Alfred Schütz, “Begriffs- und Theoriebildung in den Sozialwissenschaften” (1954)

This file is a single methodological lecture/essay. Schütz enters the mid-century dispute over whether the social sciences must imitate the natural sciences or instead require wholly separate methods. He rejects both extremes: the social sciences share standards of controlled inference, verification, generality, and exactness with empirical science, but their object is not raw behavior. It is the already meaningful social world in which human beings act, interpret, communicate, and typify one another.

Das Hauptziel der Sozialwissenschaften ist es, geordnetes Wissen von sozialer Wirklichkeit zu gewinnen.

English translation: The chief aim of the social sciences is to obtain organized knowledge of social reality.

Against Nagel’s positivist critique of Weberian Verstehen, Schütz argues that the decisive error is to equate experience with sense observation and to treat every alternative as unverifiable introspection. The naturalist position presupposes precisely what it cannot explain: intersubjectivity, language, mutual understanding, and the social character of scientific verification itself.

Alle Formen des Naturalismus und des logischen Positivismus nehmen diese soziale Wirklichkeit einfach als selbstverständlich hin, während sie der eigentliche Gegenstand der Sozialwissenschaften ist.

English translation: All forms of naturalism and logical positivism simply take this social reality for granted, whereas it is the very object of the social sciences.

Schütz’s central conceptual move is to relocate Verstehen. It is not first a special scholarly technique, nor a private act of imaginative identification with another mind. It is the ordinary way actors inhabit the socio-cultural world. Everyday life is already interpreted through motives, purposes, institutions, and culturally sedimented meanings; the social scientist begins from this preinterpreted field.

Verstehen ist daher in erster Linie nicht eine von Sozialwissenschaftlern benutzte Methode, sondern die besondere Erfahrungsweise, in der der Alltagsverstand von der sozio-kulturellen Welt Kenntnis nimmt.

English translation: Understanding [Verstehen] is therefore primarily not a method used by social scientists, but the particular mode of experience in which common sense takes cognizance of the socio-cultural world.

This clarification allows Schütz to defend Weber while correcting common misunderstandings. Weber’s “subjective interpretation” does not make science dependent on the investigator’s values or intuition. It means that adequate social explanation must be capable of referring actions back to the meanings they have for actors within their situations.

Das Postulat der subjektiven Interpretation muß in dem Sinn verstanden werden, daß jede wissenschaftliche Erklärung der sozialen Welt auf den subjektiven Sinn des Handelns menschlicher Wesen, aus denen die soziale Wirklichkeit hervorgeht, verweisen kann und dies für bestimmte Zwecke muß.

English translation: The postulate of subjective interpretation must be understood in the sense that every scientific explanation of the social world can, and for certain purposes must, refer to the subjective meaning of the actions of the human beings from which social reality arises.

The essay then develops its constructive methodology. Everyday actors organize experience through typifications, relevance systems, biographical situations, reciprocity of perspectives, and socially distributed knowledge. Scientific concepts in the social sciences must therefore be “second-order” constructions: not direct copies of lived meanings, but disciplined models built upon the first-order constructions of ordinary actors.

Daher sind die Konstruktionen der Sozialwissenschaften sozusagen Konstruktionen zweiten Grades, das heißt Konstruktionen von Konstruktionen jener Handelnden im Sozialfeld, deren Verhalten der Sozialwissenschaftler beobachten und erklären muß, und zwar in Übereinstimmung mit den Verfahrensregeln seiner Wissenschaft.

English translation: The constructs of the social sciences are therefore, so to speak, constructs of the second degree—that is, constructs of the constructs made by those actors in the social field whose behavior the social scientist has to observe and explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.

The problem is consequently not whether social science is objective or interpretive, but how it can be both. Schütz formulates the central methodological question as the reconciliation of verifiable theory with subjectively meaningful action.

Wie kann man objektive Begriffe und eine objektiv verifizierbare Theorie von subjektiven Sinnstrukturen bilden?

English translation: How can objective concepts and an objectively verifiable theory of subjective meaning-structures be formed?

His answer is the ideal-typical model. The theorist constructs “homunculi,” simplified actors endowed only with the motives, goals, roles, and relevance systems required by the scientific problem. These models are not arbitrary: logical consistency secures their theoretical objectivity, while adequacy secures their intelligibility in terms of everyday action.

Die Beachtung des Postulats der logischen Konsistenz gewährleistet die objektive Gültigkeit der gedanklichen Gegenstände, die vom Sozialwissenschaftler konstruiert werden; die Beachtung des Postulats der Adäquanz gewährleistet ihre Verträglichkeit mit den Konstruktionen des alltäglichen Lebens.

English translation: Observance of the postulate of logical consistency guarantees the objective validity of the thought objects constructed by the social scientist; observance of the postulate of adequacy guarantees their compatibility with the constructs of everyday life.

The relevance of the essay lies in its phenomenological reconstruction of social-scientific objectivity. Schütz does not deny the unity of empirical inquiry, but he refuses the reduction of method to physics or behaviorism. Social science has distinctive procedures because its object is a world already structured by meaning. Its concepts must preserve continuity with everyday understanding while transforming it into controlled, testable theory.