CONTENTS
Preface by H. L. Van Breda vi Editor's Note xxiii Introduction by Maurice Natanson xxv
Part 11 On the Methodology of the Social Sciences
common-sense and scientific interpretation of human
action 3
I. Introduction: Content of Experience and Thought Objects 3
1. The constructs of common-sense and of scientific thinking 3
2. Particular structure of the constructs of the social sciences 5
II. Constructs of Thought Objects in Common-Sense
Thinking 7
1. The individual's common-sense knowledge of the world is a system of constructs of its typicality 7
2. The intersubjective character of common-sense knowledge and its implication 10
a. The reciprocity of perspectives 11
b. The social origin of knowledge 13
c. The social distribution of knowledge 14
3. The structure of the social world and its typification
by common-sense constructs 15
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contents
contents
xvii
1.
2.
3-
4-
5-
4. Course-of-action types and personal types 19
a. Action, project,motive 19
b. Social interaction 22
c. The observer 26
III. Rational Action within Common-Sense Experience 27
IV. Constructs of Thought  Objects by the Social Sciences 34 The postulate of subj ective interpretation 34 The social scientist as disinterested observer 36 Differences between common-sense and scientific constructs of action patterns 38 The scientific model of the social world 40 Postulates for scientific model constructs of the social world 43
a. The postulate of logical consistency 43
b. The postulate of subjective interpretation 43
c. The postulate of adequacy 44
Scientific Model Constructs of Rational Action
Patterns 44
VI. Concluding Remarks 47
concept and theory formation in the social sciences 48
choosing among projects of action 67
I. The Concept of Action 67
II. The Time Structure of the Project 68
III. In-Order-To and Because Motive 69
IV. Fancying and Projecting 72
V. The Foundation of Practicability 74
a. The world as taken for granted 74
b. The biographically determined situation 76
VI. Doubting and Questioning 77
VII. Problematic and Open Possibilities According to
Husserl 79
VIII. Choosing Among Objects within Reach 83
V.
IX. Choosing Among Projects X. Bergson's Theory of Choice XI. Leibniz's Theory of Volition XII. The Problem of Weight XIII. Summary and Conclusion
Part III Phenomenology and the Social Sciences
some leading concepts of phenomenology
phenomenology and the social sciences
HUSSERL's IMPORTANCE FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
scheler's   theory   of   intersubjectivity   and the general thesis of the alter ego
I. Scheler's Concept of Man II. Scheler's Concept of Person
III. Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity
a. The problems involved
b. Inference and empathy
c. Scheler's perceptional theory of the alter ego
IV. Critical Observations
a. Intersubjectivity as a transcendental problem
b. Intersubjectivity as a mundane problem
V. The General Thesis of the Alter Ego and its Time Structure
84
85 88
93
94
VI. The Perception of the Alter Ego
VII. The Problem of Perspectives Related to Intersubjectivity
sartre's theory of the alter ego
I. Sartre's Criticism of the Realistic and the Idealistic Approach to the Problem of Intersubjectivity
99 118 140
150 150
153
156 156
159 162
164 164 167
172
176
177 180
180
ALFRED SCHUTZ
Collected Papers i
The Problem of Social Reality
EDITED  AND  INTRODUCED BY
MAURICE NATANSON
WITH A PREFACE BY
H. L. VAN BREDA
EDITOR'S NOTE
Not long before his death in 1959, Alfred Schutz asked me to ■ undertake the editing of the present volume. Since the papers that comprise this volume were originally published as articles in journals or as chapters in books, some repetition was inevitable. "Your editorial work would consist first of all," Dr. Schutz wrote tome, "in eliminating repetitions which were unavoidable when presenting the papers in various j ournals, but which would be only confusing in a volume containing collected papers. For example, various of these papers contain definitions of Conduct, Action, etc., frequently in different versions. The best statement should be selected and incorporated in the first paper, whereas cross references should be made in the other papers, where the repetitious parts would have to be eliminated . . . Finally, I would be only too happy if you were willing to write the general introduction and if so advisable the special introductions to each of the parts." When I originally agreed to edit this volume, I assumed that the author would oversee and approve of the changes to be made. Since Dr. Schutz died before he could review my work, it was decided that it would be best to restrict changes to stylistic and grammatical matters and to let stand, as far as possible, the original wording of the author. Hence, a number of repetitious passages have been retained, and no effort has been made to rewrite those sentences or paragraphs whose stylistic quality could be improved upon. When stylistic changes have been made - and they have throughout the work - the decision was dictated by the fact that the intellectual content at issue was obscured by the language. As much editorial effort has gone into decisions to retain the original wording of certain problematic passages as in devising alternative
fOTrrmlQ+innC   fnT   -r\QT+C   +1-11+   HTQrH   ^Vii-n^rn/^       AHU/Mi^    4+   V.10    n^ +
xxiv
editor s note
been feasible to attempt to indicate stylistic changes in the text, page by page, I have added my initials (M.N.) whenever I have altered Dr. Schutz's footnotes or added to them. In the Introduction I have said all I thought necessary to guide the reader who might be coming to Dr. Schutz's work for the first time. I found it unnecessary to add special introductions to each of the parts of the book.
The essays were originally published in the following form: "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (hereafter referred to -as PPR), Vol. XIV, September 1953; "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LI, April 1954; "Choosing Among Projects of Action," PPR, Vol. XII, December 1951; "Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology," Social Research, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1945; "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (edited by Marvin Farber), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1940; "Husseri's Importance for the Social Sciences," in Edmund Husserl 1859-1959, (Phaenomenologica 4), Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1959; "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis -of the Alter Ego," PPR, Vol. II, March 1942; "Sartre's Theory ■ of the Alter Ego," PPR, Vol. IX, December 1948; "On Multiple Realities," PPR, Vol. V, June 1945; "Language, Language Disturbances, and the Texture of Consciousness," Social Research, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1950; "Symbol. Reality and Society," in Symbols and Society: Fourteenth Symposium of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion (edited by Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, Hudson Hoagland, and R. M. Maclver), Harper, New York, 1955. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of these journals and books for permission to republish these papers. I wish to express my thanks to Professors Dorion Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch, Father Van Breda, Drs. J. Taminiaux and Rudolf Boehm, and, finally, Mrs. Alfred Schutz. In different ways they have all helped in the preparation of this book.
INTRODUCTION
by
Maurice Natanson
Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina
According to Bergson, a true philosopher says only one thing in his lifetime, because he enjoys but one point of contact with the real. Understood in its proper sense, this means that whatever variegation and richness a philosophical mind may possess, however extensive its interests and research, there is ultimately but one cardinal insight into reality that it achieves, one decisive illumination on which everything else turns and which is the philosopher's claim to truth. In this sense, it might be said that the philosophy of Alfred Schutz articulates a single intuition, the discovery in full depth of the presuppositions, structure, and signification of the common-sense world. Although he possessed prodigious learning in and a profound appreciation of philosophy, sociology, and social psychology, although his studies and writings covered a truly remarkable range of problems in all of these fields, and although he had a very deep grasp of literature and the arts (music in particular), the fil conducteur of his intellectual life was a concern for the meaningful structure of the world of daily life, the everyday working world into which each of us is born, within whose limits our existence unfolds, and which we transcend completely only in death. To see this world in its massive complexity, to outline and explore its essential features, and to trace out its manifold relationships were the composite parts of his central task, the realization of a philosophy of mundane reality, or, in more formal language, of a phenomenology of the natural attitude. The understanding of the paramount reality of common-sense life is the clue to the understanding of the work of Alfred Schutz.
XXVI
introduction
introduction
XXVII
Whatever other allegiances an individual has, he is first of all a citizen of the republic of daily life. Each one of us is part of an on-going world of everyday affairs which is, for the most part, taken for granted in its essential being. Although we have special concerns and interests in our various roles, we are forever rooted in a primordial range of experience out of which these concerns and interests arise and to which they remain connected. The taken for granted everyday world of living and working is the nuclear presupposition of all other strata of man's reality, and it is this ground of social reality to which Dr. Schutz turned and which he took as a point of departure for analysis. The central and most cunning feature of the taken for granted everyday world is that it is taken for granted. As common-sense men living in the mundane world, we tacitly assume that, of course, there is this world all of us share as the public domain within which we communicate, work, and live our lives. Moreover, we naively assume that this world has a history, a past, that it has a future, and that the rough present in which we find ourselves is epistemi-cally given to all normal men in much the same way. In the simplest terms, we are all born into the same world, grow up as children guided by parents and other adults, learn a language, come into contact with others, receive an education, move into some phase of the business of life, and go through the infinitely detailed catalogue of human activity: we play, love, create, suffer, and die. But throughout all of the routine elements and forms of existence, we simply assume, presuppose, take it for granted that the daily world in which all of these activities go on is there; it is only on special occasions, if at all, that a serious doubt arises as to the veridical character or philosophical signification of our everyday world. Thus, the essential foundation of mundane existence remains unrecognized by common-sense men whose lives are nevertheless structured by and built upon the matrix of daily life. The philosopher's privilege is to render the taken for granted the object of his critical inspection, and this indeed was the procedure of Dr. Schutz. His problem was to achieve a rationale of the essential structure of daily life through an examination of its manifold typifications. What follows now is an outline of the results of his analysis.
II
i. the common-sense world
"The common-sense world," "world of daily life," "every-day world" are variant expressions for the intersubjective world experienced by man within what Husserl terms the "natural attitude." This world existed, we believe, before our birth, has its history, and is given to us in an organized fashion. It is primarily the scene of our actions and the locus of resistance to action: we act not only within but upon the world. And our initial purpose is not so much the interpretation or understanding of the world but the effecting of changes within it; we seek to dominate before we endeavour to comprehend. The common-sense world, then, is the arena of social action; within it men come into relationship with each other and try to come to terms with each other as well as with themselves. All of this, however, is typically taken for granted, and this means that these structures of daily life are not themselves recognized or appreciated formally by common sense. Rather, common sense sees the world, acts in the world, and interprets the world through these implicit typifications. That there is a social world, that there are fellow men, that we can communicate meaningfully with others, that there are very broad and general principles true for daily life -these prime facts are inwoven in the texture of the natural attitude. Their explication depends on a detailed examination of the conditions a priori for the possibility of the common-sense world.
a) Biographical situation
Although the common-sense reality forms the matrix for all social action, each individual locates himself in daily life in a particular manner, in the light of what Dr. Schutz has called his "biographical situation." To be born into the world means first of all to be born of parents who are unique to us, to be raised by adults who constitute the guiding elements of our segment of exnerience. And since, as Dr. Schutz puts it, human beings are
xxviii
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born of mothers and not concocted in retorts, the formative period of each life is realized in a unique way. Moreover, each person continues throughout his life to interpret what he encounters in the world in the perspective of his special interests, motives, desires, aspirations, religious and ideological commitments. Thus, common-sense reality is given to us all in historical and cultural forms of universal validity, but the way in which these forms are translated in an individual life depends on the totality of the experience a person builds up in the course of his concrete existence. Among the conditions I find circumscribing my life, I come to recognize two types of elements: those either within my control or capable of being brought into control and those outside of or beyond the possibility of control. Acting in the world, I seek to change and alter it, to modify the scene of my activities. My biographical situation defines the way in which I locate the arena of action, interpret its possibilities, and engage its chaUenges. Even the determination of what the individual can modify or not modify is affected by his unique situation. The funded experience of a life, what a phenomenologist would call the ''sedimented" structure of the individual's experience, is the condition for the subsequent interpretation of all new events and activities. "The" world becomes transposed into "my" world in accordance with the relevant elements of my biographical situation. Thus, the individual as an actor in the social world defines the reality he encounters. As Dr. Schutz writes, "The actor's actual situation has its history; it is the sedimentation of all his previous subjective experiences. They are not experienced by the actor as being anonymous but as unique and subjectively given to him and to him alone."
b) Stock of Knowledge at Hand
The biographical situation has as its cardinal feature the fact that at any moment in his life the individual has what Dr. Schutz terms a "stock of knowledge at hand." This stock is made up of typifications of the common-sense world. Each of us accepts this world as not only existing but existing before our birth, as not only inhabited by fellow men but as interpreted by them in typical ways, as not only having a future but as havine a. future
introduction
xxix
that is only at best partially determinate. Still further, we know that our world includes animate beings as well as inert objects. These beings and objects are from the outset perceived typically and within a horizon of familiarity. What is new and different is recognized as unusual because it arises against a background of the ordinary. But no one has to teach us that the ordinary is ordinary, that the familiar is familiar; the very texture of common-sense life includes these typifications which indeed make further predications possible. This "stockpiling" of typifications is. endemic to common-sense life. From childhood on, the individual continues to amass a vast number of "recipes" which then serve as techniques for understanding or at least controlling aspects of his experience. The thousands of concrete problematic situations that arise in the course of daily affairs and have to be handled in some form are perceived and even initially formulated in terms of the individual's stock of knowledge at hand. The fund of his experience typically apprehended and interpreted is then the basis for his subsequent action. It is clear that for certain problems a person's stock of knowledge is more than adequate and that for other situations he must improvise and extrapolate, but even improvisation proceeds along typically possible lines and is restricted to the individual's imaginative possibilities. Those possibilities, in turn, are grounded in the stock of knowledge at hand. Finally, the typifications which comprise the stock of knowledge are generated out of a social structure. Here as everywhere, knowledge is socially rooted, socially distributed, and socially informed. Yet its individuated expression depends on the unique placement of the individual in the social world.
c) The Co-ordinates of the Social Matrix
A cartographer's description of a geographical area would be quite distant from my personal awareness or remembrance of the same region. The co-ordinates he must use in mapping the terrain are objectively necessary for his professional task, but they are certainly far removed from my concerns. First of all, the cartographer plots his map in terms of a universally recognized system of longitudes and latitudes; his geographical position at the time of mapping is necessarily irrelevant. Similarly, the actual
xxx
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position of the reader of the map is irrelevant to understanding what is mapped, although it may be relevant for other purposes. But in my appreciation of a certain landscape, it is precisely my position in space and time which is the primary consideration. The elements of the scene are before me, the aspects I consider marginal are marginal with regard to what I deem central, and the knowledge I possess of the surroundings is dependent on my physical placement in the world. Fore and aft, to the side of, near and far, above and below, here and there - these are all rendered intelligible by my placement in the world. Furthermore, the temporal perspectives of now and then, earlier and later, soon or not so soon, hinge upon my placement in time. In addition, then, to the co-ordinates of mathematics and natural science there are the co-ordinates of immediate personal experience, and it is these personal co-ordinates which are of fundamental importance to common-sense reality. Dr. Schutz maintains that "the place which my body occupies within the world, my actual Here, is the starting point from which I take my bearing in space. It is, so to . speak, the center 0 of my system of coordinates . .. And in a similar way my actual Now is the origin of all the time perspectives under which I organize the events within the world ..." To say, as we have, that "the" world is transposed in common-sense experience into "my" world would mean here that the standardized space and time of natural science is not the basis for the typifications of spatial and temporal location utilized by men in •daily life. Indeed, the reverse is the case: the primary grounding of our being in the world is in subjective space and time. Once again, as with the biographical situation and the stock of knowledge at hand, the definition of the individual's world arises out of his uniquely sedimented and structured subjectivity. But, as Dr. Schutz would say, this is only half the story. Although the individual defines his world from his own perspective, he is nevertheless a social being, rooted in an intersubjective reality. "The world of daily life into which we are born is from the outset an intersubjective world." The philosophical problem of inter-subjectivity is the clue to social reality.
2. intersubjectivity
It is a characteristic of daily life that the philosophical question of how knowledge of other minds is possible never arises as a formal problem for common-sense men. Instead, intersubjectivity is taken for granted as an obvious quality of our world - our world is the underlying typification of common sense. But a philosophy of what common sense takes for granted must necessarily raise and face the question of intersubjectivity if it is to come to terms with the formative features underlying human experience. Recognizing that it is a decisive feature of daily life that the problem of intersubjectivity does not arise as a formal issue, we may still say that it is part of the task of philosophy to account for this state of affairs as well as to go on to develop the methodological principles underlying relationships between persons. The first question to be asked here is that of how knowledge of other selves is possible at all. Setting aside considerations of transcendental phenomenology with which Dr. Schutz was deeply concerned, his approach to the nature of intersubjectivity is by way of a descriptive analysis of the typifications of the common-sense world.
a) The "Here" and "There" of the Ego
Taking my body as the center point for the co-ordinates which map my world, I may say that the position of my body constitutes my Here in relationship to which the body of a fellow man is There. I find that it is possible to alter my position and move from Here to There. Having moved, the There then becomes a Here. But the body of my fellow man remains There for me as it remains still a Here for him. Although I cannot in fact stand directly in the perspective of the other's Here, I can subjunctively attribute to him a reciprocity of perspectives. Thus the objects and events of the world are common to both of us because I can perceive from There the same things I perceive from Here, despite the change in perspective. Within the common-sense world it is simply taken for granted that the reciprocity of perspectives holds, that the objects and events of human ex-
xxxii introduction
perience are intersubjectively available and more or less the same for all "normal" perceivers. The concept of normalcy itself, it might be suggested, is derivative from the implicit assumptions common sense makes about the structure of sensory perception. The interchangeability of Here and There between egos is the necessary condition for a shared reality. But the problem goes much further, for in addition to spatial co-ordinates there are the temporal relationships founded on the null point of my Now. A reciprocity of temporal perspectives forms the analogue of the dialectic of Here and There.
b) The Alter Ego
Among the elements of my experience of the outer world are not only physical objects but fellow men, alter egos. Encountering the body of another human being is qualitatively different from the experience of inert bodies, bodies as things. First of all, the body of a feUow man is experienced as part of a psycho-physical unity, and this means that coeval with the recognition of the body is the awareness and appreciation of the ego who possesses, in addition to a body, a world of cognitive and conative awareness similar in general to mine. This ego is indeed an alter ego, a being for whom there is a world. Although I know infinitely more about myself than I do about the other, there is a crucial respect in which the knowledge I have of the other transcends my self-knowledge. In reflection I can grasp myself only in my past acts. The very act of reflection is possible only if the object of reflection is part of the past, even if it is the immediate past. This implies, as Dr. Schutz points out, that "the whole present . . . and also the vivid present of our Self, is inaccessible for the reflective attitude. We can only turn to the stream of our thought as if it had stopped with the last grasped experience. In other words, self-consciousness can only be experienced modo preterito, in the past tense." Our knowledge of the other, however, is possible in an immediate present. "We catch the other's thought in its vivid presence and not modo preterito; that is, we catch it as a 'Now' and not as a 'Just now.' The other's speech and our listening are experienced as a vivid simultaneity." This simultaneity is the essence of intersubjectivitv, for it means that I grasp the subjectivity of the
introduction xxxiii
alter ego at the same time as I live in my own stream of consciousness. In these terms, it is possible to define the alter ego as "that subjective stream of thought which can be experienced in its vivid present." And this grasp in simultaneity of the other as well as his reciprocal grasp of me makes possible our being in the world together.
c) Predecessors, Contemporaries, Consociates, and Successors
The designation "fellow men" really covers a broad range of alter egos possessing strata with different characteristics. My fellow man may be a predecessor, one who lived before my time and who is known to me only through the reports of others, a contemporary, one who is now alive and with whom I share a temporal reality (we are alive in the same age), a consociate, a contemporary with whom I share also a face to face relationship, (we live in the same spatial segment of the world), or a successor, one who will live after I die and who remains during my lifetime necessarily anonymous. The social structures relevant to all of these types are radically different. The knowledge I have of my predecessors is always in the mode of the past; their lives and ideas may influence my acts but they remain beyond the boundary of my influence. They influence but cannot be influenced. And, of course, I may not know them but only about them in varying degrees of clarity and detail. Successors occupy a more ghostly perspective. Toward them I may orient my actions, but they remain, in principle, unknowable. It is with contemporaries and consociates that most of my social traffic occurs. And here again they are known by way of the typifications of the common-sense world. The "face to face" relationship is fundamental for all other structures of social relatedness. In my face to face encounter with consociates I share a community of space within our reach in which I interpret the other's acts, but I share a temporal community as well. Consociates are involved in an on-going temporal flow, bounded by common spatial limits. Thus, Dr. Schutz writes, "each partner participates in the onrolling life of the other, can grasp in a vivid present the other's thoughts as they are built up step by step. They may . . . share one another's
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brief, consociates grow older together; they live, as we may call it, in a pure We-relationship." It is only in the life of consociates that the individual identity, the uniqueness of the person, may be grasped. Though even here, it is merely a facet of individuality which is available to the understanding of the other. As with all social relationships, predecessors, contemporaries, consociates, and successors are, in variant ways, located and interpreted through the typifications of common-sense life.
