These techniques have allowed a convergence of linguistics and cognitive science in the work of people such as George Lakoff, which has been presented in popular works such as The Political Mind. Lakoff writes of the role of both the unconscious and the conscious mind in how we perceive the world. One reason the results of such work has such acceptance as it has received is that it seems to work.  Another reason is that a portion of the work can be tied to physical, neurological and biochemical observations that can be studied and verified by traditional scientific methods.

But the linguistics aspect of this work derive from a different methodology, and while the conscious portion of the mind can be directly observed by each of us, inferences about unconscious processes give many pause.  And while we can, to an extent, observe the mental processes of another person through conversation, the methods we use are usually different from those of the traditional scientific method.  It has been my observation that those trained in the physical sciences often have an aversion to accepting findings based on different and unfamiliar methodologies.

I would be quite pleased to be mistaken on this.  To the extent that it occurs, I suspect that it may in part be due to lack of familiarity with some of the approaches.  In order to, hopefully, remedy this supposed deficit, I have prepared an abridged excerpt  on the subject of hermeneutics by Kees van der Pijl, which describes one such method:  

Hermeneutics....shares the liberal ontology that underlies the Rational Choice and the positivist approaches... But in its epistemology, the hermeneutic perspective is different....Rational Choice has an axiomatic, deductive epistemology; positivist sociology is empirical, inductive. In (hermeneutics) a distinction is made between the relations between the knowing subject in relation to the natural world, and the knowing subject in relation to the social world.

In contrast to the model of explanation developed in natural science, the hermeneutic strand adopts an epistemology which suspends the separation between knowing subject and the object of analysis--if it is another human subject (or an entity made up of such subjects). This particular connection between a human subject and people with whom the subject shares essential emotional and intellectual abilities (however differently they may be applied), makes for a unique method of interpretation, an emphatic `understanding', which is not possible when studying the moon or the ocean floor.

The `facts' that positivism collects for its method of explanation of events, now include the inner world of the subject-in-action, which in this strand are available for introspection and interpretation. The social world is a universe of meaning(s) which require a different approach than that used for the observation of inarticulate phenomena.

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It is from this starting point that hermeneutics (from the Greek for `interpreter') as a methodological concept emerged....(This) led to a procedure that can generally be applied to written and oral language expressions. Interpretation is the key term here, because conclusions are not drawn on the basis of observation, in which subject and object are separated; the subject as it were `enters' the object by situating him/herself in it.  This process, called `divination', is composed of two steps: 1) `Placing oneself within'...  and 2) `copying' or `re-living'...

What happens in this process is that the interpreter shares the inner experience of the thinking or speaking or acting of the object, and once `inside', attempts to reconstruct how this speech or thought act or practical act came about in terms of motivations, the creative path to it.  The divination process...is based on empathy, sharing the emotional inner world of an author or actor. It is complemented by comparison, and the method as a whole consists in a constant back and forth between divination and comparison, without ever reaching complete knowledge

Note the important difference here with the positivist concern about verification, acceptance/ rejection of a hypothesis, etc.:

• knowledge is never `positive', but only an approximation however hard we try;
  
• to acquire knowledge is an inter-subjective process: we move from our own mind to that of somebody else. There is a forensic aspect involved that is absent from positivism....
  

Even so hermeneutics remains firmly anchored in the subjectivist epistemology on which actor-oriented theories are based....

(It) is clear that it can only be applied to the thinking/feeling part of the universe. One cannot enter into the inarticulate world in the same interpretive way. Hence...hermeneutics implies a separation of the human world from the natural world, and it is this separation which forms the starting point...