Interviewing is key to many forms of qualitative educational research; we interview respondents for oral histories, life histories, ethnographies, and case studies (see Tierney & Dilley, 2002, for an overview of interviewing in education). Despite the primacy of verbal data in qualitative research, basic introductions to qualitative research (including Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Merriam, 1998; and Rossman & Rallis, 1998) and "how to" guides for conducting qualitative projects (such as Goodall, 2000) include only sections on interviewing. Only within the past decade have book-length explorations of interviewing been produced for an audience of educational researchers (as opposed to, say, anthropologists or sociologists). Of those, three specifically acknowledge the philosophical foundations of interview methodologies. Each examines, in complementary ways, the relationships between philosophy and protocol, epistemology and research, words and meanings. This article analyzes these three works and demonstrates how they each offer insight into how the perhaps most dominant qualitative research method is philosophical rather than instrumental in nature.