3. action
Dr. Schutz defines "action" as human conduct self-consciously projected by the actor. "Act," on the other hand, designates accomplished action. The difference between action and mere phantasying is that a voluntative fiat is involved in the former which establishes the action as purposive. Action is either overt or covert. By definition, all overt action is both projected and purposive. Purposive phantasying would be termed a "performance," not an action. But overt action is only part of the total complex of action. Refraining from action - what may be termed negative action - is also a type of action, indeed an especially interesting and important phenomenon. "Covert" action, then, covers all forms of negative decision in which the actor purposively chooses to refrain from certain overt conduct. The surgeon's decision not to operate, the statesman's decision not to compromise, the businessman's decision not to sell, the politician's decision not to run for office are all examples of covert action. But the list should be extended radically to include the infinite range of situations which men in daily life confront and define in their own way, often through negative action. The crucial feature of action in every case is its purposive and projective character. Action has its source in the consciousness of the actor.
a) The Subjective Interpretation of Meaning
Taking as his point of departure Max Weber's postulate of the
concerned with the understanding of social action as the meaning which the actor bestows upon his action, i.e., the meaning his action has for him. Rather than treat Weber's postulate as a formal methodological device, Dr. Schutz thinks of the subjective interpretation of meaning as above all a typification of the common-sense world, the actual way in which men in daily life do interpret their own and each other's behavior. More strictly put, the subjective interpretation of meaning as well as the whole problem of interpretive understanding (Verstehen) involves three related but different issues: "Verstehen (1) as the experiential form of common-sense knowledge of human affairs, (2) as an epistemological problem, and (3) as a method peculiar to the social sciences." As the experiential form of common sense knowledge of human affairs Verstehen means simply that men in daily life interpret their world from the outset as a meaningful one. In addition to the body of the other being understood as an integral part of a psycho-physical unity, his acts are similarly treated as the conduct of a purposeful creature. Motives and goals are as inescapably part of the other's behavior as they are of our own. When I encounter a man acting in the social world, I know that I must understand Mm as a human being, and this means that his actions mean something to him as well as to me, relate to his world as well as to mine, and are ultimately rooted in the interpretive scheme he has created for living his life. But this knowledge is itself taken for granted by me as well as by him; its being taken for granted by us is precisely the typification which makes intersubjectivity possible. The philosophical problem involved here, however, transcends the scope of the common-sense world and constitutes the second meaning of Verstehen as an epistemological issue. Here Dr. Schutz argues that Verstehen in this sense is rooted in what Husserl calls the Lebenswelt, the Life-world that encompasses the rich totality of common-sense experience lived through by the individual in his concrete existence. And it is the Lebenswelt also which is the ground for understanding the meaning of Verstehen in the third sense, as a method peculiar to the social sciences. The objects investigated by the methods of the natural sciences are first-order constructs; they are, however complex, merely objects within the world of
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xxxvi
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xxxvii
qualitatively different situation. His objects are not only objects for his observation, they are beings who have their own pre-interpreted world, who do their own observing; they are fellow-men caught up in social reality. These "objects," then, are second-order constructs, and the method of Verstehen is employed in the social sciences in order to come to terms with the full subjective reality of the human beings they seek to comprehend.
b) The Definition of the Situation
If the primary concern of the social scientist should be the meaning which the actor bestows upon his own act, it follows that the actor is responsible for defining that meaning as well as the situation of which it is a part. The situation of the actor is primarily his problem, not that of the scientific observer. Moreover, the way in which the actor locates and interprets a given situation is a function of his subjectivity and corresponds to elements of his biographical situation. The social world is constituted by a multiplicity of actors, each of whom defines that world in related but individuated ways. Whether or not an actor defines his situation in a manner that tallies generally with what we call "objective" facts, his action is meaningful and quite relevant to the social scientist. However an actor defines his situation, his action is a datum for inquiry. That there is not only a multiplicity but a relativity in the definition of a situation by different actors or even by the same actor at different times is part of the essential structure of daily life. Understanding the social world means understanding the way in which men define their situations. Here Dr. Schutz turns to the sociology of W. I. Thomas as an American and more recent complement to Weber's subjective interpretation of meaning. "If men define situations as real," Thomas writes, "they are real in their consequences." If I define a situation as pleasant, threatening, boring, challenging, or fantastic, the way in which I have defined it establishes the status that situation has within my world, for the time being at least. Rather than treating such definition as a "response" or "reaction" to certain objective states of affairs, the social scientist, Dr. Schutz suggests, has to understand that definition
acting in it. That I may define the "same" situation in a radically different manner than does my fellow man leads philosophically to the problem of reality. Insisting as common sense does, if questioned, that there is an objective reality which is the "same" for all normal observers is not to be confused with demonstrating that this is indeed so or even understanding what is implied in such a claim. Men living in the paramount reality of everyday life are enmeshed in situations as they define them in the context of their lives. It is idle for the neutral observer to point out to committed actors the "objective" situation. As Sartre puts it: for the Romans, Carthage was conquered, but for the Cartha-genians, Carthage was enslaved.
c) Horizons of Action
Action is never isolated, unrelated to other action, divorced from the world. Whether overt or covert, all action has its horizons of relatedness with social reality. As Dr. Schutz writes, "No object is perceived as an insulated object; it is from the outset perceived as 'an object within its horizon,' a horizon of typical familiarity andpreacquaintanceship." So it is with every action. To perform or reperform the "same" action presupposes a typification deeply rooted in common-sense life, which Husserl calls the idealization of "I-can-do-it-again," that is, as Dr. Schutz puts it, "the assumption that I may under typically similar circumstances act in the typically similar way that I did before in order to bring about a typically similar state of affairs." The basic typification involved here underlies as well the structure of my biographical situation and my stock of knowledge at hand. And since action presupposes the situation of the actor, the initial constitution of "my" world is grounded in the typicality with which I handle the data of my experience. But even the idealization of "I-can-do-it-again" has its connections; it is the subjective correlate of the idealization of what Husserl calls "and so on," that is, the open horizon of determinability which attaches to any predication. Once again, these constructs reflect back on the epistemic situation of the actor. The co-ordinates of the social matrix, the Here and Now of the ego, imply the possi-
imn +/-> r\r T-ooraini-nor npr^nprtivp.s once held but
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xxxix
subsequently relinquished. The dialectic of Here and There is made possible by the idealizations which alone give it application to human action within the social world. The forms and modalities of action presuppose these essential horizons.
4. projects and roles
"All projecting," Dr. Schutz writes, "consists in an anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying." In phantasying, I visualize in anticipation the action I am projecting as though it were already performed, completed. Recalling the distinction between "action" and "act," we may say that projecting is the phantasying of acts. Clearly, the time structure of the project is of central importance. In projecting, I anticipate the act as already having been accomplished; I place myself imaginatively in the future perfect tense. But the possibility of doing this rests on certain essential elements of the present. My biographical situation and my stock of knowledge at hand are the condition for my "as-if" projection into the future. Between the present anticipation and the fulfilled act lies the temporal "in between" which I must pass through in order to realize my project. The realization of my plans presupposes my growing older in a world of necessary "in betweens." Of course, all projects are not fulfilled, and even those which are realized are seldom achieved in the pure form in which they were projected. Disappointment is no less a characteristic of daily life than attainment; we know, if only intuitively, that in the course of realizing a project the "I" who phantasied will not be identical with the "I" who later reflects on his fulfilled act. And even the notion of a "pure" phantasying is ambiguous, for the "I" who phantasies is in reality a complex and changing ego whose knowledge of the world and of others is as fragmentary as his knowledge of himself. These considerations prove decisive for any theory of social roles.
a) "Because" and "In-Order-To" Motives
The difficulty with defining action as "motivated behavior"
prefers to distinguish two different types of concepts, too often herded into one shed. Motives which involve ends to be achieved, goals sought for, are termed "in-order-to" motives; motives which are explained on the basis of the actor's background, environment,  or psychic disposition  are  called "because" motives. The time structure of both types is different. In-order-to motives are dominated by the future tense; because motives by the past tense. As I project my action now, I am aware of my in-order-to motives; indeed, it is precisely these motives which spur my action. But the because motives which could explain certain aspects of my projecting, their causal conditions, remain obscure and marginal to my awareness. These temporal differences lead to a larger differentiation: in-order-to motives form a subjective category; because motives an objective category. The actor caught up in his action, understood as part of the on-going process of projecting, defines and interprets the meaning of his action in terms of in-order-to motives. To refer to these motives as a subjective category is consistent with the meaning of Weber's postulate of the subjective interpretation of meaning and Thomas' theory of the definition of the situation. "Subjective" here refers to the relationship action bears to the consciousness of the actor; it has nothing to do with notions of introspection, psychological conditions, or private attitudes. In exploring the subjectivity of the actor, then, Dr. Schutz is concerned with those aspects of consciousness which are accessible to phenomeno-logical inspection and description. The analysis of the objective conditions underlying because motives is a causal affair open to the methods of natural scientific inquiry. Out of the problematic relationship between the two types of motives arises the metaphysical problem of free will and determinism.
b) Fragmentation
The ego cannot be considered simply an "I." First of all, any act of reflection involves the distance between the reflector and the reflected upon described earlier with regard to the problem of the alter ego. When I reflect upon myself, I cannot seize myself as I am in the immediate now; I can only attend to myself as an obiect for reflection, and this means that it is always an earlier
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phase of myself which I capture. George H. Mead's distinction between the "I" and the "me" aspects of the self is quite relevant here, as Dr. Schutz points out. For Mead, the "I" is always the subject of any action, the "me" the object. The relationship between the two is highly dialectical, for the self is continually involved in action in which both aspects appear. This dialectic is also a temporal one: the "I" as subject of a present action may become the "me" reflected upon in a later phase of conduct. Quite apart from the theory of the social genesis of the self which Mead develops, however, the problem of the "I" and "me" aspects of the self leads to a conception of the fragmentation of the ego. Each of us, as Simmel has shown, is not only a fragment of the social collectivity, each of us is but a fragment of his own possibilities. The individual presents himself to society, to his fellow men, with varying sides or aspects of his nature, realized in the form of social roles; but he remains in a problematic relationship with himself as well, for he sees himself in a partial way and comprehends merely a fragment of his being. All projects and roles are permeated with the underlying imperfection of self-knowledge and knowledge of other selves. Each of us is destined to play a multitude of roles in the everyday world; yet the full meaning of these roles remains latent in experience. In Simmel's formulation, as expressed by Dr. Schutz, "man . .. enters any social relationship merely with a part of his self and is, at the same time, always within and outside of such a relationship." The fragmentation of the self is a metaphysical constant of the human condition.
c) Relevance
If the common-sense world is from the outset a pre-interpreted one, if all of the elements of this world have their horizons of typicality, and if the notions of the biographicaUy determined situation, the stock of knowledge at hand, and the definition of the situation are reliable guides for the interpretation of social reality, there must be some underlying principle of selection which accounts for the concrete choices, attitudes, decisions, and commitments the individual expresses and makes. For Dr. Schutz, "relevance" is the rubric under which he includes the
types and forms of action undertaken by the individual. I decide upon a course of action in one direction rather than another in the light of what I deem to be relevant to my deepest convictions or interests. Although I share certain general relevance systems with most of my fellow men, I recognize that I often share them for somewhat different reasons and that these reasons can be explicated only in terms of my scheme of fundamental concerns. Similarly, I know that what is interesting to me may bore another, what is sacred to me may be laughable to him, what I prize may leave him indifferent. Underlying all of these disagreements is the prime difference of variant or even contradictory systems of relevance. Just as the co-ordinates of the social matrix determine the way in which the world presents itself to me, so there is a kind of "Here and Now" of the relevance structure of my life, a null point at the very center of my axio-logical existence, in terms of which all evaluative predication takes on significance and direction. The ultimate grounding of the system of relevances which guides the life of the individual is in an existential theme explored by Dr. Schutz within the framework of his theory of multiple realities.
5. multiple realities
Following William James, Dr. Schutz approaches the problem of reality in terms of the orders of reality which James calls "sub-universes": the world of physical things, of science, of religion, and even of "sheer madness and vagary." Although the tendency among common-sense men is to conceive of these worlds in more or less disconnected fashion, James holds that "each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention." The problem now is to determine the nature of the connections or bridges which bind these worlds to each other, and to see how the individual may inhabit any of them or all of them in the course of his existence. Dr. Schutz attacks his problem by setting aside the psycho-logistic grounding and orientation of James' theory. Instead of speaking, then, of "sub-universes," he will refer to "finite provinces of meaning." "We speak of provinces of meaning and
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not of sub-universes/' Dr. Schutz writes, "because it is the meaning of our experiences and not the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes reality." The essential features of all finite provinces of meaning are described. Each province has its own cognitive style with respect to which experiences within each world are inter-consistent. And each of the finite provinces of meaning may receive the "accent of reality," may be attended to as real. But there is no formula of transformation which • enables one to pass smoothly from one province to another; it is only by a Kierkegaardian "leap" that passage is possible. Finally, these considerations require one qualification: although they extend to the world of daily life, they do so with a difference, for "the world of working in daily life," according to Dr. Schutz, "is the archetype of our experience of reality. All the other provinces of meaning may be considered as its modifications."
. a) The Paramount Reality
The world of working or, in alternative language, the world of common sense and daily life, is taken as the paramount reality. Within it the individual locates himself as a body, as operating physically in the world, and as meeting the resistance of fellow men as well as of things. Working means gearing into the outer world, in Dr. Schutz' terminology, and this, in turn, means that as an actor in the common-sense world I know that my action will ' cause changes that will affect other states of affairs and will be noticed by other men. Reviewing my acts, I recognize their ■ causal character as well as their productive value. Anticipating acts in the projective mood of phantasy, I imagine their consequences and their effects. Finally, it is in the world of working, the wide awake world of adult daily life, that communication has its primary locus. Gearing into the world also means communicating in it. And since communication presupposes intersubjectivity, and intersubjectivity the typifications underlying all social relatedness, the individual is born into the paramount reality in which, as Dr. Schutz has tried to show, all typifications are rooted. It is this reality which the individual takes for granted and which he believingly lives in within the natural attitude. What Husserl terms the "general thesis of the natural
attitude," the doxic belief in the very being of the world, finds its primary expression in the common-sense world. All modifications of this thesis must then be treated as having their root in daily life, just as all movements from one finite province of meaning to another presuppose the bed-rock of common sense. How does it happen, then, that traffic between worlds occurs at all? Or to point to the same problem from a different perspective, how is the boundary of the paramount reality protected from invaders? These questions ultimately generate the phe-nomenological problem of how a philosophy of the natural attitude is possible.
b) The Epoche of the Natural Attitude
One of the most important insights of Dr. Schutz' theory of multiple realities is his notion of the "epoche of the natural attitude." It deserves to be quoted at length: "Phenomenology has taught us the concept of phenomenological epoche, the suspension of our belief in the reality of the world as a device to overcome the natural attitude by radicalizing the Cartesian method of philosophical doubt. The suggestion may be ventured that man within the natural attitude also uses a specific epoche, of course quite another one than the phenomenologist. He does not suspend belief in the outer world and its objects, but on the contrary, he suspends doubt in its existence. What he puts in brackets is the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him. We propose to call this epoche the epoche of the natural attitude." Our natural believing in the world, in its reality, its being there, its having a past and the likelihood of a future, and of its being given to us all in much the same way is the philosophical foundation of the common-sense world. The paramount reality is founded on the apparent truth of the natural attitude. The implications of Dr. Schutz' idea of an epoche of the natural attitude are of considerable consequence. Essentially, he is suggesting that the natural attitude itself is an achievement based on a prior suspension of doubt. To be sure, this is not a self-conscious affair any more than the natural attitude itself is self-consciously constructed. Suspension of doubt mav now be considered a clue to the verv concept of typifi-
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cation, of the taken for granted idealizations which structure daily life. If an implicit rationale underlies the epoche of the natural attitude, explains why it should be effected at all, the underlying reasons must be sought for in those existential themes which are the philosophical climax of Dr. Schutz' account of multiple realities. Here also we will find the constitutive roots for his theory of relevance.
c) The Fundamental Anxiety
"The whole system of relevances which govern us within the natural attitude," Dr. Schutz argues, "is founded upon the basic experience of each of us: I know that I shall die and I fear to die. This basic experience we suggest calling the fundamental anxiety. It is the primordial anticipation from which all the others originate. From the fundamental anxiety spring the many interrelated systems of hopes and fears, of wants and satisfactions, of chances and risks which incite man within the natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world, to overcome obstacles, to draft projects, and to realize them." The fear of death is here the fear of my death, and it might be suggested, though Dr. Schutz does not develop this idea, that the epoche of the natural attitude includes within its brackets the awareness that I will die. It would be an error, however, to treat the fundamental anxiety as a version of Heidegger's conception of death, an interpretation for which Dr. Schutz had considerable understanding but little sympathy. Nor would it be proper to consider the fundamental anxiety an existential theme in the narrower sense of a topic developed in the complex movement known simply as "existentialism." Again, Dr. Schutz had a profound grasp of the problems of existential philosophy but equally profound reservations about its conclusions. Let us rather consider the fundamental anxiety as an existential theme exploited not only by existentialists but by every metaphysical mind in the entire range of philosophy. In these terms, the fear of death is a primordial datum of human existence, as inescapable in its philosophical pertinence as it is in its implications for any theory of social reality. The paramount reality of daily life is
However he defines his awareness of death, he cannot avoid its conceptual and emotive impact. It is the sovereign condition of human existence that the paramount reality transcends us all.
