologists ought to be aware of the different theoretical possibilities …