Alfred Schütz’s methodological essay, first published in 1954 and republished in the supplied 1967 version, examines how social science can establish objective knowledge of a world already interpreted by its participants. Moving from disputes over scientific method to everyday understanding and theoretical modeling, Schütz defends shared standards of scientific rigor while insisting that social inquiry respect the meaningful constitution of its objects.
The essay opens with the controversy between methodological naturalism and the claim that social science requires fundamentally different procedures. Schütz criticizes the elevation of natural-scientific methods into an exclusive standard:
In a kind of monopolistic imperialism the methods of the latter were frequently declared to be the only scientific ones and the particular problems which social scientists encountered in their work were disregarded.
Yet the opposing position also risks obscuring differences among disciplines through sweeping contrasts between measurement and interpretation, experiment and historical understanding. Schütz identifies its central premise:
The other school of thought feels that there is a basic difference in the structure of the social world and the world of nature.
His task is to articulate that difference without abandoning controlled inference, verification, or explicit theoretical relations. His disagreement with Ernest Nagel and Carl Hempel concerns less these standards than the restriction of experience to sensory observation and the treatment of subjective interpretation as private intuition.
Observable conduct cannot by itself disclose whether a movement belongs to a war dance or a ceremonial reception. Nor can observation alone adequately explain intentional abstention or the social force of beliefs. Scientific verification itself presupposes an understanding of another investigator’s purposes and judgments of relevance. Interpretation is therefore not an optional supplement to an otherwise self-sufficient behavioral description.
Schütz distinguishes everyday understanding, philosophical investigation of its possibility, and its methodological employment in social science. Everyday understanding is a socially acquired competence, not an imaginative reproduction of another person’s mental life. It enables practical anticipation and interpersonal checking. Subjective interpretation concerns the meaning an action has for its actor, rather than the investigator’s feelings or values.
The decisive consequence is that social-scientific concepts reconstruct a world already organized by common-sense interpretations. Whereas natural science can abstract from cultural meanings, social science investigates those meanings as constitutive features of its subject matter. Its theoretical constructs therefore operate at a second level, interpreting the constructs through which actors understand themselves and others.
Schütz grounds this relationship in everyday typification. People apprehend situations, actions, and persons through types selected according to practical interests and biographical circumstances. They generally orient themselves toward typical motives rather than another person’s full individuality. Such knowledge is socially inherited and unequally distributed; cooperation depends on sufficiently shared interpretations and a presumed reciprocity of perspectives. Institutional patterns become intelligible through these established expectations.
Scientific modeling transforms this ordinary interpretive activity. In presenting the methodological controversy, Schütz formulates the interpretive demand:
On the contrary, he must construct "ideal types" or "models of motivations" in terms of which he seeks to "understand" overt social behavior by imputing springs of action to the actors involved in it.
The scientist’s theoretical problem replaces the actor’s practical interests as the governing principle of relevance. Model actors receive only the knowledge and motives required by the inquiry. Their deliberately restricted consciousness permits systematic comparison without claiming to reproduce concrete persons exhaustively.
Logical consistency, subjective interpretation, and adequacy discipline this construction. Scientific concepts must form coherent models, refer action to the meanings and motives of modeled actors, and preserve its intelligibility in everyday terms. Adequacy thus connects theoretical abstraction with the interpretations through which participants organize their world. Objectivity depends neither on eliminating subjective meaning nor on intuitively entering individual minds, but on disciplined reconstruction.
The essay makes the relationship between everyday interpretation and theoretical construction central to social-scientific validity. It preserves a common logic of scientific inquiry while rejecting uniform investigative procedures: the meaningful structure of the social world determines what an adequate explanation must reconstruct.
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