Ill
It would be misleading to suggest that Dr. Schutz' concern with the structure of common-sense life and his study of its essential forms were original because other philosophers had somehow ignored this stratum of experience. Mundane existence has been an ancient and persistent theme for philosophical treatment, and Dr. Schutz' historical indebtedness is manifest in his appreciative treatment of such thinkers as Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, and, above all, Husserl. Instead, we should say that the striking originality of the work which follows is in the methodological perspective in terms of which the central theme is approached and in terms of which the analysis is developed. We have here a phenomenological investigation into the nature of social reality, the first fully conceived and systematically realized description of the eidetic structure of the Lebenswelt. But it would be equally mistaken to say that Dr. Schutz' work is merely an extension of Husserľs thought or merely an application of phenomenological method to the problems of the social sciences. Dr. Schutz was deeply involved in phenomenology, but he was also an independent philosopher for whom phenomenology was a guide, not a master. He had the rare advantage of a comprehensive grasp of the concrete problems of sociology, social psychology, economics, history, political theory, and jurisprudence as well as the philosophical apparatus capable of handling them. Phenomenology served him as the instrument for ordering these problems into a coherent unity; never did it dictate to him, a priori, a methodological mold to which these disciplines had to conform. His originality expressed itself, then, in the union of a phenomenological philosophy with a unique placement of the very concept of social reality. The result involves a radical reconsideration of the starting point of philosophy.
TraditionaUy, perception has been taken as the decisive issue f^r- t^v,;i^c.^t-1v,í^qi rvripntatinn and annraisal. The full impact of Dr.
xl vi
introduction
Schutz' work leads to the denial of the validity of this starting point for any philosophy concerned with social reality. Instead, action becomes the dominant theme. The implications of this transformation for epistemology are far-reaching, but its effects on the methodology of the social sciences are of more immediate concern to us here. Fundamentally, positivistic and naturalistic philosophies of science have assumed that since perception or sensation generally is paradigmatic as a point of departure for a methodology of the natural sciences, it is necessarily the case that it has the same status for a methodology of the social sciences. The assumption is that the ideal for the social sciences would be a science of society patterned, of course, after the eminently successful models of physics and mathematics. To challenge the status of perception, in this context, is to challenge the assumption that informs so much of contemporary methodology. Dr. Schutz goes as far as to suggest that "the particular methodological devices developed by the social sciences in order to grasp social reality are better suited than those of the natural sciences to lead to the discovery of the general principles which govern all human knowledge." What emerges from this view is a particular conception of methodology but also an approach to a theory of man.
The stress upon action as the starting point for a methodology of the social sciences is not a plea for a new kind of knowledge; it is rather an insistence on the qualitative difference between the kinds of reality investigated by natural scientists and social scientists. It is a plea for appreciating the fact that men are not only elements of the scientist's field of observation but pre-interpreters of their own field of action, that their overt conduct is only a fragment of their total behavior, that the first challenge given to those who seek to understand social reality is to comprehend the subjectivity of the actor by grasping the meaning an act has for him, the axis of the social world. Finally, Dr. Schutz's emphasis on action returns us to his cardinal insight, his analysis of the typifications of the common-sense world. The social scientist's task is the reconstruction of the way in which men in daily life interpret their own world. This is Dr. Schutz' Berg-sonian point of contact with the real. But the final development
Of his Position won 1H  a«}iP rpmcmrTorl  ro^nir«+l,~.,.—1«-----# —«
introduction
XLVir.
a philosophical anthropology, a theory of man. Hints toward such a theory are given throughout his work; now they remain seminal fragments of an extraordinary achievement. The critical evaluation of that achievement is beyond our present scope, but to attest to its brilliance may be permitted as a final pnyilege^ Dr Schutz was modest in his claims but certain of the truth of his endeavour. "Of my results I am not so sure, he once said, "others may do better; but of one thing I am deeply convinced. Here are the problems of the social sciences.
The Problem of Social Reality
PART I
On The Methodology of the Social Sciences
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN ACTION
i. introduction: content of
experience and thought objects
IJ The constructs of common-sense and of scientific thinking
"Neither common sense nor science can proceed without departing from the strict consideration of what is actual in experience." This statement by A. N. Whitehead is at the foundation of his analysis of the Organization of Thought.1 Even the thing perceived in everyday life is more than a simple sense presentation.2 It is a thought object, a construct of a highly complicated nature, involving not only particular forms of time-successions in order to constitute it as an object of one single sense, say of sight,3 and of space relations in order to constitute it as a sense-object of several senses, say of sight and touch,4 but also a contribution of imagination of hypothetical sense presentations in order to complete it.5 According to Whitehead, it is precisely the last-named factor, the imagination of hypothetical sense presentation, "which is the rock upon which the whole structure of common-sense thought is erected" 6 and it is the effort of reflective criticism "to construe our sense presentation as actual realization of the hypothetical thought object of perceptions." 7 In other words, the so-called concrete facts of common-sense perception are not so concrete as it seems. They already involve abstractions of a highly complicated nature, and
1 Alfred North Whitehead: The Organization of Thought, London, 1917, now partially republished in The Aims of Education, New York, 1929, also as "Mentor-Book," New York, 1949. The quotations refer to this edition. For the first quotation see p. no.
2 Ibid., Chapter 9, "The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas, I Fact, II Objects."
3 Ibid., p. i28f. and I3r.
4 Ibid., p. i3r and 136.
5 Ibid., p. r33.
6 Ibid., p. 134.
7 Ibid., p. 135.
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METHODOLOGY
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION 5
we have to take account of this situation lest we commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.8
Science always, according to Whitehead, has a twofold aim: First, the production of a theory which agrees with experience, and second, the explanation of common-sense concepts of nature at least in their outline; this explanation consists in the preservation of these concepts in a scientific theory of harmonized thought.9 For this purpose physical science (which, in this context, is alone of concern to Whitehead) has to develop devices by which the thought objects of common-sense perception are superseded by the thought objects of science.10 The latter, such as molecules, atoms, and electrons have shed all qualities capable of direct sense presentation in our consciousness and are known to us only by the series of events in which they are implicated, events, to be sure, which are represented in our consciousness by sense presentations. By this device a bridge is formed between the fluid vagueness of sense and the exact definition of thought.11
It is not our concern to follow here step by step the ingenious method by which Whitehead uses the principle briefly outlined for his analysis of the organization of thought, starting from the "anatomy of scientific ideas" and ending with the mathematically formulated theories of modern physiscs and the procedural rules of symbolic logic.12 We are, however, highly interested in the basic view which Whitehead shares with many other prominent thinkers of our time such as Wilham James,13 Dewey,14 Bergson,15 and Husserl.16 This view can be, very roughly, formulated as follows:
8 Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modem World, New York, 1925, reprinted as "Mentor-Book," New York, 1948, p. 52 ff.
9 The Aims of Education, p. 126.
10 Ibid., p. 135.
11 Ibid., p. 136.
12 Ibid., pp. Ii2-r23 and 136-155.
13 William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IX, "The Stream of Thought," p. 224f; especially p. 289!
14 John Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, New York, 1938, especially Chs. Ill, IV, VII, VIII, XII; See also the essay, "The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy" (1941) now in the collection Problems of Men, New York, 1946. p. 3i6f.
15 Henri Bergson, Matiere et memoire, Ch. I, "La Selection des Images par la Representation."
16 See for instance Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II Bd., II, "Die 1   »i_v.u j__ c---;„„ „„a Hip riHiien Abstraktions Theorien"; rendered excel-
All our knowledge of the world, in common-sense as well as in scientific thinking, involves constructs, i.e., a set of abstractions, generalizations, formalizations, idealizations specific to the respective level of thought organization. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as facts, pure and simple. All facts are from the outset facts selected from a universal context by the activities of our mind. They are, therefore, always interpreted facts, either facts looked at as detached from their context by an artificial abstraction or facts considered in their particular setting. In either case, they carry along their interpretational inner and outer horizon. This does not mean that, in daily life or in science, we are unable to grasp the reality of the world. It just means that we grasp merely certain aspects of it, namely those which are relevant to us either for carrying on our business of living or from the point of view of a body of accepted rules of procedure of thinking called the method of science.
2) Particular structure of the constructs of the social sciences
If, according to this view, all scientific constructs are designed to supersede the constructs of common-sense thought, then a principal difference between the natural and the social sciences becomes apparent. It is up to the natural scientists to determine which sector of the universe of nature, which facts and events therein, and which aspects of such facts and events are topically and interpretationally relevant to their specific purpose. These facts and events are neither preselected nor preinterpreted; they do not reveal intrinsic relevance structures. Relevance is not inherent in nature as such, it is the result of the selective and interpretative activity of man within nature or observing nature. The facts, data, and events with which the natural scientist has to deal are just facts, data, and events within his observational field but this field does not "mean" anything to the molecules, atoms, and electrons therein.
But the facts, events, and data before the social scientist are of an entirely different structure. His observational field, the social
Ch. IX, esp. p. 25if; Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, English translation by Boyce Gibson, London, 1931, First Section; Formale und transzendentale Logik, Halle, 1929, Sees. 82-86, 94-96 (cf. Farber. I.e., p. 50111.); Erfahrung und
6 METHODOLOGY
world, is not essentially structureless. It has a particular meaning and relevance structure for the human beings Uving, thinking, and acting therein. They have preselected and preinterpreted this world by a series of common-sense constructs of the reality of daily life, and it is these thought objects which determine their behavior, define the goal of their action, the means available for attaining them - in brief, which help them to find their bearings within their natural and socio-cultural environment and to come to terms with it. 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 fellow-men. Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural17 rules of his science.
Modern social sciences find themselves faced with a serious dilemma. One school of thought feels that there is a basic difference in the structure of the social world and of the world of nature. This insight leads, however, to the erroneous conclusion that the social sciences are toto coelo different from the natural sciences, a view which disregards the fact that certain procedural rules relating to correct thought organization are common to all empirical sciences. The other school of thought tries to look at the behavior of man in the same way in which the natural scientist looks at the "behavior" of his thought objects, taking it for granted that the methods of the natural sciences (above all, mathematical physics), which have achieved such magnificent results, are the only scientific methods. On the other hand, it takes for granted that the very adoption of the methods of the natural sciences for establishing constructs will lead to reliable knowledge of social reality. Yet these two assumptions are incompatible with each other. An ideally refined and fully developed behavioristic system, for example, would lead far away from the constructs in terms of which men in the reality of daily life experience their own and their fellow-men's behavior.
17 On the concept of procedural rules, see Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York, rg44, esp. Chs. Ill and IV; on the divergent views of the
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION J
To overcome this difficulty particular methodological devices are required, among them the constructs of patterns of rational action. For the purpose of further analysis of the specific nature of the thought objects of social sciences we have to characterize some of the common-sense constructs used by men in everyday life. It is upon the latter that the former are founded.
II. CONSTRUCTS OF THOUGHT OBJECTS IN COMMON-SENSE THINKING
i) The individual's common-sense knowledge of the world is a system of constructs of its typicality
Let us try to characterize the way in which the wide-awake 18 grown-up man looks at the intersubjective world of daily life within which and upon which he acts as a man amidst his fellow-men. This world existed before our birth, experienced and interpreted by others, our predecessors, as an organized world. Now it is given to our experience and interpretation. All interpretation of this world is based on a stock of previous experiences of it, our own or those handed down to us by parents or teachers; these experiences in the form of "knowledge at hand" function as a scheme of reference.
To this stock of knowledge at hand belongs our knowledge that the world we live in is a world of more or less well circumscribed objects with more or less definite qualities, objects among which we move, which resist us and upon which we may act. Yet none of these objects is perceived as insulated. From the outset it is an object within a horizon of familiarity and pre-acquaintanceship which is, as such, just taken for granted until further notice as the unquestioned, though at any time questionable stock of knowledge at hand. The unquestioned pre-experiences are, however, also from the outset, at hand as typical, that is, as carrying open horizons of anticipated similar experiences. For example, the outer world is not experienced as an arrangement of individual unique objects, dispersed in space and time, but as
18 As to the precise meaning of this term, see "On Multiple Realities," p. 213. (Note: where articles are cited without further indication of source, as in this instance, the reference is to the present volume.) (M.N.)
8
METHODOLOGY
"mountains," "trees," "animals," "fellow-men." I may have never seen an Irish setter but if I see one, I know that it is an animal and in particular a dog, showing all the familiar features and the typical behavior of a dog and not, say, of a cat. I may reasonably ask: "What kind of dog is this?" The question presupposes that the dissimilarity of this particular dog from all other kinds of dogs which I know stands out and becomes questionable merely by reference to the similarity it has to my unquestioned experiences of typical dogs. In the more technical language of Husserl, whose analysis of the typicality of the world of daily life we have tried to sum up,19 what is experienced in the actual perception of an object is apperceptively transferred to any other similar object, perceived merely as to its type. Actual experience will or will not confirm my anticipation of the typical conformity with other objects. If confirmed, the content of the anticipated type will be enlarged; at the same time the type will be split up into sub-types; on the other hand the concrete real object will prove to have its individual characteristics, which, nevertheless, have a form of typicality.
Now, and this seems to be of special importance, I may take the typically apperceived object as an exemplar of the general type and allow myself to be led to this concept of the type, but I do not need by any means to think of the concrete dog as an exemplar of the general concept of "dog." "In general" my Irish setter Rover shows all the characteristics which the type "dog," according to my previous experience, implies. Yet exactly what he has in common with other dogs is of no concern to me. I look at him as my friend and companion Rover, as such distinguished from all the other Irish setters with which he shares certain typical characteristics of appearance and behavior. I am, without a special motive, not induced to look at Rover as a mammal, an animal, an object of the outer world, although I know that he is all this too.
Thus, in the natural attitude of daily life we are concerned merely with certain objects standing out over against the unquestioned field of pre-experienced other objects, and the result of the selecting activity of our mind is to determine which
19 Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, Sees. 18-21 and 82-85; sf. also "Lang-
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION 9
particular characteristics of such an object are individual and which typical ones. More generally, we are merely concerned with some aspects of this particular typified object. Asserting of this object S that it has the characteristic property p, in the form "S is p," is an elliptical statement. For S, taken without any question as it appears to me, is not merely p but also q and r and many other things. The full statement should read: "S is, among many other things, such as q and r, also p." If I assert with respect to an element of the world as taken for granted: "S is p," I do so because under the prevailing circumstances I am interested in the p-being of S, disregarding as not relevant its being also q and r.20
The terms "interest" and "relevant" just used are, however, merely headings for a series of complicated problems which cannot be elaborated upon within the frame of the present discussion. We have to restrict ourselves to a few remarks.
Man finds himself at any moment of his daily life in a bio-graphically determined situation, that is, in a physical and socio-cultural environment as defined by him,21 within which he has his position, not merely his position in terms of physical space and outer time or of his status and role within the social system but also his moral and ideological position.22 To say that this definition of the situation is biographically determined is to say that it has its history; it is the sedimentation of all man's previous experiences, organized in the habitual possessions of his stock of knowledge at hand, and as such his unique possession, given to him and to him alone.* This biographically determined situation includes certain possibilities of future practical or theoretical activities which shall be briefly called the "purpose at hand." It is this purpose at hand which defines those elements among all the others contained in such a situation which are relevant for this purpose. This system of relevances in turn determines what elements have to be made a substratum of
20 See literature referred to in Footnote 19.
21 As to the concept of "Defining the Situation," see the various pertinent papers of W. I. Thomas, now collected in the volume, Social Behavior and Personality, Contributions of W. I. Thomas to Theory and Social Research, ed. by Edmund H. Volkart, New York, igsr. Consult index and the valuable introductory essay by the editor.
22 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phinominologie de la perception, Paris, 1945, p. I58- • * See "Choosing anions Proier.ts of Action". T>r>. 76-77. (M.N.)
10
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COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION II
generalizing typification, what traits of these elements have to be selected as characteristically typical, and what others as unique and individual, that is, how far we have to penetrate into the open horizon of typicality. To return to our previous example: A change in my purpose at hand and the system of relevances attached thereto, the shifting of the "context" within which S is interesting to me, may induce me to become concerned with the q-being of S, its being also p having become irrelevant to me.
2) The inter subjective character of common-sense knowledge and its implication
In analyzing the first constructs of common-sense thinking in 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. It is intersubjective because we live in it as men among other men, bound to them through common influence and work, understanding others and being understood by them. It is a world of culture because, from the outset, the world of everyday life is a universe of significance to us, that is, a texture of meaning which we have to interpret in order to find our bearings within it and come to terms with it. This texture of meaning, however - and this distinguishes the realm of culture from that of nature -originates in and has been instituted by human actions, our own and our fellow-men's, contemporaries and predecessors. All cultural objects - tools, symbols, language systems, works of art, social institutions, etc. - point back by their very origin and meaning to the activities of human subjects. For this reason we are always conscious of the historicity of culture which we encounter in traditions and customs. This historicity is capable of being examined in its reference to human activities of which it is the sediment. For the same reason I cannot understand a cultural object without referring it to the human activity from which it originates. For example, I do not understand a tool without knowing the purpose for which it was designed, a sign or symbol without knowing what it stands for in the mind of the person who uses it, an institution without understanding what it means fnr the inrlivirlnals who orient their behavior with resard
to its existence. Here is the origin of the so-called postulate of subjective interpretation of the social sciences which will call for our attention later on.
Our next task is, however, to examine the additional constructs which emerge in common-sense thinking if we take into account that this world is not my private world but an intersubjective one and that, therefore, my knowledge of it is not my private affair but from the outset intersubjective or socialized. For our purpose we have briefly to consider three aspects of the problem of the socialization of knowledge:
a) The reciprocity of perspectives or the structural socialization of knowledge;
b) The social origin of knowledge or the genetic socialization of knowledge;
c) The social distribution of knowledge.
a) The reciprocity of perspectives
In the natural attitude of common-sense thinking in daily life I take it for granted that intelligent fellow-men exist. This implies that the objects of the world are, as a matter of principle, accessible to their knowledge, i.e., either known to them or knowable by them. This I know and take for granted beyond question. But I know also and take for granted that, strictly speaking, the "same" object must mean something different to me and to any of my feUow-men. This is so because
i) I, being "here," am at another distance from and experience other aspects as being typical of the objects than he, who is "there." For the same reason, certain objects are out of my reach (of my seeing, hearing, my manipulatory sphere, etc.) but within his, and vice versa.
ii) My and my fellow-man's biographically determined situations, and therewith our respective purposes at hand and our respective systems of relevances originating in such purposes, must differ, at least to a certain extent.
