Collection containing Schuetz’s “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action” (1953)

The source should be read as a journal issue or edited-volume unit, not as Schuetz’s text in isolation: archival/editorial matter, Schuetz’s 1953 contribution, its notes, and a Spanish-language extract frame the same methodological problem. Its substantive center is Schuetz’s chapter on how social science can be objective while studying actors who already interpret their world. The contributing voices are functionally distinct: Schuetz supplies the main argument; Whitehead, Husserl, Weber, Parsons, and rational-action theorists appear as cited interlocutors, giving the chapter its genealogy in anti-positivism, phenomenology, interpretive sociology, and model theory.

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as facts, pure and simple.

Schuetz’s opening section attacks naïve empiricism. Everyday and scientific knowledge both select from a world according to purposes, attention, and relevance; neither simply receives bare reality. The next movement reconstructs common-sense interpretation from within the life-world. The everyday actor is practically oriented and dependent on sedimented experiences learned through biography, language, family, teachers, institutions, and inherited social types.

In analyzing the first constructs of common-sense thinking of everyday life we proceeded, however, as if the world were my private world and as if we were entitled to disregard the fact that it is from the outset an intersubjective world of culture.

This is the social ontology of the piece. The world of action is not a private mental field later joined to others; it is already intersubjective, cultural, and typified. Common sense recognizes persons as neighbors, officials, buyers, strangers, or friends, and attends only to aspects of an object or situation relevant to a project. Ordinary knowledge is approximate but not arbitrary: it works for practical purposes because actors assume enough reciprocity of perspectives to coordinate.

The following chapters/sections apply this account to action. Action is projected conduct, not visible behavior alone. To understand it is to grasp the actor’s anticipated outcome and motive-context. Schuetz distinguishes future-oriented in-order-to motives from retrospectively discoverable because-motives, showing why one deed can carry different meanings for actor, partner, observer, and analyst. Social coordination depends less on perfect rationality than on roles, institutions, and typified expectations.

The scientific chapters then explain how social science differs from natural science without abandoning rigor. Its objects are already meaningful before the scientist arrives, so the scholar builds second-order constructs—ideal types, models, motive schemes—on first-order constructs already used in everyday life.

The thought objects constructed by the social scientists refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellowmen.

The later discussion of rational models and fictive actor-types gives the volume its methodological payoff. Scientific models simplify deliberately: they assign an artificial actor only the knowledge, motives, and relevances needed by the research problem. Their rationality is a feature of construction, not a claim that living persons act with complete insight. Valid social-scientific constructs must be logically consistent, subjectively interpretable, and adequate to common-sense life. The Spanish extract functions as a companion textual layer that preserves the same lesson: social-scientific objectivity comes from disciplining, not bypassing, the reconstruction of meaning.

Read as a volume/issue, the source moves from phenomenology to interpretive sociology: facts are selected, experience typified, action motivated, and explanation held answerable to the meanings through which social reality is built.