The Philosophy of Social Research
John A. Hughes, Wesley W. Sharrock
Chapter 5
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Although that strand of the interpretative tradition represented by Weber recognised the partiality of
social scientific accounts, and hermeneutics their inevitability, the phenomenological tradition did not
abandon the quest for the indubitable grounds of knowledge but sought it in a different place to that of
positivism. Knowledge, for phenomenology, is an act of consciousness (see Natanson 1970, Luckman 197S.
Anderson et al. 1987). To be conscious is to be conscious of something. For Husserl (1859-1938), the
German philosopher who founded the school of phenomenology, the 'world' means a world experienced
and made meaningful by acts of consciousness. It is through these alone that the world is given and
presented to us. This is as true for science as it is for any other mode of knowing. The subject matter of
science, for example, is a system of constructs resulting from conceptualisations idealisations,
mathematisations, and so on, based on and derived from a 'pregiven' everyday experience. The prime task of
phenomenology is to describe this everyday experience of the 'life world': the world as given in
immediate experience and independent of and prior to any scientific or other interpretation.
Admittedly, 'life worlds' belong to specific sociohistorical groupings. Our world, that is the everyday world
of the peoples of modern societies in the late twentieth century for example, is a world seen through the
lens of modern science and different, in significant respects, from the 'life worlds' of the peoples of
Ancient Greece. However, no special privilege attaches to any particular 'life world' since these are shaped
by sociohistorical circumstances and there can be no historically or socially independent standard by
which to determine which conceptions of the world are superior to others. For Husserl, however, a
'transcendental phenomenology' could be developed as a universal theory of consciousness. Such an
'ontology of the life world' would be an a priori science of the universal structures of the perceptual world
and would, therefore, enable us to derive any particular sociocultural product from these structures,
including science and logic. If such a theory were possible, it would perform the same role that positivism
envisaged for the neutral observation language; that is, a noninterpreted basis for knowledge.
For our purposes, the important figure in this tradition is Alfred Schutz who elaborated and modified
Husserl's work (Schutz 1962). However, Schutz's starting point was Weber's view that it was possible to
provide sociological explanations adequate at both the level of meaning and the level of causality. Schutz
regarded Weber's ambition as admirable but felt that he had failed to provide the necessary philosophical
premises of an interpretative social science. So, in turning to Husserl's philosophical method and his
analysis of the 'life world', Schutz aimed at building the ontological framework for an interpretative
social science by treating the concept of understanding as the problem which, though Weber identified, he
failed to examine thoroughly enough.
Borrowing from Husserl, Schutz argued that the 'life world' of ordinary understandings is carried into
the scientific world but in a manner which leaves it unexamined. The reality that the social sciences take as
their topic has its origins in the 'life world', and it is this which both Weber and the positivists failed to
realise. To place interpretative social science on a firmer footing, it is necessary to examine the character of
daily life as the outcome of the activities of social actors. Central to Schutz's analysis is the 'postulate of
subjective interpretation' which requires that social scientific accounts have to treat social actors as
conscious beings whose activities have meaning for them and others. The social reality in which action
takes place is the outcome of the interpretations made and courses of action undertaken by social actors.
The 'objects' which this postulate makes available for study within this intersubjective 'life world' of
everyday life are presented to us as an objectified system of shared designations and expressive forms. It
is world of everyday life as lived and experienced through 'common sense' and displaying the 'natural attitude',
that is, the attitude of the world of everyday life. Under this attitude the world is 'taken for granted'. Social
actors do not question the meaningful structure of this world, do not theorise or philosophise about it, or
doubt its existence: it is a world which is 'there' and dealt with in a practical manner. For example, in the
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course of our daily lives we have to take so many things for granted - for instance, that the sun will rise in the
morning, that the cinema we plan to go to in the evening will still be there, that the work we left to do will
still be on the desk tomorrow, that the car is still in the garage, that the road to work will not suddenly have
changed direction, that the letter we posted yesterday will be delivered, and so on and so on - in order to
construct the daily activities that we ordinarily engage in. This does not mean that things will always go to
plan or that our expectations will not sometimes be confounded. We may discover that our car is not in the
garage where it was left last night. But we do not conclude by this that its nature has been changed so that a
car has some intermittent existence and flickers in and out of being, sometimes being there and
sometimes not. We are more likely to make the usual assumption that the car remains in continuous
existence and that if it is not where it was left then it is somewhere else, that it has been stolen or,
perhaps, that it was actually left somewhere else and that we had temporarily forgotten. It is not something
to theorise about or something which will provoke us to raise ontological questions about the nature of
reality. The meaningful structure of the 'life world' is not questioned but taken for granted. The task
within the 'natural attitude' is to live in the world as practical rather than theoretical or philosophical
creatures.