Common-sense thinking overcomes the differences in individual perspectives resulting from these factors by two basic idealizations :
i)   The idealization of the interchangeabilitv of the standpoints:
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I take it for granted - and assume my fellow-man does the same - that if I change places with him so that his "here" becomes mine, I shall be at the same distance from things and see them with the same typicality as he actually does; moreover, the same things would be in my reach which are actually in his. (The reverse is also true.) ii) The idealization of the congruency of the system of relevances: Until counterevidence I take it for granted - and assume my fellow-man does the same - that the differences in perspectives originating in our unique biographical situations are irrelevant for the purpose at hand of either of us and that he and I, that "We" assume that both of us have selected and interpreted the actually or potentially common objects and their features in an identical manner or at least an "empirically identical" manner, i.e., one sufficient for all practical purposes. It is obvious that both idealizations, that of the interchange-ability of the standpoints and that of the congruency of relevances
- together constituting the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives
- are typifying constructs of objects of thought which supersede the thought objects of my and my fellow-man's private experience. By the operation of these constructs of common-sense thinking it is assumed that the sector of the world taken for granted by me is also taken for granted by you, my individual fellow-man, even more, that it is taken for granted by "Us." But this "We" does not merely include you and me but "everyone who is one of us," i.e., everyone whose system of relevances is substantially (sufficiently) in conformity with yours and mine. Thus, the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives leads to the apprehension of objects and their aspects actually known by me and potentially known by you as everyone's knowledge. Such knowledge is conceived to be objective and anonymous, i.e., detached from and independent of my and my feUow-man's definition of the situation, our unique biographical circumstances and the actual and potential purposes at hand involved therein.
We must interpret the terms "objects" and "aspect of objects" in the broadest possible sense as signifying objects of knowledge taken for granted. If we do so, we shall discover the importance
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common-sense and scientific interpretation 13
in the structural socialization of knowledge just described, for many problems investigated, but not thoroughly analyzed, by eminent social scientists. What is supposed to be known in common by everyone who shares our system of relevances is the way of life considered to be the natural, the good, the right one by the members of the "in-group"; 23 as such, it is at the origin of the many recipes for handling things and men in order to come to terms with typified situations, of the folkways and mores, of "traditional behavior," in Max Weber's sense, 24 of the "of-course statements" believed to be valid by the in-group in spite of their inconsistencies,25 briefly, of the "relative natural aspect of the world." 26 All these terms refer to constructs of a typified knowledge of a highly socialized structure which supersede the thought objects of my and my fellow-man's private knowledge of the world as taken for granted. Yet this knowledge has its history, it is a part of our "social heritage," and this brings us to the second aspect of the problem of socialization of knowledge, its genetic structure.
b) The social origin of knowledge
Only a very small part of my knowledge of the world originates within my personal experience. The greater part is socially derived, handed down to me by my friends, my parents, my teachers and the teachers of my teachers. I am taught not only how to define the environment (that is, the typical features of the relative natural aspect of the world prevailing in the in-group as the unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things taken for granted until further notice), but also how typical constructs have to be formed in accordance with the system of relevances accepted from the anonymous unified point of view of
23 William Graham Sumner, Folkways, A Study of the Sociological Importance of Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals, New York, 1906.
24 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York, 1947, pp. H5ff; see also Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York, 1937, Ch. XVI.
25 Robert S. Lynd, Middletown in Transition, New York, 1937. Ch. XII, and Knowledge for What?, Princeton, 1939, pp. 38-63.
26 Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Problemc einer Soziologie des Wissens, Leipzig, 1926, pp. 58ff. Cf. Howard Becker and Helmut Dahlke, "Max Scheler's Sociology of Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. II, 1942, pp. 3ro-22, esp. 315.
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COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION    15.
the in-group. This includes ways of life, methods of coming ta terms with the environment, efficient recipes for the use of typical means for bringing about typical ends in typical situations. The typifying medium par excellence by which socially derived knowledge is transmitted is the vocabulary and the syntax of everyday language. The vernacular of everyday life is primarily a language of named things and events, and any name includes a typification and generalization referring to the relevance system prevailing in the linguistic in-group which found the named thing significant enough to provide a separate term for it. The pre-scientific vernacular can be interpreted as a treasure house of ready made pre-constituted types and characteristics, all socially derived and carrying along an open horizon of unexplored content.27
c) The social distribution of knowledge
Knowledge is socially distributed. The general thesis of reciprocal perspectives, to be sure, overcomes the difficulty that my actual knowledge is merely the potential knowledge of my fellow-men and vice versa. But the stock of actual knowledge at hand differs from individual to individual, and common-sense thinking takes this fact into account. Not only what an individual knows differs from what his neighbor knows, but also how both know the "same" facts. Knowledge has manifold degrees of clarity, distinctness, precision, and familiarity. To take as an example William James' 28 well known distinction between "knowledge of acquaintance" and "knowledge-about," it is obvious that many things are known to me just in the dumb way of mere acquaintance, whereas you have knowledge "about" what makes them what they are and vice versa. I am an "expert" in a small field and "layman" in many others, and so are you.29 Any individual's stock of knowledge at hand is at any moment of his life structured as having zones of various degrees of clarity, distinctness and precision. This structure originates in the
27 See "Language, Language Disturbances, and the Texture of Consciousness", p. 2851.
28 William James, I.e., Vol. I, p. 2211.
29 Alfred Schutz, "The Well-informed Citizen, an Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge," Social Research, Vol. 13, 1946, pp. 463-472.
system of prevailing relevances and is thus biographically determined. The knowledge of these individual differences is itself an element of common-sense experience: I know whom and under what typical circumstances I have to consult as a "competent" doctor or lawyer. In other words, in daily life I construct types of the Other's field of acquaintance and of the scope and texture of his knowledge. In doing so, I assume that he will be guided by certain relevance structures, expressing themselves in a set of constant motives leading to a particular pattern of action and even co-determining his personality. But this statement anticipates the analysis of the common-sense constructs related to the understanding of our fellow-men, which is our next task.29a
3) The structure of the social world and its typification by common-sense constructs
I, the human being, born into the social world, and living my daily life in it, experience it as built around my place in it, as open to my interpretation and action, but always referring to my actual biographically determined situation. Only in reference to • me does a certain kind of my relations with others obtain the specific meaning which I designate with the word "We"; only with reference to "Us," whose center I am, do others stand out as "You," and in reference to "You," who refer back to me, third parties stand out as "They." In the dimension of time there are with reference to me in my actual biographical moment "contemporaries," with whom a mutual interplay of action and reaction can be established; "predecessors," upon whom I cannot act, but whose past actions and their outcome are open to my interpretation and may influence my own actions; and
29a With the exception of some economists (e.g., F. A. Hayek, "Economics and Knowledge", Economica, February 1937, now reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago rg48) the problem of the social distribution of knowledge has not attracted the attention of the social scientists it merits. It opens a new field for theoretical and empirical research which would truly deserve the name of a sociology of knowledge, now reserved for an ill-defined discipline which just takes for granted the social distribution of knowledge, upon which it is founded. It may be hoped that the systematic investigation of this field will yield significant contributions to many problems of the social sciences such as those of social role, of social stratification, of institutional or organizational behavior, of the sociology of occupations and professions, of prestige and status, etc.
l6 methodology
"successors," of whom no experience is possible but toward whom I may orient my actions in a more or less empty anticipation. All these relations show the most manifold forms of intimacy and anonymity, of familiarity and strangeness, of intensity and extensity.30
In the present context we are restricting ourselves to the interrelationship prevailing among contemporaries. Still dealing with common-sense experience we may just take for granted that man can understand his fellow-man and his actions and that he can communicate with others because he assumes they understand his actions; also, that this mutual understanding has certain limits but is sufficient for many practical purposes.
Among my contemporaries are some with whom I share, as long as the relation lasts, not only a community of time but also of space. We shall, for the sake of terminological convenience, call such contemporaries "consociates" and the relationship prevailing among them a "face-to-face" relationship, this term being understood in a sense other than that used by Cooley 31 and his successors; we designate by it merely a purely formal aspect of social relationship equally applicable to an intimate talk between friends and the co-presence of strangers in a railroad car.
Sharing a community of space implies that a certain sector of the outer world is equally within the reach of each partner, and contains objects of common interest and relevance. For each partner the other's body, his gestures, his gait and facial expressions, are immediately observable, not merely as things or events of the outer world but in their physiognomical significance, that is, as symptoms of the other's thoughts. Sharing a community of time - and this means not only of outer (chronological) time, but of inner time - implies that each partner participates in the on-rolling life of the other, can grasp in a vivid present the other's thoughts as they are built up step by step. They may thus share one another's anticipations of the future as plans, or hopes ■or anxieties. In brief, consociates are mutually involved in one
30 Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aujbau dersozialen Welt, Vienna, 1932, 2nd edition i960. See also Alfred Stonier and Karl Bode, "A New Approach to the Methodology of the Social Sciences," Economica, Vol. V, November, 1937, pp. 406-424, esp. pp. 4i6ff.
31 Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization, New York, 1909, Chs. Ill—V; and Alfred QoTint^ "Thia "H"nm<apnmr>i- " AntitvinttM Tnurtm.I. nf Snninlniľv. VnL sn. TO/ti. rj. 371.
common-sense and scientific interpretation 17
another's biography; they are growing older together; they live, as we may call it, in a pure We-relationship.
In such a relationship, fugitive and superficial as it may be, the Other is grasped as a unique individuality (although merely one aspect of his personality becomes apparent) in its unique biographical situation (although revealed merely fragmentarily). In all the other forms of social relationship (and even in the relationship among consociates as far as the unrevealed aspects of the Other's self are concerned) the fellow-man's self can merely be grasped by a "contribution of imagination of hypothetical meaning presentation" (to allude to Whitehead's statement quoted earlier), that is, by forming a construct of a typical way of behavior, a typical pattern of underlying motives, of typical attitudes of a personality type, of which the Other and his conduct under scrutiny, both outside of my observational reach, are just instances or exemplars. We cannot here 32 develop a full taxonomy of the structuredness of the social world and of the various forms of constructs of course-of-action types and personality types needed for grasping the Other and his behavior. Thinking of my absent friend A, I form an ideal type of his personality and behavior based on my past experience of A as my consociate. Putting a letter in the mailbox, I expect that unknown people, called postmen, will act in a typical way, not quite intelligible to me, with the result that my letter will reach the addressee within typically reasonable time. Without ever having met a Frenchman or a German, I understand "Why France fears the rearmament of Germany." Complying with a rule of English grammar, I follow a socially approved behavior pattern of contemporary English-speaking fellow-men to which I have to adjust my own behavior in order to make myself understandable. And, finally, any artifact or utensil refers to the anonymous fellow-man who produced it to be used by other anonymous fellow-men for attaining typical goals by typical means.*
These are just a few examples but they are arranged according to the degree of increasing anonymity of the relationship among contemporaries involved and therewith of the construct needed
32 See footnote 30.
* See Alfred Schutz, "The Problem of Rationality in the Social World", Economica, Vol. X, May 1943. (M.N.).
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20
METHODOLOGY
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION
21
outcome of this ongoing process, that is, the accomplished action. Action may be covert (for example, the attempt to solve a scientific problem mentally) or overt, gearing into the outer world; it may take place by commission or omission, purposive abstention from acting being considered an action in itself.
All projecting consists in anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying, yet it is not the ongoing process of action but the phantasied act as having been accomplished which is the starting point of all projecting. I have to visualize the state of affairs to be brought about by my future action before I can draft the single steps of such future acting from which this state of affairs will result. Metaphorically speaking, I must have some idea of the structure to be erected before I can draft the blueprints. Thus I have to place myself in my phantasy at a future time, when this action will already have been accomplished. Only then may I reconstruct in phantasy the single steps which will have brought forth this future act. In the terminology suggested, it is not the future action but the future act that is anticipated in the project, and it is anticipated in the Future Perfect Tense, modo futuri exacti. This time perspective peculiar to the project has rather important consequences.
i) All projects of my forthcoming acts are based upon my knowledge at hand at the time of projecting. To this knowledge belongs my experience of previously performed acts which are typically similar to the projected one. Consequently all projecting involves a particular idealization, called by Husserl the idealization of "I-can-do-it-again," 39 i.e., the assumption that I may under typically similar circumstances act in a way typically similar to that in which I acted before in order to bring about a typically similar state of affairs. It is clear that this idealization involves a construction of a specific kind. My knowledge at hand at the time of projecting must, strictly speaking, be different from my knowledge at hand after having performed the projected act, if for no other reason than because I "grew older" and at least the experiences I had while carrying out my project have
modified my biographical circumstances and enlarged my
39 Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Halle, 192g, See. 74, p. 167: Erfahrum und Urteil, See. 24.. Sec. sib.
stock of experience. Thus, the "repeated" action will be something else than a mere re-performance. The first action A' started within a set of circumstances C and indeed brought about the state of affairs S'; the repeated action A" starts in a set of circumstances C" and is expected to bring about the state of affairs S". By necessity C" will differ from C because the experience that A' succeeded in bringing about S' belongs to my stock of knowledge, which is an element of C", whereas to my stock of knowledge, which was an element of C, belonged merely the empty anticipation that this would be the case. Similarly S" will differ from S' as A" will from A'. This is so because all the terms - C, C", A', A", S', S" - are as such unique and irretrievable events. Yet exactly those features which make them unique and irretrievable in the strict sense are - to my common-sense thinking -eliminated as being irrelevant for my purpose at hand. When making the idealization of "I-can-do-it-again" I am merely interested in the typicality of A, C, and S, all of them without primes. The construction consists, figuratively speaking, in the suppression of the primes as being irrelevant, and this, incidentally, is characteristic of typifications of all kinds.
This point will become especially important for the analysis of the concept of so-called rational action. It is obvious that in the habitual and routine actions of daily life we apply the construction just described in following recipes and rules of thumb which have stood the test so far and in frequently stringing together means and ends without clear knowledge "about" their real connections. Even in common-sense thinking we construct a world of supposedly interrelated facts containing exclusively elements deemed to be relevant for our purpose at hand, ii) The particular time perspective of the project sheds some light on the relationship between project and motive. In ordinary speech the term "motive" covers two different sets of concepts which have to be distinguished, a) We may say that the motive of a murderer was to obtain the money of the victim. Here "motive" means the state of affairs, the end, which is to be brought about by the action undertaken. We shall call this kind of motive the
22 METHODOLOGY
"in-order-to motive." From the point of view of the actor this class of motives refers to the future. The state of affairs to be brought about by the future action, pre-phantasied in its project, is the in-order-to motive for carrying out the action, b) We may say that the murderer has been motivated to commit his deed because he grew up in this or that environment, had these or those childhood experiences, etc. This class of motives, which we shall call "(genuine)393, because-motives" refers from the point of view of the actor to his past experiences which have determined him to act as he did. What is motivated in an action in the form of "because" is the project of the action itself (for instance, to satisfy his need for money by killing a man). We cannot enter here 40 into a more detailed analysis of the theory of motives. But it should be pointed out that the actor who lives in his ongoing process of acting has merely the in-order-to motive of his ongoing action in view, that is, the projected state of affairs to be brought about. Only by turning back to his accomplished act or to the past initial phases of his still ongoing action or to the once established project which anticipates the act modo futuri exacti can the actor grasp retrospectively the because-motive that determined him to do what he did or what he projected to do. But then the actor is not acting any more; he is an observer of himself.
The distinction between the two kinds of motives becomes of vital importance for the analysis of human interaction to which we now turn.
b) Social interaction
Any form of social interaction is founded upon the constructs already described relating to the understanding of the Other and
39a Linguistically in-order-to motives may be expressed in modern languages also by "because"-sentences. Genuine because-motives, however, cannot be expressed by "in-order-to" sentences. This distinction between the two possibilities of linguistic expressions relating to the in-order-to motive, important as it is in another context, will be disregarded in the following and the term "because-motive" or "because-sentence" will be exclusively reserved for the genuine because-motive and its linguistic expression.
40 See footnote 30.
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION 23
the action pattern in general. Take as an example the interaction of consociates involved in questioning and answering. In projecting my question, I anticipate that the Other will understand my action (for instance my uttering an interrogative sentence) as a question and that this understanding will induce him to act in such a way that I may understand his behavior as an adequate response. (I: "Where is the ink?" The Other points at a table.) The in-order-to motive of my action is to obtain adequate information which, in this particular situation, presupposes that the understanding of my in-order-to motive will become the Other's because-motive to perform an action in-order-to furnish me this information - provided he is able and willing to do so, which I assume he is. I anticipate that he understands English, that he knows where the ink is, that he will tell me if he knows, etc. In more general terms, I anticipate that he will be guided by the same types of motives by which in the past, according to my stock of knowledge at hand, I myself and many others were guided under typically similar circumstances. Our example shows that even the simplest interaction in common life presupposes a series of common-sense constructs - in this case constructs of the Other's anticipated behavior - all of them based on the idealization that the actor's in-order-to motives will become because-motives of his partner and vice versa. We shall call this idealization that of the reciprocity of motives. It is obvious that this idealization depends upon the general thesis of the reciprocity of perspectives, since it implies that the motives imputed to the Other are typically the same as my own or that of others in typically similar circumstances; all this is in accordance with my genuine or socially derived knowledge at hand.
Suppose now that I want to find some ink in order to refill my fountain pen so that I can write this application to the fellowship committee which, if granted, will change my entire way of life. I, the actor (questioner), and I alone know of this plan of mine to obtain the fellowship which is the ultimate in-order-to motive of my actual action, the state of affairs to be brought about. Of course, this can be done merely by a series of steps (writing an application, bringing writing tools within my reach, etc.) each of them to be materialized by an "action" with its particular project and its particular in-order-to motive. Yet all these
24
METHODOLOGY
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION 25.
"sub-actions" are merely phases of the total action and all intermediary steps to be materialized by them are merely means for attaining my final goal as defined by my original project. It is the span of this original project which welds together the chain of sub-projects into a unit. This becomes clear if we consider that in this chain of interrelated partial actions, designed to materialize states of affairs which are merely "means" for attaining the projected end, certain links can be replaced by others or even drop out without any change in the original project. If I cannot find some ink I may turn to the typewriter in order to prepare my application.
In other words, only the actor knows "when his action starts and where it ends," that is, why it will have been performed. It is the span of his projects which determines the unit of his action. His partner has neither knowledge of the projecting preceding the actor's action nor of the context of a higher unit in which it stands. He knows merely that fragment of the actor's action which has become manifest to him, namely, the performed act observed by him or the past phases of the still ongoing action. If the addressee of my question were asked later on by a third person what I wanted from him he would answer that I wanted to know where to find some ink. That is all he knows of my projecting and its context, and he has to look at it as a self contained unit action. In order to "understand" what I, the actor, meant by my action he would have to start from the observed act and to construct from there my underlying in-order-to motive for the sake of which I did what he observed.
