Interpretative approaches begin from the insight that to understand actions, practices and institutions, we need to grasp the relevant meanings, the beliefs and preferences of the people involved. As John Stuart Mill (1969 [1840], 119-20) remarked:
By Bentham … men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it … Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries … With Coleridge … the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or generations of mankind, was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for.
Interpretive approaches are typically based on philosophical analyses of meaning in action. Meanings are beliefs and, to explain webs of beliefs, Mark Bevir (1999a) uses the concepts of tradition and dilemma. The concepts of belief, tradition, and dilemma distinguish interpretivism from other approaches to political science.