The world has meaning because of the intentionality of consciousness. For most of the time, what
persons are doing is self-evidently meaningful. Meanings are intersubjectively shared. We make sense of
our own actions and those of others through a 'stock of knowledge' that is held in common, that we inherit
and learn as members of society. Though such knowledge has the tonalities of our personal biography and is
continually changing, its own intersubjective structure is familiar. As Husserl emphasised, we do not
experience a stream of sense data as, for example, the logical positivists would have it, but experience objects
as constituted for us in consciousness, such as cars, books, TVs, houses, Jon, bicycles, curries, and so on.
The structure of this 'life world' is displayed through 'typifications' constructed out of whatever relevances
arise from the actor's interests and purposes 'at hand'. As used by Schutz such typifications would
include the universal and relatively stable as well as the more specific and changing.
As said, the primary world in which social actors live is an inter-subjective one of everyday life, a
world governed by the natural attitude with its pragmatic motives and interests. In addition, actors live in other
worlds of 'finite provinces of meaning', such as those of art, religious experience, dreams, childhood,
and so on, each with a particular cognitive style.7 What Schutz means by this is not that we can simply
imagine the world as we choose, but that each province of meaning has its own, though not unique in all
respects, structure of relevances, and that the available 'stocks of knowledge' enable us to bestow
'factuality' in different ways. The paramount reality is, however, that of daily life. Of special concern to us
is the world of scientific theory. This style is that of the disinterested observer who is only
concerned with problems and solutions valid in their own right for everyone, at any place, and at any
time, wherever and whenever certain conditions, from the assumptions of which he starts, prevail. The
'leap' into theoretical thought involves the resolution of the individual to suspend his subjective point of
view.
(Schutz 1962: 248)
The private and pragmatic concerns of everyday life are bracketed away; that is, put on one side as
irrelevant for the duration of involvement in theoretical work. Sciences, both natural and social, adopt a
theoretic attitude to their subject matter. They are not primarily concerned with practical consequences
except as these are theoretically given. Scientific relevances are determined by the problem at hand and the
procedures of the science concerned rather than those of everyday life. In the scientific attitude, as
opposed to the requirements of the 'natural attitude', anything - save the existence of the external world
itself - can be doubted and, accordingly, subject to investigation and analysis.
It is in this way that Schutz faces up to what he sees as the basic epistemological problem of social
science, namely, how, as sciences of subjective meanings, are they possible? Like all sciences, they seek to
make objective meaning claims, but in the case of the social sciences these have to be within the context
of the human activity which has created them and which cannot be understood apart from these. Schutz's
resolution of the difficulty is to argue that the social sciences must recognise that difference between
social actors' experience of daily life and social actors as constituted as the objects of social science. This
difference is required in order to make subjectivity available under the theoretic attitude. The social scientist is
concerned with 'typical' schemes of actions, using simplified, abstracted and generalised versions of social
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actors, models which are 'lifeless fictions', 'constructs', 'ideal types', 'puppets' or 'homunculi' created by
the social scientist. These models are constructed according to the postulates of logical consistency,
subjective interpretation and adequacy. The first of these proposes that the construct must conform to the
requirements of formal logic, the second that it must incorporate within it a model of the human mind and
its typical contents such that the observed facts can be seen as the outcome of its operation. The third postulate
suggests a principle of objectivity, namely, that the construct must be formulated in such a way as to be
understandable to the actor using his or her own common sense.