It is now clear that the meaning of an action is necessarily a different one (a) for the actor; (b) for his partner involved with him in interaction and having, thus, with him a set of relevances and purposes in common; and (c) for the observer not involved in such relationship. This fact leads to two important consequences: First, that in common-sense thinking we have merely a chance to understand the Other's action sufficiently for our purpose at hand; secondly that to increase this chance we have to search for the meaning the action has for the actor. Thus, the postulate of the "subjective interpretation of meaning," as the unfortunate term goes, is not a particularity of Max
Weber's 41 sociology or of the methodology of the social sciences in general but a principle of constructing course-of-action types in common-sense experience.*
But subjective interpretation of meaning is merely possible by revealing the motives which determine a given course of action. By referring a course-of-action type to the underlying typical motives of the actor we arrive at the construction of a personal type. The latter may be more or less anonymous and, therewith, more or less empty of content. In the We-relationship among consociates the Other's course of action, its motives (insofar as ■ they become manifest) and his person (insofar as it is involved in the manifest action) can be shared in immediacy and the constructed types, just described, will show a very low degree of anonymity and a high degree of fullness. In constructing course-of-action types of contemporaries other than consociates, we impute to the more or less anonymous actors a set of supposedly invariant motives which govern their actions. This set is itself a construct of typical expectations of the Other's behavior and has been investigated frequently in terms of social role or function or institutional behavior. In common-sense thinking such a construct has a particular significance for projecting actions which are oriented upon my contemporaries' (not my consociates') behavior. Its functions can be described as follows:
i) I take it for granted that my action (say putting a stamped and duly addressed envelope in a mailbox) will induce anonymous fellow-men (postmen) to perform typical actions (handling the mail) in accordance with typical in-order-to motives (to live up to their occupational duties) with the result that the state of affairs projected by me (delivery of the letter to the addressee within reasonable time) will be achieved. 2) I also take it for granted that my construct of the Other's course-of-action type corresponds substantiaUy to his own self-typification and that to the latter belongs a typified construct of my, his anonymous partner's, typical way of behavior based on typical and sup-
41 Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 9, 18, 22, 90, esp. p. 88: "In 'action' is included all human behavior when and insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it . . . Action is social insofar as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in it course." See Talcott Parsons, op. cit.. esp. pp. 82ft, 345-47, and 484ft; Felix Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. i66f.
* Cf "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," p. 56f. (M.N.)
26 METHODOLOGY
posedly invariant motives. ("Whoever puts a duly addressed and stamped envelope in the mailbox is assumed to intend to have it delivered to the addressee in due time.") 3) Even more, in my own self-typification - that is by assuming the role of a customer of the mail service - I have to project my action in such a typical way as I suppose the typical post office employee expects a typical customer to behave. Such a construct of mutually interlocked behavior patterns reveals itself as a construct of mutually interlocked in-order-to and because motives which are supposedly invariant. The more institutionalized or standardized such a behavior pattern is, that is, the more typified it is in a socially approved way by laws, rules, regulations, customs, habits, etc., the greater is the chance that my own self-typifying behavior will bring about the state of affairs aimed at.
, c) The observer
We have still to characterize the special case of the observer who is not a partner in the interaction patterns. His motives are not interlocked with those of the observed person or persons; he is "tuned in" upon them but not they upon him. In other words, the observer does not participate in the complicated mirror-reflexes involved by which in the interaction pattern among contemporaries, the actor's in-order-to motives become understandable to the partner as his own because motives and vice versa. Precisely this fact constitutes the so-called "disinterestedness" or detachment of the observer. He is not involved in the actor's hopes and fears whether or not they will understand one another and achieve their end by the interlocking of motives. Thus, his system of relevances differs from that of the interested parties and permits him to see at the same time more and less than what is seen by them. But under all circumstances, it is merely the manifested fragments of the actions of both partners that are accessible to his observation. In order to understand them the observer has to avail himself of his knowledge of typically similar patterns of interaction in typically similar situational settings and has to construct the motives of the actors from that sector of the course of action which is patent to his • observation. The constructs of the observer are, therefore,
COMMON-SENSE AND SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION
different ones than those used by the participants in the interaction, if for no other reason than the fact that the purpose of the observer is different from that of the interactors and therewith the systems of relevances attached to such purposes are also different. There is a mere chance, although a chance sufficient for many practical purposes, that the observer in daily life can grasp the subjective meaning of the actor's acts. This chance increases with the degree of anonymity and standardization of the observed behavior. The scientific observer of human interrelation patterns, the social scientist, has to develop specific methods for the building of his constructs in order to assure their applicability for the interpretation of the subjective meaning the observed acts have for the actors. Among these devices we are here especially concerned with the constructs of models of so-called rational actions. Let us consider first the possible meaning of the term "rational action" within the common-sense experience of everyday life.
III. RATIONAL ACTION WITHIN COMMON-SENSE EXPERIENCE*
Ordinary language does not sharply distinguish among a sensible, a reasonable, and a rational way of conduct. We may say that a man acted sensibly if the motive and the course of his action is understandable to us, his partners or observers. This will be the case if his action is in accordance with a socially approved set of rules and recipes for coming to terms with typical problems by applying typical means for achieving typical ends. If I, if We, if "Anybody who is one of us" found himself in typically similar circumstances he would act in a similar way. Sensible behavior, however, does not presuppose that the actor is guided by insight into his motives and the means-ends context. A strong emotional reaction against an offender might be sensible and refraining from it foolish. If an action seems to be sensible to the observer and is, in addition, supposed to spring from a judicious choice among different courses of action, we may call it reasonable even if such action
* Cf. "The Problem of Rationality in the Social World", Economica, Vol. X, May, Z943. (M.N.)
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follows traditional or habitual patterns just taken for granted.. Rational action, however, presupposes that the actor has clear and distinct insight 41a into the ends, the means, and the secondary results, which "involves rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to other prospective results of employment of any given means and, finally, of the relative importance of different possible ends. Determination of action, either in affectual or in traditional terms, is thus incompatible with this type." 42
41a This postulate of Leibniz obviously underlies the concept of rationality used by many students of this topic. Pareto, distinguishing between logical and non-logical actions, requires that the former have logically to conjoin means to ends not only from the standpoint of the subject performing the action but also from the standpoint of other persons who have a more extensive knowledge, that is, of the scientist. [Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato de Sociológia Generate, English translation under the title The Mind and Society, ed. by Arthur Livingston, New York 1935 and 1942; see especially Volume I, Sees. i5off.] Objective and subjective purpose have to be identical. Professor Talcott Parsons (The Structure of Social Action, p. 58) develops a similar theory. Pareto admits, however, (I.e., sect. 150) that from the subjective point of view nearly all human actions belong to the logical class. Professor Howard Becker (Through Values to Social Interpretation, Durham, 1950, pp. 23-27) is of the opinion that action may be found (expediently) rational where it is completely centered upon means viewed by the actor as adequate for the attainment of ends which he conceives as unambiguous.
42 Max Weber, op. cit., p. 117. The characterization of "rational action" follows Max Weber's definition of one of the two types of rational actions distinguished by him, (op. cit., p. 115) namely, the so-called "zweckrationales Handeln" (rendered in Parsons' translation by "rational orientation to a system of discrete ends"). We disregard here Weber's second type of rational action, the "wertrationales Handeln" (rendered by "rational orientation to an absolute value") since the distinction between both types can be reduced in the terms of the present discussion to a distinction between two types of "because-motives" leading to the project of an action as such. "Zweckrationales Handeln" implies that within the system of hierarchical projects, which we have called the "plans," several courses of action stand to choice and that this choice has to be a rational one; "Wertrationales Handeln" cannot choose among several projects of action equally open to the actor within the system of his plan. The project is taken for granted, but there are alternatives open for bringing about the projected state of affairs, and they have to be determined by rational selection. Parsons has rightly pointed out (I.e., p. 115, footnote 38) that it is nearly impossible to find English terms for "Zweckrational" and "Wertrational," but the circumscription chosen by him for their translation already implies an interpretation of Weber's theory and obfuscates an important issue: Neither is, in the case of "Zweckrationalität," a system of discrete ends presupposed nor, in the case of "Wertrationalität," an absolute value. (For Parsons' own theory, see pp. i6ff. of his introduction to the Weber volume.)
Far more important for our problem than the distinction of two types of rational action is the distinction between rational actions of both types, on the one hand, and traditional and affectual actions on the other. The same holds good for the modifications suggested by Howard Becker (op. cit., p. 22ff) between "four types of means" followed by the members of any society in attaining their ends: (1) expedient rationality; (2) sanctioned rationality; (3) traditional non-rationality; (4) affective non-rationality. Whereas Weber and Parsons include the ends in their concept of rationality, Becker speaks of types of means.
These very preliminary definitions for sensible, reasonable, and rational actions are stated in terms of common-sense interpretations of other people's actions in daily life but, characteristically, they refer not only to the stock of knowledge taken for granted in the in-group to which the observer of this course of action belongs but also to the subjective point of view of the actor, that is, to his stock of knowledge at hand at the time of carrying out the action. This involves several difficulties. First, it is, as we have seen, our biographical situation which determines the problem at hand and, therewith, the systems of relevances under which the various aspects of the world are constructed in the form of types. Of necessity, therefore, the actor's stock of knowledge will differ from that of the observer. Even the general thesis of the reciprocity of perspectives is not sufficient to eliminate this difficulty because it presupposes that both the observed and the observer are sharing a system of relevances sufficiently homogeneous in structure and content for the practical purpose involved. If this is not the case, then a course of action which is perfectly rational from the point of view of the actor may appear as non-rational to the partner or observer and vice versa. Both attempts, to induce rain by performing the rain-dance or by seeding clouds with silver iodine, are subjectively seen, rational actions from the point of view of the Hopi Indian or the modern meteorologist respectively, but both would have been judged as non-rational by a meteorologist twenty years ago.
Secondly, even if we restrict our investigation to the subjective point of view, we have to ascertain whether there is a difference in the meaning of the term "rational," in the sense of reasonable, if applied to my own past acts or to the determination of a future course of my actions. At first glance, it seems that the difference is considerable. What I did has been done and cannot be undone, although the state of affairs brought about by my actions might be modified or eliminated by countermoves. I do not have, with respect to past actions, the possibility of choice. Anything anticipated in an empty way in the project which had preceded my past action has been fulfilled or not by the outcome of my action. On the other hand, all future action is projected under the idealization of "I can do it again," which may or may not stand the test.
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Closer analysis shows, however, that even in judging the reasonableness of our own past action we refer always to our knowledge at hand at the time of projecting such action. If we find, retrospectively, that what we had formerly projected as a reasonable course of action under the then known circumstances proved to be a failure, we may accuse ourselves of various mistakes: of an error in judgment if the then prevailing circumstances were incorrectly or incompletely ascertained; or of a lack of foresight if we failed to anticipate future developments, etc. We will, however, not say that we acted unreasonably.
Thus, in both cases, that of the past and of the future action, our judgment of reasonableness refers to the project determining the course of action and, still more precisely, to the choice among several projects of action involved. As has been shown elsewhere,43 any projecting of future action involves a choice between at least two courses of conduct, namely, to carry out the projected action or to refrain from doing so.
Each of the alternatives standing to choice has, as Dewey says,44 to be rehearsed in phantasy in order to make choice and decision possible. If this deliberation is to be strictly a rational one then the actor must have a clear and distinct knowledge of the following elements of each projected course-of-action standing to choice:
a) of the particular state of affairs within which his projected action has to start. This involves a sufficiently precise definition of his biographical situation in the physical and socio-cultural environment;
b) of the state of affairs to be brought about by his projected action, that is, its end. Yet since there is no such thing as an isolated project or end, (all my projects, present to my mind at a given time, being integrated into systems of projects, called my plans and all my plans being integrated into my plan of life), there are also no isolated ends. They are interconnected in a hierarchical order, and the attaining of one might have repercussions on the other. I have, therefore, to have clear and distinct knowledge of the place of my project within the hierarchical order of my plans (or the inter-
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relationship of the end to be achieved with other ends), the compatibility of one with the other, and the possible repercussions of one upon another, briefly: of the secondary results of my future action, as Max Weber calls it.45 c) of the various means necessary for attaining the established end, of the possibility of bringing them within my reach, of the degree of the expediency of their application, of the possible employment of these same means for the attainment of other potential ends, and of the compatibility of the selected means with other means needed for the materialization of other projects. The complication increases considerably if the actor's project of a rational action involves the rational action or reaction of a fellow-man, say of a consociate. Projecting rationally such a kind of action involves sufficiently clear and distinct knowledge of the situation of departure not only as defined by me but also as defined by the Other. Moreover, there has to be sufficient likelihood that the Other will be tuned in upon me and consider my action as relevant enough to be motivated in the way of because by my in-order-to motive. If this is the case, then there has to be a sufficient chance that the Other will understand me, and this means in the case of a rational interrelationship that he will interpret my action rationally as being a rational one and that he will react in a rational way. To assume that the Other will do so implies, however, on the one hand, that he will have sufficiently clear and distinct knowledge of my project and of its place in the hierarchy of my plans (at least as far as my overt actions makes them manifest to him) and of my system of relevances attached thereto; and, on the other hand, that the structure and scope of his stock of knowledge at hand will be in its relevant portion substantially similar to mine and that his and my system of relevances will, if not overlap, be at least partially congruent. If, furthermore, I assume in my projecting that the Other's reaction to my projected action will be a rational one, I suppose that he, in projecting his response, knows all the aforementioned elements (a), (b), (c) of his reaction in a clear and distinct way. Consequently, if I project a rational action which
43 "Choosing Among Projects of Action."
44 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, Modern Library edition, p. 190.
See quotation from Max Weber on p. 28.
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requires an interlocking of my and the Other's motives of action to be carried out (e.g., I want the Other to do something for me), I must, by a curious mirror-effect, have sufficient knowledge of what he, the Other, knows (and knows to be relevant with respect to my purpose at hand), and this knowledge of his is supposed to include sufficient acquaintance with what I know. This is a condition of ideally rational interaction because without such mutual knowledge I could not "rationally" project the attainment of my goal by means of the Other's co-operation or reaction. Moreover, such mutual knowledge has to be clear and distinct; merely a more or less empty expectation of the Other's behavior is not sufficient.
It seems that under these circumstances rational social interaction becomes impracticable even among consociates. And yet we receive reasonable answers to reasonable questions, our commands are carried out, we perform in factories and laboratories and offices highly "rationalized" activities, we play chess together, briefly, we come conveniently to terms with our fellow-men. How is this possible?
Two different answers seem to offer themselves. First, if interaction among consociates is involved we may assume that the mutual participation in the consociate's onrolling life, the sharing of his anticipations so characteristic of the pure We-relation establishes the prerequisites for rational interaction just analyzed. Yet it is precisely this pure We-relation which is the irrational element of any interrelationship among consociates. The second answer refers not only to the interrelationship among consociates but among contemporaries in general. We may explain the rationality of human interaction by the fact that both actors orient their actions on certain standards which are socially approved as rules of conduct by the in-group to which they belong: norms, mores of good behavior, manners, the organizational framework provided for this particular form of division of labor, the rules of the chess game, etc. But neither the origin nor the import of the socially approved standard is "rationally" understood. Such standards might be traditionally or habitually accepted as just being taken for granted, and, within the meaning of our previous definitions, behavior of this kind will be sensible nr even reasonable but not necessarily rational. At any rate, it
will not be "ideally" rational, that is, meeting all the requirements worked out in the analysis of this concept.
We come, therefore, to the conclusion that "rational action" on the common-sense level is always action within an unquestioned and undetermined frame of constructs of typicalities of the setting, the motives, the means and ends, the courses of action and personalities involved and taken for granted. They are, however, not merely taken for granted by the actor but also supposed as being taken for granted by the fellow-man. From this frame of constructs, forming their undetermined horizon, merely particular sets of elements stand out which are clearly and distinctly determinable. To these elements refers the common-sense concept of rationality. Thus we may say that on this level actions are at best partially rational and that rationality has many degrees. For instance, our assumption that our fellow-man who is involved with us in a pattern of interaction knows its rational elements will never reach "empirical certainty" (certainty "until further notice" or "good until counter-evidence") 46 but will always bear the character of plausibility, that is, of subjective likelihood (in contradistinction to mathematical probability). We always have to "take chances" and to "run risks," and this situation is expressed by our hopes and fears which are merely the subjective corollaries of our basic uncertainty as to the outcome of our projected interaction.
To be sure, the more standardized the prevailing action pattern is, the more anonymous it is, the greater is the subjective chance of conformity and, therewith, of the success of inter-subjective behavior. Yet - and this is the paradox of rationality on the common-sense level - the more standardized the pattern is, the less the underlying elements become analyzable for common-sense thought in terms of rational insight.
All this refers to the criterion of rationality as applicable to the thinking of everyday life and its constructs. Only on the level of models of interaction patterns constructed by the social scientist in accordance with certain particular requirements defined by the methods of his science does the concept of rationality obtain its full significance. In order to make this clear we have first to examine the basic character of such scientific constructs and
40 Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung unci Urteil, Sec. 77, p. 370.
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their relationship to the "reality" of the social world, as such reality presents itself to the common-sense thought of everyday life.
IV. CONSTRUCTS OF THOUGHT OBJECTS BY THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
I) The postulate of subjective interpretation
There will be hardly any issue among social scientists that the object of the social sciences is human behavior, its forms, its organization, and its products. There will be, however, different opinions about whether this behavior should be studied in the same manner in which the natural scientist studies his object or whether the goal of the social sciences is the explanation of the "social reality" as experienced by man living his everyday life within the social world. The introductory section of the present discussion attempted to show that both principles are incompatible with each other. In the following pages we take the position that the social sciences have to deal with human conduct and its common-sense interpretation in the social reality, involving the analysis of the whole system of projects and motives, of relevances and constructs dealt with in the preceding sections. Such an analysis refers by necessity to the subjective point of view, namely, to the interpretation of the action and its settings in terms of the actor. Since this postulate of the subjective interpretation is, as we have seen, a general principle of constructing course-of-action types in common-sense experience, any social science aspiring to grasp "social reality" has to adopt this principle also.
Yet, at first glance, it seems that this statement is in contradiction to the well-established method of even the most advanced social sciences. Take as an example modern economics. Is it not the "behavior of prices" rather than the behavior of men in the market situation which is studied by the economist, the "shape of demand curves" rather than the anticipations of economic subjects symbolized by such curves? Does not the economist investigate successfully subject matters such as "savings," "capital," "business cycle," "wages" and "unemployment,"
"multipliers" and "monopoly" as if these phenomena were entirely detached from any activity of the economic subjects, even less without entering into the subjective meaning structure such activities may have for them ? The achievements of modern economic theories would make it preposterous to deny that an abstract conceptual scheme can be used very successfully for the solution of many problems. And similar examples could be given from the field of almost all the other social sciences. Closer investigation, however, reveals that this abstract conceptual scheme is nothing else than a kind of intellectual shorthand and that the underlying subjective elements of human actions involved are either taken for granted or deemed to be irrelevant with respect to the scientific purpose at hand - the problem under scrutiny - and are, therefore, disregarded. Correctly understood, the postulate of subjective interpretation as applied to economics as well as to all the other social sciences means merely that we always can - and for certain purposes must -refer to the activities of the subjects within the social world and their interpretation by the actors in terms of systems of projects, available means, motives, relevances, and so on.47
But if this is true, two other questions have to be answered. First, we have seen from the previous analyses that the subjective meaning an action has for an actor is unique and individual because it originates in the unique and individual biographical situation of the actor. How is it then possible to grasp subjective meaning scientificaUy ? Secondly, the meaning context of any system of scientific knowledge is objective knowledge but accessible equally to all his fellow scientists and open to their control, which means capable of being verified, invalidated, or falsified by them. How is it, then, possible to grasp by a system of objective knowledge subjective meaning structures? Is this not a paradox ?
Both questions can be satisfactorily met by a few simple considerations. As to the first question, we learned from Whitehead that all sciences have to construct thought objects of their own which supersede the thought objects of common-sense
47 Ludwig Von Mises rightly calls his "Treatise on Economics" Human Action, New Haven, 1949. See also F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, Glencoe, 1952, pp. 25-36.
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thinking.48 The thought objects constructed by the social sciences do not refer to unique acts of unique individuals occurring within a unique situation. By particular methodological devices, to be described presently, the social scientist replaces the thought objects of common-sense thought relating to unique events and occurrences by constructing a model of a sector of the social world within which merely those typified events occur that are relevant to the scientist's particular problem under scrutiny. All the other happenings within the social world are considered as being irrelevant, as contingent "data," which have to be put beyond question by appropriate methodological techniques as, for instance, by the assumption "all other things being equal." 49 Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a model of a sector of the social world consisting of typical human interaction and to analyze this typical interaction pattern as to the meaning it might have for the personal types of actors who presumptively originated them.
The second question has to be faced. It is indeed the particular problem of the social sciences to develop methodological devices for attaining objective and verifiable knowledge of a subjective meaning structure. In order to make this clear we have to consider very briefly the particular attitude of the scientist to the social world.
2) The social scientist as disinterested observer
This attitude of the social scientist is that of a mere disinterested observer of the social world. He is not involved in the observed situation, which is to him not of practical but merely of cognitive interest. It is not the theater of his activities but merely the object of his contemplation. He does not act within it, vitally interested in the outcome of his actions, hoping or fearing what their consequences might be but he looks at it with the same detached equanimity with which the natural scientist looks at the occurrences in his laboratory.
A word of caution is necessary here to prevent possible mis-
48 See above, pp. 5-6.
49 On. this concept see Felix Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 84.fi and 21311, on the concept "scientific situation" p. 52 and 251 n. 4.
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understandings. Of course, in his daily life the social scientist remains a human being, a man living among his fellow-men, with whom he is interrelated in many ways. And, surely, scientific activity itself occurs within the tradition of socially derived knowledge, is based upon co-operation with other scientists, requires mutual corroboration and criticism and can only be communicated by social interaction. But insofar as scientific activity is socially founded, it is one among all the other activities occurring within the social world. Dealing with science and scientific matters within the social world is one thing, the specific scientific attitude which the scientist has to adopt toward his object is another, and it is the latter which we propose to study in the following.
Our analysis of the common-sense interpretation of the social world of everyday life has shown how the biographical situation of man within the natural attitude determines at any given moment his purpose at hand. The system of relevances involved selects particular objects and particular typical aspects of such objects as standing out over against an unquestioned background of things just taken for granted. Man in daily life considers himself as the center of the social world which he groups around himself in layers of various degrees of intimacy and anonymity. By resolving to adopt the disinterested attitude of a scientific observer - in our language, by establishing the life-plan for scientific work - the social scientist detaches himself from his biographical situation within the social world. What is taken for granted in the biographical situation of daily life may become questionable for the scientist, and vice versa; what seems to be of highest relevance on one level may become entirely irrelevant on the other. The center of orientation has been radically shifted and so has the hierarchy of plans and projects. By making up his mind to carry out a plan for scientific work governed by the disinterested quest for truth in accordance with preestabhshed rules, called the scientific method, the scientist has entered a field of pre-organized knowledge, called the corpus of his science.50 He has either to accept what is considered by his fellow-scientist as established knowledge or to "show cause" why he cannot do so. Merely within this frame may he select his particular
50 Ibid., pp. 42 and 232.
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scientific problem and make his scientific decisions. This frame constitutes his "being in a scientific situation" which supersedes his biographical situation as a human being within the world. It is henceforth the scientific problem once established which determines alone what is and what is not relevant to its solution, and thus what has to be investigated and what can be taken for granted as a "datum," and, finally, the level of research in the broadest sense, that is, the abstractions, generalizations, formalizations, idealizations, briefly, the constructs required and admissible for considering the problem as being solved. In other words, the scientific problem is the "locus" of all possible constructs relevant to its solution, and each construct carries along - to borrow a mathematical term - a subscript referring to the problem for the sake of which it has been established. It follows that any shifting of the problem under scrutiny and the level of research involves a modification of the structures of relevance and of the constructs formed for the solution of another problem or on another level; a great many misunderstandings and controversies, especially in the social sciences, originate from disregarding this fact.
3) Differences between common-sense and scientific constructs of action patterns
Let us consider very briefly (and very incompletely) some of the more important differences between common-sense constructs and scientific constructs of interaction patterns originating in the transition from the biographicaUy determined to the scientific situation. Common-sense constructs are formed from a "Here" within the world which determines the presupposed reciprocity of perspectives. They take a stock of socially derived and socially approved knowledge for granted. The social distribution of knowledge determines the particular structure of the typifying construct, for instance, the assumed degree of anonymity of personal roles, the standardization of course-of-action patterns, and the supposed constancy of motives. Yet this social distribution itself depends upon the heterogeneous composition of the stock of knowledge at hand which itself is an element of common-sense experience.  The concepts of "We," "You,"
"They," of "in-group" and "out-group," of consociates, contemporaries, predecessors, and successors, all of them with their particular structurization of familiarity and anonymity are at least implied in the common-sense typifications or even co-constitutive for them. All this holds good not only for the participants in a social interaction pattern but also for the mere observer of such interaction who still makes his observations from his biographical situation within the social world. The difference between both is merely that the participant in the interaction pattern, guided by the idealization of reciprocity of motives, assumes his own motives as being interlocked with that of his partners, whereas to the observer merely the manifest fragments of the actors' actions are accessible. Yet both, participants and observer, form their common-sense constructs relatively to their biographical situation. In either case, these constructs have a particular place within the chain of motives originating in the biographicaUy determined hierarchy of the constructor's plans.
The constructs of human interaction patterns formed by the social scientist, however, are of an entirely different kind. The social scientist has no "Here" within the social world or, more precisely, he considers his position within it and the system of relevances attached thereto as irrelevant for his scientific undertaking. His stock of knowledge at hand is the corpus of his science, and he has to take it for granted - which means, in this context, as scientifically ascertained - unless he makes explicit why he cannot do so. To this corpus of science belong also the rules of procedure which have stood the test, namely, the methods of his science, including the methods of forming constructs in a scientifically sound way. This stock of knowledge is of quite another structure than that which man in everyday life has at hand. To be sure, it will also show manifold degrees of clarity and distinctness. But this structurization will depend upon knowledge of problems solved, of their still hidden implications and open horizons of other still not formulated problems. The scientist takes for granted what he defines to be a datum, and this is independent of the beliefs accepted by any in-group in the world of everyday life.51 The scientific problem, once established, determines alone the structure of relevances.
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Having no "Here" within the social world the social scientist does not organize this world in layers around himself as the center. He can never enter as a consociate in an interaction pattern with one of the actors on the social scene without abandoning, at least temporarily, his scientific attitude. The participant observer or field worker establishes contact with the group studied as a man among fellow-men; only his system of relevances which serves as the scheme of his selection and interpretation is determined by the scientific attitude, temporarily dropped in order to be resumed again.
Thus, adopting the scientific attitude, the social scientist observes human interaction patterns or their results insofar as they are accessible to his observation and open to his interpretation. These interaction patterns, however, he has to interpret in terms of their subjective meaning structure lest he abandon any hope of grasping "social reality."
In order to comply with this postulate, the scientific observer proceeds in a way similar to that of the observer of a social interaction pattern in the world of everyday life, although guided by an entirely different system of relevances.
4) The scientific model of the social world 52
He begins to construct typical course-of-action patterns corresponding to the observed events. Thereupon he co-ordinates to these typical course-of-action patterns a personal type, a model of an actor whom he imagines as being gifted with consciousness. Yet it is a consciousness restricted to containing nothing but all the elements relevant to the performance of the course-of-action patterns under observation and relevant, therewith, to the scientist's problem under scrutiny. He ascribes, thus, to this fictitious consciousness a set of typical in-order-to motives corresponding to the goals of the observed course-of-action patterns and typical because-motives upon which the in-order-to motives are founded. Both types of motives are assumed to be invariant in the mind of the imaginary actor-model.
52 To this section cf. in addition to the literature mentioned in footnotes 30 and 43, Alfred Schutz: "The Problem of Rationality in the Social World," Economica, Vol. X, May 1943, pp. 130-149.
Yet these models of actors are not human beings living within their biographical situation in the social world of everyday life. Strictly speaking, they do not have any biography or any history, and the situation into which they are placed is not a situation defined by them but defined by their creator, the social scientist. He has created these puppets or homunculi to manipulate them for his purpose. A merely specious consciousness is imputed to them by the scientist, which is constructed in such a way that its presupposed stock of knowledge at hand (including the ascribed set of invariant motives) would make actions originating from it subjectively understandable, provided that these actions were performed by real actors within the social world. But the puppet and his artificial consciousness is not subjected to the ontological conditions of human beings. The homunculus was not born, he does not grow up, and he will not die. He has no hopes and no fears; he does not know anxiety as the chief motive of all his deeds. He is not free in the sense that his acting could transgress the hmits his creator, the social scientist, has predetermined. He cannot, therefore, have other conflicts of interests and motives than those the social scientist has imputed to him. He cannot err, if to err is not his typical destiny. He cannot choose, except among the alternatives the social scientist has put before him as standing to his choice. Whereas man, as Simmel has clearly seen,53 enters any social relationship merely with a part of his self and is, at the same time, always within and outside of such a relationship, the homunculus, placed into a social relationship is involved therein in his totality. He is nothing else but the originator of his typical function because the artificial consciousness imputed to him contains merely those elements which are necessary to make such functions subjectively meaningful.
Let us very briefly examine some of the implications of this general characterization. The homunculus is invested with a system of relevances originating in the scientific problem of his constructor and not in the particular biographically determined situation of an actor within the world. It is the scientist who defines what is to his puppet a Here and a There, what is within his reach, what is to him a We and a You or a They. The scientist
53 See footnote 33 above.
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determines the stock of knowledge his model has supposedly at hand. This stock of knowledge is not socially derived and, unless especially designed to be so, without reference to social approval. The relevance system pertinent to the scientific problem under scrutiny alone determines its intrinsic structure, namely, the elements "about" which the homunculus is supposed to have knowledge, those of which he has a mere knowledge of acquaintance and those others which he just takes for granted. With this is determined what is supposed to be familiar and what anonymous to him and on what level the typification of the experiences of the world imputed to him takes place.
If such a model of an actor is conceived as interrelated and interacting with others - they, too, being homunculi - then the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives, their interlocking, and, therewith, the correspondence of motives is determined by the constructor. The course-of-action and personal types supposedly formed by the puppet of his partners, including the definition of their systems of relevances, roles, motives, have not the character •of a mere chance which will or will not be fulfilled by the supervening events. The homunculus is free from empty anticipations of the Other's reactions to his own actions and also from self-typifications. He does not assume a role other than that attributed to him by the director of the puppet show, called the model of the social world. It is he, the social scientist, who sets the stage, who distributes the roles, who gives the cues, who defines when an "action" starts and when it ends and who determines, thus, the "span of projects" involved. All standards and institutions governing the behavioral pattern of the model are supplied from the outset by the constructs of the scientific observer.
In such a simplified model of the social world pure rational acts, rational choices from rational motives are possible because all the difficulties encumbering the real actor in the everyday life-world have been eliminated. Thus, the concept of rationality in the strict sense already defined does not refer to actions within the common-sense experience of everyday life in the social world; it is the expression for a particular type of constructs of certain specific models of the social world made by the social scientist for certain specific methodological purposes.
Before, discussing the particular functions of "rational" models of the social world, however, we have to indicate some principles governing the construction of scientific models of human action in general.
5) Postulates for scientific model constructs of the social world
We said before that it is the main problem of the social sciences to develop a method in order to deal in an objective way with the subjective meaning of human action and that the thought objects of the social sciences have to remain consistent with the thought objects of common sense, formed by men in everyday life in order to come to terms with social reality. The model constructs as described before fulfill these requirements if they are formed in accordance with the following postulates:
a) The postulate of logical consistency
The system of typical constructs designed by the scientist has to be established with the highest degree of clarity and distinctness of the conceptual framework implied and must be fully compatible with the principles of formal logic. Fulfillment of this postulate warrants the objective validity of the thought objects constructed by the social scientist, and their strictly logical character is one of the most important features by which scientific thought objects are distinguished from the thought objects constructed by common-sense thinking in daily life which they have to supersede.
b) The postulate of subjective interpretation
In order to explain human actions the scientist has to ask what model of an individual mind can be constructed and what typical contents must be attributed to it in order to explain the observed facts as the result of the activity of such a mind in an understandable relation. The compliance with this postulate warrants the possibility of referring all kinds of human action or their result to the subjective meaning such action or result of an action had for the actor.
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c) The postulate of adequacy
Each term in a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act performed within the life-world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical construct would be understandable for the actor himself as well as for his fellow-men in terms of common-sense interpretation of everyday life. Compliance with this postulate warrants the consistency of the constructs of the social scientist with the constructs of common-sense experience of the social reality.
V. SCIENTIFIC MODEL CONSTRUCTS OF RATIONAL ACTION PATTERNS
All model constructs of the social world in order to be scientific have to fulfill the requirements of these three postulates. But is not any construct complying with the postulate of logical consistency, is not any scientific activity by definition a rational one?
This is certainly true but here we have to avoid a dangerous misunderstanding. We have to distinguish between rational constructs of models of human actions on the one hand, and constructs of models of rational human actions on the other. Science may construct rational models of irrational behavior, as a glance in any textbook of psychiatry shows. On the other hand, common-sense thinking frequently constructs irrational models of highly rational behavior, for example, in explaining economic, political, military and even scientific decisions by referring them to sentiments or ideologies presupposed to govern the behavior of the participants. The rationality of the construction of the model is one thing and in this sense all properly constructed models of the sciences - not merely of the social sciences - are rational; the construction of models of rational behavior is quite another thing. It would be a serious misunderstanding to believe that it is the purpose of model constructs in the social sciences or a criterion for their scientific character that irrational behavior patterns be interpreted as if they were rational.
In the following we are mainly interested in the usefulness of scientific - therefore rational - models of rational behavior
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patterns. It can easily be understood that the scientific construct of a perfect rational course-of-action type, of its corresponding personal type and also of rational interaction patterns is, as a matter of principle, possible. This is so because in constructing a model of a fictitious consciousness the scientist may select as relevant for his problem merely those elements which make rational actions or reactions of his homunculi possible. The postulate of rationality which such a construct would have to meet can be formulated as follows:
The rational course-of-action and personal types have to be constructed in such a way that an actor in the life-world would perform the typified action if he had a perfectly clear and distinct knowledge of all the elements, and only of the elements, assumed by the social scientist as being relevant to this action and the constant tendency to use the most appropriate means assumed to be at his disposal for achieving the ends defined by the construct itself.
The advantage of the use of such models of rational behavior in the social sciences can be characterized as follows:
1) The possibility of constructing patterns of social interaction under the assumption that all participants in such interaction act rationally within a set of conditions, means, ends, motives defined by the social scientist and supposed to be either common to all participants or distributed among them in a specific manner. By this arrangement standardized behavior such as so-called social roles, institutional behavior, etc., can be studied in isolation.
2) Whereas the behavior of individuals in the social life-world is not predictable unless in empty anticipations, the rational behavior of a constructed personal type is by definition supposed to be predictable, within the limits of the elements typified in the construct. The model of rational action can, therefore, be used as a device for ascertaining deviating behavior in the real social world and for referring it to "problem-transcending data," that is, to non-typified elements.
3) By appropriate variations of some of the elements several models or even sets of models of rational actions can be constructed for solving the same scientific problem and compared with one another.
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The last point, however, seems to require some comment. Did we not state earlier that all constructs carry along a "subscript" referring to the problem under scrutiny and have to be revised if a shift in the problem occurs ? Is there not a certain contradiction between this insight and the possibility of constructing several competing models for the solution of one and the same scientific problem ?
The contradiction disappears if we consider that any problem is merely a locus of implications which can be made explicit or, to use a term of Husserľs,54 that it carries along its inner horizon of unquestioned but questionable elements.*
In order to make the inner horizon of the problem explicit we may vary the conditions within which the fictitious actors are supposed to act, the elements of the world of which they are supposed to have knowledge, their assumed interlocked motives, the degree of f amiliarity or anonymity in which they are assumed to be interrelated, etc. For example, as an economist concerned with the theory of oligopoly,55 I may construct models of a single firm or of an industry or of the economic system as a whole. If restricting myself to the theory of the individual firm (say, if analyzing the effects of a cartel agreement on the output of the commodity concerned), I may construct a model of a producer acting under conditions of unregulated competition, another of a producer with the same cost-conditions acting under the cartel restrictions imposed upon him and with the knowledge of similar restrictions imposed on the other suppliers of the "same" commodity. We can then compare the output of "the" firm in the two models.
All these models are models of rational actions but not of actions performed by living human beings in situations defined by them. They are assumed to be performable by the personal types constructed by the economist within the artificial environment in which he has placed his homunculi.
54 As to the concept of horizon, see Helmut Kuhn, "The Phenomenological Concept of Horizon" in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, edited by Marvin Farber, Cambridge, 1940, pp. 106-124 and Ludwig Landgrebe in Husserl, Erfahrung and Urteil, sees. 8-10.
55 I gratefully acknowledge the permission of my friend, Professor Fritz Machlup, to borrow the following examples from his book The Economics of Seller's Competition Model Analysis of Seller's Conduct, Baltimore, 1952, p. 4ff.
* See, for example, "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," tjd. 63-6°;. (M.N.)
VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS
The relationship between the social scientist and the puppet he has created reflects to a certain extent an age-old problem of theology and metaphysics, that of the relationship between God and his creatures. The puppet exists and acts merely by the grace of the scientist; it cannot act otherwise than according to the purpose which the scientist's wisdom has determined it to carry out. Nevertheless, it is supposed to act as if it were not determined but could determine itself. A total harmony has been pre-established between the determined consciousness bestowed upon the puppet and the pre-constituted environment within which it is supposed to act freely, to make rational choices and decisions. This harmony is possible only because both, the puppet and its reduced environment, are the creation of the scientist. And by keeping to the principles which guided him, the scientist succeeds, indeed, in discovering within the universe, thus created, the perfect harmony established by himself.
CONCEPT AND THEORY FORMATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 1
The title of my paper refers intentionally to that of a Symposium held in December, 1952, at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association.2 Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel contributed highly stimulating comments on the problem involved, formulated in the careful and lucid way so characteristic of these scholars. Their topic is a controversy which for more than half a century has split not only logicians and methodologists but also social scientists into two schools of thought. One of these holds that the methods of the natural sciences which have brought about such magnificent results are the only scientific ones and that they alone, therefore, have to be applied in their entirety to the study of human affairs. Failure to do so, it has been maintained, prevented the social sciences from developing systems of explanatory theory comparable in precision to those offered by the natural sciences and makes debatable the empirical work of theories developed in restricted domains such as economics.
The other school of thought feels that there is a basic difference in the structure of the social world and the world of nature. This feeling led to the other extreme, namely the conclusion that the methods of the social sciences are toto coelo different from those of the natural sciences. In order to support this position a variety of arguments was proffered. It has been maintained that the social sciences are idiographic, characterized by individualizing conceptualization and seeking singular assertory propositions,
1 Paper presented at the 33rd Semi-Annual Meeting of the Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences, New York, May 3, 1953.
2 Published in the volume Science, Language and Human Rights (American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Vol. I), Philadelphia, 1952, pp. 43-86 (referred to as SLH).
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whereas the natural sciences are nomothetic, characterized by generalizing conceptualization and seeking general apodictic propositions. The latter have to deal with constant relations of magnitude which can be measured and can perform experiments, whereas neither measurement nor experiment is practicable in the social sciences. In general, it is held that the natural sciences have to deal with material objects and processes, the social sciences, however, with psychological and intellectual ones and that, therefore, the method of the former consists in explaining, that of the latter in understanding.
Admittedly, most of these highly generalized statements are untenable under closer examination, and this for several reasons. Some proponents of the characterized arguments had a rather erroneous concept of the methods of the natural sciences. Others were inclined to identify the methodological situation in one particular social science with the method of the social sciences in general. Because history has to deal with unique and nonrecurrent events, it was contended that all social sciences are restricted to singular assertory propositions. Because experiments are hardly possible in cultural anthropology, the fact was ignored that social psychologists can successfully use laboratory experiments at least to a certain extent. Finally, and this is the most important point, these arguments disregard the fact that a set of rules for scientific procedure is equally valid for all empirical sciences whether they deal with objects of nature or with human affairs. Here and there, the principles of controlled inference and verification by fellow scientists and the theoretical ideals of unity, simplicity, universality, and precision prevail.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs results chiefly from the fact that the development of the modern social sciences occurred during a period in which the science of logic was mostly concerned with the logic of the natural sciences. 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. Left without help and guidance in their revolt against this dogmatism, the students of human affairs had to develop their own conceptions of what they believed to be the methodology of the social sciences. They did it without sufficient philosophical
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knowledge and stopped their effort when they reached a level of generalization which seemed to justify their deeply felt conviction that the goal of their inquiry could not be reached by adopting the methods of the natural sciences without modification or implementation. No wonder that their arguments are frequently ill-founded, their formulations insufficient, and that many misunderstandings obfuscate the controversy. Not what social scientists said but what they meant is therefore our main concern jn the following.
The writings of the late Felix Kaufmann 3 and the more recent contributions by Nagel4 and Hempel 5 have criticized many fallacies in the arguments proposed by social scientists and prepared the ground for another approach to the problem. I shall here concentrate on Professor Nagel's criticism of the claim made by Max Weber and his school that the social sciences seek to "understand" social phenomena in terms of "meaningful" categories of human experience and that, therefore, the "causal functional" approach of the natural sciences is not applicable in social inquiry. This school, as Dr. Nagel sees it, maintains that all socially significant human behavior is an expression of motivated psychic states, that in consequence the social scientist cannot be satisfied with viewing social processes simply as concatenations of "externally related" events, and that the establishment of correlations or even of universal relations of concomitance cannot be his ultimate goal. 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. If I understand Professor Nagel's criticism correctly, he maintains:
1) That these springs of action are not accessible to sensory observation. It follows and has frequently been stated that the social scientist must imaginatively identify himself with the participants and view the situation which they face as the actors themselves view it. Surely, however, we need not undergo other men's psychic experiences in order to know that they have them or in order to predict their overt behavior.
3 Especially his Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York, 1941.
4 SLH, pp. 43-64.
5 SLH, pp. 65-86.
2) That the imputation of emotions, attitudes, and purposes as an explanation of overt behavior is a twofold hypothesis: it assumes that the agents participating in some social phenomenon are in certain psychological states; and it assumes also definite relations of concomitance between such states, and between such states and overt behavior. Yet none of the psychological states which we imagine the subjects of our study to possess may in reality be theirs, and even if our imputations should be correct none of the overt actions which allegedly issue from those states may appear to us understandable or reasonable.
3) That we do not "understand" the nature and operations of human motives and their issuance in overt behavior more adequately than the "external" causal relations. If by meaningful explanation we assert merely that a particular action is an instance of a pattern of behavior which human beings exhibit under a variety of circumstances and that, since some of the relevant circumstances are realized in the given situation, a person can be expected to manifest a certain form of that pattern, then there is no sharp gulf separating such explanations from those involving merely "external" knowledge of causal connections. It is possible to gain knowledge of the actions of men on the evidence supplied by their overt behavior just as it is possible to discover and know the atomic constitution of water on the evidence supplied by the physical and chemical behavior of that substance. Hence the rejection of a purely "objective" or "behavioristic" social science by the proponents of "meaningful connections" as the goal of social sciences is unwarranted.
Since I shall have to disagree with Nagel's and Hempel's findings on several questions of a fundamental nature, I might be permitted to start with a brief summary of the no less important points on which I find myself happily in full agreement with them. I agree with Professor Nagel that all empirical knowledge involves discovery through processes of controlled inference, and that it must be statable in propositional form and capable of being verified by anyone who is prepared to make the effort to do so through observation6 - although I do not believe, as Professor Nagel does, that this observation has to be sensory in the precise meaning of this term. Moreover, I agree with him that "theory"
6 SLH, p. 56.
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means in all empirical sciences the explicit formulation of determinate relations between a set of variables in terms of which a fairly extensive class of empirically ascertainable regularities can be explained.7 Furthermore, I agree wholeheartedly with his statement that neither the fact that these regularities have in the social sciences a rather narrowly restricted universality, nor the fact that they permit prediction only to a rather limited extent, constitutes a basic difference between the social and the natural sciences, since many branches of the latter show the same features.8 As I shall try to show later on, it seems to me that Professor Nagel misunderstands Max Weber's postulate of subjective interpretation. Nevertheless, he is right in stating that a method which would require that the individual scientific observer identify himself with the social agent observed in order to understand the motives of the latter, or a method which would refer the selection of the facts observed and their interpretation to the private value system of the particular observer, would merely lead to an uncontrollable private and subjective image in the mind of this particular student of human affairs, but never to a scientific theory.9 But I do not know of any social scientist of stature who ever advocated such a concept of subjectivity as that criticized by Professor Nagel. Most certainly this was not the position of Max Weber.
I also think that our authors are prevented from grasping the point of vital concern to social scientists by their basic philosophy of sensationalistic empiricism or logical positivism, which identifies experience with sensory observation and which assumes that the only alternative to controllable and, therefore, objective sensory observation is that of subjective and, therefore, uncontrollable and unverifiable introspection. This is certainly not the place to renew the age old controversy relating to the hidden presuppositions and implied metaphysical assumptions of this basic philosophy. On the other hand, in order to account for my own position, I should have to treat at length certain principles of phenomenology. Instead of doing so, I propose to defend a few rather simple propositions:
' SLH, p. 46. 8 SLH, pp. 60 ff. * SLH, pp. 55-57-
1) The primary goal of the social sciences is to obtain organized knowledge of social reality. By the term "social reality" I wish to be understood the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men hving their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction. It is the world of cultural objects and social institutions into which we all are born, within which we have to find our bearings, and with which we have to come to terms. From the outset, we, the actors on the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of nature and of culture, not as a private but as an inter-subjective one, that is, as a world common to all of us, either actually given or potentially accessible to everyone; and this involves intercommunication and language.
2) All forms of naturalism and logical empiricism simply take for granted this social reality, which is the proper object of the social sciences. Intersubjectivity, interaction, intercommunication, and language are simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of these theories. They assume, as it were, that the social scientist has already solved his fundamental problem, before scientific inquiry starts. To be sure, Dewey emphasized, with a clarity worthy of this eminent philosopher, that all inquiry starts and ends within the social cultural matrix; to be sure, Professor Nagel is fully aware of the fact that science and its self-correcting process is a social enterprise.10 But the postulate of describing and explaining human behavior in terms of controllable sensory observation stops short before the description and explanation of the process by which scientist B controls and verifies the observational findings of scientist A and the conclusions drawn by him. In order to do so, B has to know what A has observed, what the goal of his inquiry is, why he thought the observed fact worthy of being observed, i.e., relevant to the scientific problem at hand, etc. This knowledge is commonly called understanding. The explanation of how such a mutual understanding of human beings might occur is apparently left to the social scientist. But whatever his explanation might be, one thing is sure, namely, that such an intersubjective understanding between scientist B and scientist A occurs neither by scientist B's
10 SLH, p. 53.
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observations of scientist A's overt behavior, nor by introspection performed by B, nor by identification of B with A. To translate this argument into the language dear to logical positivism, this means, as Felix Kaufmann 11 has shown, that so-called protocol propositions about the physical world are of an entirely different kind than protocol propositions about the psycho-physical world.
3) The identification of experience with sensory observation in general and of the experience of overt action in particular (and that is what Nagel proposes) excludes several dimensions of social reality from all possible inquiry.
a) Even an ideally refined behaviorism can, as has been pointed out for instance by George H. Mead,12 merely explain the behavior of the observed, not of the observing behaviorist.
b) The same overt behavior (say a tribal pageant as it can be captured by the movie camera) may have an entirely different meaning to the performers. What interests the social scientist is merely whether it is a war dance, a barter trade, the reception of a friendly ambassador, or something else of this sort.
c) Moreover, the concept of human action in terms of common-sense thinking and of the social sciences includes what may be called "negative actions," i.e., intentional refraining from acting,13 which, of course, escapes sensory observation. Not to sell certain merchandise at a given price is doubtless as economic an action as to sell it.
d) Furthermore, as W. I. Thomas has shown,14 social reality contains elements of beliefs and convictions which are real because they are so defined by the participants and which escape sensory observation. To the inhabitants of Salem in the seventeenth century, witchcraft was not a delusion but an element of their social reality and is as such open to investigation by the social scientist.
e) Finally, and this is the most important point, the postulate of sensory observation of overt human behavior takes as a model a particular and relatively small sector of the social world,
11 Op. cit., p. 126.
12 Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, 1937-
13 See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York, 1947. P- 8S-
M See W. I. Thomas, Social Behavior and Personality, edited by E. H. Volkart, New York, 1951, p. 81.
namely, situations in which the acting individual is given to the observer in what is commonly called a face-to-face relationship. But there are many other dimensions of the social world in which situations of this kind do not prevail. If we put a letter in the mailbox we assume that anonymous fellow-men, called postmen, will perform a series of manipulations, unknown and unobserv-able to us, with the effect that the addressee, possibly also unknown to us, will receive the message and react in a way which also escapes our sensory observation; and the result of all this is that we receive the book we have ordered. Or if I read an editorial stating that France fears the re-armament of Germany, I know perfectly well what this statement means without knowing the editorialist and even without knowing a Frenchman or a German, let alone without observing their overt behavior.
In terms of common-sense thinking in everyday life men have knowledge of these various dimensions of the social world in which they live. To be sure, this knowledge is not only fragmentary since it is restricted principally to certain sectors of this world, it is also frequently inconsistent in itself and shows all degrees  of  clarity  and  distinctness  from  full insight or "knowledge-about," as James 15 called it, through "knowledge of acquaintance" or mere familiarity, to blind belief in things^ just taken for granted. In this respect there are considerable differences from individual to individual and from social group to social group. Yet, in spite of all these inadequacies, common-sense knowledge of everyday life is sufficient for coming to terms with fellow-men, cultural objects, social institutions - in brief; with social reality. This is so, because the world (the natural and the social one) is from the outset an intersubjective world and because, as shall be pointed out later on, our knowledge of it is in various ways socialized. Moreover, the social world is experienced from the outset as a meaningful one. The Other's body is not experienced as an organism but as a fellow-man, its overt behavior not as an occurrence in the space-time of the outer world, but as our fellow-man's action. We normally "know" what the Other does, for what reason he does it, why he does it at this particular time and in these particular circumstances. That means that we experience our fellow-man's action in terms of his
15 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 22if.
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motives and goals. And in the same way, we experience cultural objects in terms of the human action of which they are the result. A tool, for example, is not experienced as a thing in the outer world (which of course it is also) but in terms of the purpose for which it was designed by more or less anonymous fellow-men and its possible use by others.
The fact that in common-sense thinking we take for granted our actual or potential knowledge of the meaning of human actions and their products, is, I suggest, precisely what social scientists want to express if they speak of understanding or Verstehen as a technique of dealing with human affairs. Verstehen is, thus, primarily not a method used by the social scientist, but the particular experiential form in which common-sense thinking takes cognizance of the social cultural world. It has nothing to do with introspection; it is a result of processes of learning or acculturation in the same way as the common-sense experience of the so-called natural world. Verstehen is, moreover, by no means a private affair of the observer which cannot be controlled by the experiences of other observers. It is controllable at least to the same extent to which the private sensory perceptions of an individual are controllable by any other individual under certain conditions. You have just to think of the discussion by a trial jury of whether the defendant has shown "pre-meditated malice" or "intent" in killing a person, whether he was capable of knowing the consequences of his deed, etc. Here we even have certain "rules of procedure" furnished by the "rules of evidence" in the juridical sense and a kind of verification of the findings resulting from processes of Verstehen by the Appellate Court, etc. Moreover, predictions based on Verstehen are continuously made in common-sense thinking with high success. There is more than a fair chance that a duly stamped and addressed letter put in a New York mailbox will reach the addressee in Chicago.
Nevertheless, both defenders and critics of the process of Verstehen maintain, and with good reason, that Verstehen is "subjective." Unfortunately, however, this term is used by each party in a different sense. The critics of understanding call it subjective, because they hold that understanding the motives of another man's action depends upon the private, uncontrollable, and unverifiable intuition of the observer or refers to his private
value system. The social scientists, such as Max Weber, however, call Verstehen subjective because its goal is to find out what the actor "means" in his action, in contrast to the meaning which this action has for the actor's partner or a neutral observer. This is the origin of Max Weber's famous postulate of subjective interpretation, of which more will have to be said in what follows. The whole discussion suffers from the failure to distinguish clearly between Verstehen i) as the experiential form of common-sense knowledge of human affairs, 2) as an epistemologi-cal problem, and 3) as a method peculiar to the social sciences.
So far we have concentrated on Verstehen as the way in which common-sense thinking finds its bearing within the social world and comes to terms with it. As to the epistemological question: "How is such understanding or Verstehen possible?" Alluding to a statement Kant made in another context, I suggest that it is a "scandal of philosophy" that so far a satisfactory solution to the problem of our knowledge of other minds and, in connection therewith, of the intersubjectivity of our experience of the natural as well as the socio-cultural world has not been found and that, until rather recent times, this problem has even escaped the attention of philosophers. But the solution of this most difficult problem of philosophical interpretation is one of the first things taken for granted in our common-sense thinking and practically solved without any difficulty in each of our everyday actions. And since human beings are born of mothers and not concocted in retorts, the experience of the existence of other human beings and of the meaning of their actions is certainly the first and most original empirical observation man makes.
On the other hand, philosophers as different as James, Bergson, Dewey, Husserl, and Whitehead agree that the common-sense knowledge of everyday life is the unquestioned but always questionable background within which inquiry starts and within which alone it can be carried out. It is this Lebenswelt, as Husserl calls it, within which, according to him, all scientific and even logical concepts originate; it is the social matrix within which, according to Dewey, unclarified situations emerge, which have to be transformed by the process of inquiry into warranted as-sertibility; and Whitehead has pointed out that it is the aim of science to produce a theory which agrees with experience by
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explaining the thought-objects constructed by common sense through the mental constructs or thought objects of science.* For all these thinkers agree that any knowledge of the world, in common-sense thinking as well as in science, involves mental constructs, syntheses, generalizations, formalizations, idealizations specific to the respective level of thought organization. The concept of Nature, for instance, with which the natural sciences have to deal is, as Husserl has shown, an idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt, an abstraction which, on principle and of course legitimately, excludes persons with their personal life and all objects of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this layer of the Lebenswelt, however, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate.
This insight sheds a light on certain methodological problems peculiar to the social sciences. To begin with, it appears that the assumption that the strict adoption of the principles of concept and theory formation prevailing in the natural sciences will lead to reliable knowledge of social reality is inconsistent in itself. If a theory can be developed on such principles, say in the form of an ideally refined behaviorism - and it is certainly possible to imagine this - then it will not tell us anything about social reality as experienced by men in everyday life. As Professor Nagel himself admits,16 it will be highly abstract, and its concepts will apparently be remote from the obvious and familiar traits found in any society. On the other hand, a theory which aims at explaining social reality has to develop particular devices foreign to the natural sciences in order to agree with the common-sense experience of the social world. This is indeed what all theoretical sciences of human affairs - economics, sociology, the sciences of law, linguistics, cultural anthropology, etc. - have done.
This state of affairs is founded on the fact that there is an essential difference in the structure of the thought objects or mental constructs formed by the social sciences and those formed by the natural sciences.17 It is up to the natural scientist and to
16 SLH, p. 63.
17 Some of the points dealt with in the following are presented more elaborately in "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action".
* See "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action," p. 3f. (M.N.)
him alone to define, in accordance with the procedural rules of his science, his observational field, and to determine the facts, data, and events within it which are relevant for his problem or scientific purpose at hand. Neither are those facts and events pre-selected, nor is the observational field pre-interpreted. The world of nature, as explored by the natural scientist, does not "mean" anything to molecules, atoms, and electrons. But the observational field of the social scientist - social reality - has a specific meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, acting, and thinking within it. By a series of common-sense constructs they have pre-selected and pre-interpreted this world which they experience as the reality of their daily lives. It is these thought objects of theirs which determine their behavior by motivating it. The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world. Thus, the constructs of the social sciences are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the social scientist has to observe and to explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.
Thus, the exploration of the general principles according to which man in daily life organizes his experiences, and especially those of the social world, is the first task of the methodology of the social sciences. This is not the place to outline the procedures of a phenomenological analysis of the so-called natural attitude by which this can be done. We shall briefly mention only a few problems involved.
The world, as has been shown by Husserl, is from the outset experienced in the pre-scientific thinking of everyday life in the mode of typicality. The unique objects and events given to us in a unique aspect are unique within a horizon of typical familiarity and pre-acquaintanceship. There are mountains, trees, animals, dogs - in particular Irish setters and among them my Irish setter, Rover. Now I may look at Rover either as this unique individual, my irreplaceable friend and comrade, or just as a typical example of "Irish setter," "dog," "mammal," "animal," "organism," or "object of the outer world." Starting
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from here, it can be shown that whether I do one or the other, and also which traits or qualities of a given object or event I consider as individually unique and which as typical, depends upon my actual interest and the system of relevances involved -briefly, upon my practical or theoretical "problem at hand." This "problem at hand," in turn, originates in the circumstances within which I find myself at any moment of my daily life and which I propose to call my biographically determined situation. Thus, typification depends upon my problem at hand for the definition and solution of which the type has been formed. It can be further shown that at least one aspect of the biographically and situationally determined systems of interests and relevances is subjectively experienced in the thinking of everyday life as systems of motives for action, of choices to be made, of projects to be carried out, of goals to be reached. It is this insight of the actor into the dependencies of the motives and goals of his actions upon his biographically determined situation which social scientists have in view when speaking of the subjective meaning which the actor "bestows upon" or "connects with" his action. This implies that, strictly speaking, the actor and he alone knows what he does, why he does it, and when and where his action starts and ends.
But the world of everyday life is from the outset also a social cultural world in which I am interrelated in manifold ways of interaction with fellow-men known to me in varying degrees of intimacy and anonymity. To a certain extent, sufficient for many practical purposes, I understand their behavior, if I understand their motives, goals, choices, and plans originating in their biographically determined circumstances. Yet only in particular situations, and then only fragmentárny, can I experience the Others' motives, goals, etc. - briefly, the subjective meanings they bestow upon their actions, in their uniqueness. I can, however, experience them in their typicality. In order to do so I construct typical patterns of the actors' motives and ends, even of their attitudes and personalities, of which their actual conduct is just an instance or example. These typified patterns of the Others' behavior become in turn motives of my own actions, and this leads to the phenomenon of self-typification well known to social scientists under various names.
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Here, I submit, in the common-sense thinking of everyday life, is the origin of the so-called constructive or ideal types, a concept which as a tool of the social sciences has been analyzed by Professor Hempel in such a lucid way. But at least at the common-sense level the formation of these types involves neither intuition nor a theory, if we understand these terms in the sense of Hempel's statements.18 As we shall see, there are also other kinds of ideal or constructive types, those formed by the social scientist, which are of a quite different structure and indeed involve theory. But Hempel has not distinguished between the two.
Next we have to consider that the common-sense knowledge of everyday life is from the outset socialized in many respects.
It is, first, structurally socialized, since it is based on the fundamental idealization that if I were to change places with my fellow-man I would experience the same sector of the world in substantially the same perspectives as he does, our particular biographical circumstances becoming for all practical purposes at hand irrelevant. I propose to call this idealization that of the reciprocity of perspectives.*
It is, second, genetically socialized, because the greater part of our knowledge, as to its content and the particular forms of typification under which it is organized, is socially derived, and this in socially approved terms.
It is, third, socialized in the sense of social distribution of knowledge, each individual knowing merely a sector of the world and common knowledge of the same sector varying individually as to its degree of distinctness, clarity, acquaintanceship, or mere belief.
These principles of socialization of common-sense knowledge, and especially that of the social distribution of knowledge, explain at least partially what the social scientist has in mind in speaking of the functional structural approach to studies of human affairs. The concept of functionalism - at least in the modern social sciences - is not derived from the biological concept of the functioning of an organism, as Nagel holds. It refers to the socially distributed constructs of patterns of typical
18 SLH, pp. 76ff. and 81.
* See "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action," p. rif. (M.N.)
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motives, goals, attitudes, personalities, which are supposed to be invariant and are then interpreted as the function or structure of the social system itself. The more these interlocked behavior patterns are standardized and institutionalized, that is, the more their typicality is socially approved by laws, folkways, mores, and habits, the greater is their usefulness in common-sense and scientific thinking as a scheme of interpretation of human behavior.
These are, very roughly, the outlines of a few major features of the constructs involved in common-sense experience of the intersubjective world in daily life, which is caUed Verstehen. As explained before, they are the first level constructs upon which the second level constructs of the social sciences have to be erected. But here a major problem emerges. On the one hand, it has been shown that the constructs on the first level, the common-sense constructs, refer to subjective elements, namely the Verstehen of the actor's action from his, the actor's, point of view. Consequently, if the social sciences aim indeed at explaining social reality, then the scientific constructs on the second level, too, must include a reference to the subjective meaning an action has for the actor. This is, I think, what Max Weber understood by his famous postulate of subjective interpretation, which has, indeed, been observed so far in the theory formation of all social sciences. The postulate of subjective interpretation has to be understood in the sense that all scientific explanations of the social world can, and for certain purposes must, refer to the subjective meaning of the actions of human beings from which social reality originates.
On the other hand, I agreed with Professor Nagel's statement that the social sciences, like all empirical sciences, have to be objective in the sense that their propositions are subjected to controlled verification and must not refer to private uncontrol-able experience.
How is it possible to reconcile these seemingly contradictory principles ? Indeed, the most serious question which the methodology of the social sciences has to answer is: How is it possible to form objective concepts and an objectively verifiable theory of subjective meaning-structures? The basic insight that the concepts formed by the social scientist are constructs of the con-
structs formed in common-sense thinking by the actors on the social scene offers an answer. The scientific constructs formed on the second level, in accordance with the procedural rules valid for all empirical sciences, are objective ideal typical constructs and, as such, of a different kind from those developed on the first level of common-sense thinking which they have to supersede. They are theoretical systems embodying testable general hypotheses in the sense of Professor Hempel's definition.19 This device has been used by social scientists concerned with theory long before this concept was formulated by Max Weber and developed by his school.
Before describing a few features of these scientific constructs, let us briefly consider the particular attitude of the theoretical social scientist to the social world, in contradistinction to that of the actor on the social scene. The theoretical scientist - qua scientist, not qua human being (which he is, too) - is not involved in the observed situation, which is to him not of practical but merely of cognitive interest. The system of relevances governing common-sense interpretation in daily life originates in the biographical situation of the observer. By making up his mind to become a scientist, the social scientist has replaced his personal biographical situation by what I shall call, following Felix Kauf-mann,20 a scientific situation. The problems with which he has to deal might be quite unproblematic for the human being within the world and vice versa. Any scientific problem is determined by the actual state of the respective science, and its solution has to be achieved in accordance with the procedural rules governing this science, which among other things warrant the control and verification of the solution offered. The scientific problem, once established, alone determines what is relevant for the scientist as well as the conceptual frame of reference to be used by him. This and nothing else, it seems to me, is what Max Weber means when he postulates the objectivity of the social sciences, their detachment from value patterns which govern or might govern the behavior of the actors on the social scene.
How does the social scientist proceed? He observes certain facts and events within social reality which refer to human action
19 SLH, pp. 77ff.
20 Op. cit., pp. 52 and 251.
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and he constructs typical behavior or course-of-action patterns from what he has observed. Thereupon he co-ordinates to these typical course-of-action patterns models of an ideal actor or actors, whom he imagines as being gifted with consciousness. Yet it is a consciousness restricted so as to contain nothing but the elements relevant to the performing of the course-of-action patterns observed. He thus ascribes to this fictitious consciousness a set of typical notions, purposes, goals, which are assumed to be invariant in the specious consciousness of the imaginary actor-model. This homunculus or puppet is supposed to be interrelated in interaction patterns to other homunculi or puppets constructed in a similar way. Among these homunculi with which the social scientist populates his model of the social world of everyday life, sets of motives, goals, roles - in general, systems of relevances - are distributed in such a way as the scientific problems under scrutiny require. Yet - and this is the main point - these constructs are by no means arbitrary. They are subject to the postulate of logical consistency and to the postulate of adequacy. The latter means that each term in such a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act performed within the real world by an individual actor as indicated by the typical construct would be understandable to the actor himself as well as to his fellow-men in terms of common-sense interpretation of everyday life. Compliance with the postulate of logical consistency warrants the objective vahdity of the thought objects constructed by the social scientist; compliance with the postulate of adequacy warrants their compatibility with the constructs of everyday life.*
As the next step, the circumstances within which such a model operates may be varied, that is, the situation which the homunculi have to meet may be imagined as changed, but not the set of motives and relevances assumed to be the sole content of their consciousness. I may, for example, construct a model of a producer acting under conditions of unregulated competition, and another of a producer acting under cartel restrictions, and then compare the output of the same commodity of the same firm in
* See "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action," p. 43f.
:(M.N.)
the two models.21 In this way, it is possible to predict how such a puppet or system of puppets might behave under certain conditions and to discover certain "determinate relations between a set of variables, in terms of which .. . empirically ascertainable regularities.. . can be explained." This, however, is Professor Nagel's definition of a theory.22 It can easily be seen that each step involved in the construction and use of the scientific model can be verified by empirical observation, provided that we do not restrict this term to sensory perceptions of objects and events in the outer world but include the experiential form, by which common-sense thinking in everyday life understands human actions and their outcome in terms of their underlying motives and goals.
Two brief concluding remarks may be permitted. First, a key concept of the basic philosophic position of naturalism is the so-called principle of continuity, although it is under discussion whether this principle means continuity of existence, or of analysis, or of an intellectual criterion of pertinent checks upon the methods employed.23 It seems to me that this principle of continuity in each of these various interpretations is fulfilled by the characterized device of the social sciences, which even establishes continuity between the practice of everyday life and the conceptualization of the social sciences.
Second, a word on the problem of the methodological unity of the empirical sciences. It seems to me that the social scientist can agree with the statement that the principal differences between the social and the natural sciences do not have to be looked for in a different logic governing each branch of knowledge. But this does not involve the admission that the social sciences have to abandon the particular devices they use for exploring social reality for the sake of an ideal unity of methods which is founded on the entirely unwarranted assumption that only methods used by the natural sciences, and especially by physics, are scientific ones. So far as I know, no serious attempt has ever been made by the proponents of the "unity of science" movement to answer
21 See Fritz Machlup, The Economics of Seller's Competition: Model Analysis of Seller's Conduct, Baltimore, 1952, pp. 9 ff.
22 SLH, p. 46; see also pp. 51-52 above.
23 See Thelma Z. Lavine, "Note to Naturalists on the Human Spirit," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. L, 1953, pp. 145-154, and Ernest Nagel's answer, ibid., pp. 154-157-
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or even to ask the question whether the methodological problem of the natural sciences in their present state is not merely a special case of the more general, still unexplored, problem how scientific knowledge is possible at all and what its logical and methodological presuppositions are. It is my personal conviction that phenomenological philosophy has prepared the ground for such an investigation. Its outcome might quite possibly show that the particular methodological devices developed by the social sciences in order to grasp social reality are better suited than those of the natural sciences to lead to the discovery of the general principles which govern all human knowledge.
CHOOSING AMONG PROJECTS OF ACTION
I. THE CONCEPT OF ACTION
Our purpose here is the analysis of the process by which an actor in daily life determines his future conduct after having considered several possible ways of action. The term "action" shaU designate human conduct as an ongoing process which is devised by the actor in advance, that is, which is based upon a preconceived project. The term "act" shall designate the outcome of this ongoing process, that is, the accomplished action. Action, thus, may be covert - for example, the attempt to solve a scientific problem mentally - or overt, gearing into the outer world. But not all projected conduct is also purposive conduct. In order to transform the forethought into an aim and the project into a purpose, the intention to carry out the project, to bring about the projected state of affairs, must supervene. This distinction is of importance with respect to covert actions. My phantasying may be a projected one, and therefore, an action within the meaning of our definition. But it remains mere fancying unless what W. James called the voluntative "fiat" supervenes and transforms my project into a purpose. If a covert action is more than "mere fancying," namely purposive, it shall be called for the sake of convenience a "performance." In case of an overt action, which gears into the outer world and changes it, such a distinction is not necessary. An overt action is always both projected and purposive. It is projected by definition because otherwise it would be mere conduct and since it has become overt, that is, manifested in the outer world, the voluntative fiat which transfers the project into a purpose, the inner command "Let us start!" must have preceded.
Action may take place - purposively or not - by commission or omission. The case of purposively refraining from action deserves,
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however, special attention. I may bring about a future state of affairs by non-interference. Such a projected abstaining from acting may be considered in itself as an action and even as a performance within the meaning of our definition. If I project an action, then drop this project, say because I forget about it, no performance occurs. But if I oscillate between carrying out and not carrying out a project and decide for the latter, then my purposive refraining from acting is a performance. I may even interpret my deliberation whether or not to carry out a projected action as a choice between two projects, two anticipated states of affairs, one to be brought about by the action projected, the other by refraining from it. The deliberation of the surgeon whether or not to operate upon a patient or of the businessman whether or not to sell under given circumstances are examples of situations of this kind.
II. THE TIME STRUCTURE OF THE PROJECT *
According to Dewey's pregnant formulation, deliberation is "a dramatic rehearsal in imagination of various competing possible lines of action... It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon." 1 This definition hits the point in many respects. All projecting consists in an anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying. We have only to find out whether it is the future ongoing process of the action as it rolls on phase by phase or the outcome of this future action, the act imagined as having been accomplished, which is anticipated in the phantasying of projecting. It can easily be seen, that it is the latter, the act that will have been accomplished, which is the starting point of all of our projecting. I have to visualize the state of affairs to be brought about by my future action before I can draft the single steps of my future acting from which this state of affairs will result. Metaphorically speaking, I have to have some idea of the structure to be erected before I can draft the blueprints. In order to project my future
1 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, III, Modern Library edit., p. 190. * Cf. "On Multiple Realities," p. 214S. (M.N.)
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action as it will roll on I have to place myself in my phantasy at a future time when this action will already have been accomplished, when the resulting act will already have been materialized. Only then may I reconstruct the single steps which will have brought forth this future act. What is thus anticipated in the project is, in our terminology, not the future action, but the future act, and it is anticipated in the Future Perfect Tense, modo futuri exacti. This time perspective peculiar to the project has rather important consequences. First, I base my projecting of my forthcoming act in the Future Perfect Tense upon my knowledge of previously performed acts which are typically similar to the prescribed one, upon my knowledge of typically relevant features of the situation in which this projected action will occur, including my personal biographically determined situation. But this knowledge is my knowledge now at hand, now, at the time of projecting, and must necessarily be different from that which I shall have when the now merely projected act will have been materialized. Until then I shall have grown older and if nothing else has changed, at least the experiences I shall have had while carrying out my project will have enlarged my knowledge. In other words, projecting like any other anticipation carries along its empty horizons which will be filled in merely by the materialization of the anticipated event. This constitutes the intrinsic uncertainty of all forms of projecting.
Second, the particular time perspective of the project explains the relationship between the project and the various forms of motives.
III. IN-ORDER-TO AND BECAUSE MOTIVE
It is frequently stated that actions within the meaning of our definition are motivated behavior. Yet the term "motive" is equivocal and covers two different sets of concepts which have to be distinguished. We may say that the motive of the murderer was to obtain the money of the victim. Here "motive" means the state of affairs, the end, which the action has been undertaken to bring about. We shall call this kind of motive the "in-order-to motive." From the point of view of the actor this class of motives refers to his future. In the terminology suggested, we may say
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that the projected act, that is the pre-phantasied state of affairs to be brought about by the future action constitutes the in-order-to motive of the latter. What is, however, motivated by such an in-order-to motive ? It is obviously not the projecting itself. I may project in my phantasy to commit a murder without any supervening intention to carry out such a project. Motivated by the way of in-order-to, therefore, is the "voluntative fiat," the decision: "Let's go!" which transforms the inner fancying into a performance or an action gearing into the outer world.
Over against the class of in-order-to motives we have to distinguish another one which we suggest calling the "because" motive. The murderer has been motivated to commit his acts because he grew up in an environment of such and such a kind, because, as psycho-analysis shows, he had in his infancy such and such experiences, etc. Thus, from the point of view of the actor, the because-motive refers to his past experiences. These experiences have determined him to act as he did. What is motivated in an action in the way of "because" is the project of the action itself. In order to satisfy his needs for money, the actor had the possibility of providing it in several other ways than by killing a man, say by earning it in a remunerative occupation. His idea of attaining this goal by killing a man was determined ("caused") by his personal situation or, more precisely, by his life history, as sedimented in his personal circumstances.
The distinction between in-order-to motives and because motives is frequently disregarded in ordinary language which permits the expression of most of the "in-order-to" motives by "because" sentences, although not the other way around. It is common usage to say that the murderer killed his victim because he wanted to obtain his money. Logical analysis has to penetrate the cloak of language and to investigate how this curious translation of "in-order-to" relations into "because" sentences becomes possible.
The answer seems to be a twofold one and opens still other aspects of the implications involved in the concept of motives. Motive may have a subjective and an objective meaning. Subjectively it refers to the experience of the actor who lives in his ongoing process of activity. To him, motive means what he has actually in view as bestowing meaning upon his ongoing
action, and this is always the in-order-to motive, the intention of bringing about a projected state of affairs, of attaining a preconceived goal. As long as the actor lives in his ongoing action, he does not have in view its because motives. Only when the action has been accomplished, when in the suggested terminology it has become an act, he may turn back to his past action as an observer of himself and investigate by what circumstances he has been determined to do what he did. The same holds good if the actor grasps in retrospection the past initial phases of his still ongoing action. This retrospection may even be merely anticipated modo futuri exacti. Having, in my projecting phantasy, anticipated what I shall have done when carrying out my project, I may ask myself why I was determined to take this and no other decision. In all these cases the genuine because motive refers to past or future perfect experiences. It reveals itself by its very temporal structure only to the retrospective glance. This "mirror-effect" of temporal projection explains why, on the one hand, a linguistic "because form" may and is frequently used for expressing genuine "in-order-to relations" and why, on the other hand, it is impossible to express genuine because relations by an "in-order-to" sentence. In using the linguistic form "in-order-to", I am looking at the ongoing process of action which is still in the making and appears therefore in the time perspective of the future. In using the linguistic "because" form for expressing a genuine in-order-to relationship, I am looking at the preceding project and the therein modo futuri exacti anticipated act. The genuine because motive, however, involves, as we have seen, the time perspective of the past and refers to the genesis of the projecting itself.
So far we have analyzed the subjective aspect of the two categories of motives, that is, the aspect from the point of view of the actor. It has been shown that the in-order-to motive refers to the attitude of the actor living in the process of his ongoing action. It is, therefore, an essentially subjective category and is revealed to the observer only if he asks what meaning the actor bestows upon his action. The genuine because motive, however, as we have found, is an objective category, accessible to the observer who has to reconstruct from the accomplished act, namely from the state of affairs brought about in the outer