It is the third postulate which addresses the problem which has been a major theme of this chapter,
namely, the relationship between actors' concepts and those of the social scientist. Positivism's attempt to
evade the socially grounded nature of knowledge by trying to formulate a neutral observation language
created tensions between actors' conceptions and those of social science. And, of course, for some, Marx
and Durkheim being the classic examples, this very disjuncture between the world as understood by
actors and the world as discovered by the application of social science was seen as the expected outcome of
such a science. Schutz, following Weber, wants to give actors' standards and concepts a much more salient
role as a yardstick for the adequacy of social scientific understanding: a point which we shall develop in
the next chapter in a discussion of Winch. The social scientist's interest and purpose is to display the
meanings that enter into actors' worlds. Various devices, the 'ideal type', 'homunculi', or whatever, are
important to this. 'Objectivity' and 'truth' are established within 'life worlds' and their socially organised
settings and there is no question of one form of knowledge being absolutely superior to any other.
The important connection between Schutz's phenomenology and social research is the influence it has had on
the origins of ethnomethodology as developed by Harold Garfinkel who, as Lazarsfeld tried to with
positivism, sought to turn a philosophical doctrine into a methodology for social science.8 Although Schutz
shared the aspirations of his mentor, Husserl, of constructing a 'transcendental analytic' of knowledge through
philosophical inquiry, ethnomethodology is focused on the empirical analysis of the practical reasonings
through which members produce the common-sense features of social life. It is interested in the properties
of intersubjectivity as these are exhibited by social actors in the course of their activities in the day-to-day
world (see, e.g. Button 1991, Anderson and Sharrock 1986, Garfinkel 1967).
Conclusion
What we have tried to do in this chapter is review some of the social philosophies which have tried to
come to terms with the fact that the members of society themselves live within a world which has sense and
meaning for them. It is recognition of this which presents the problem of the relationship between the sense
of the world for social actors and social scientific concepts: a tension between the relationship between the
social sciences and their subject matter. Research methods, where it might be said that philosophical
conceptions get their hands dirty, as it were, reflect these tensions since their ability to do the job required
of them by empirical researchers depends, in its turn, on the researcher's own commitments to one or the other
of these philosophies.
As we saw in connection with the critique of positivist research methods earlier in this chapter, the
argument is as much about the fundamental issue of the subject matter of social science as it is about the
validity of the techniques and methods of social research itself. Though there is a case to be made that
even by their own standards such methods do not work, there is also the equally important issue of the
nature of the phenomena to be investigated and this will, or ought to, have a considerable bearing upon
the means of investigation and the kind of knowledge that we require. Although interpretative
philosophies of social science, as we have termed them, reject the positivist conception of science, not all of
them by any means abandon the idea that social science needs secure foundations as well as the means of
endowing intellectual rigour to inquiries. It is in this latter regard that we can understand Weber's treatment
of verstehen and the 'ideal type', for example; that is, as ways of making the messy concreteness of the
sociohistorical world amenable to rigorous empirical investigation.
As indicated earlier, a major preoccupation of the philosophies discussed in this chapter is with the grounds
of social scientific knowledge and, especially in these cases, engaging with the fact that not only does it have
to come to terms with a world which is already pre-interpreted but also with the fact that these
interpretations are themselves subject to social and historical circumstances and change. It is this kind of
conception which raises the spectre of the relativism of social scientific knowledge. If knowledge is socially
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determined, then on what grounds can we make the claim that social scientific knowledge is superior to
that of lay social actors? What gives social science, if anything does, its privileged status as knowledge?
For hermeneutics, especially in the hands of Gadamer, knowledge was irretrievably tied to tradition this is the ontological condition which makes understanding and interpretation possible - and,
accordingly, there is nothing for it to be relative to. Transcending our own horizons is an endless process
of interpretation. Habermas proposes a therapeutic stance in which the presumptions of our knowledge
and interpretations are exposed to critical glance and, through this, achieve a greater possibility of human
emancipation. Somewhat earlier and less optimistically, Weber argued that all sciences, the natural and the
social, are partial: a partiality governed by our social and investigative interests. But this does not mean
that we abandon all aspirations to scholarly rigour. It is in the exercise of strict scholarly standards that we
achieve objectivity rather than by slavishly following methodological recipes. Phenomenology, on the
other hand, did not abandon the quest for the foundations of knowledge. Instead it sought them in the
structure of consciousness, that is, the deep-seated ways in which our experience was organised and
which enabled it to be shaped by social and historical conditions. By stripping these latter away it sought to
uncover the basic elements which constituted the very possibility of knowledge.
It would be fair to say that much of the work within the above traditions - with the exception of
ethnomethodology which, in any case, only takes selectively from phenomenology - remains
philosophical rather than empirical in character.9 The research methods typically associated with
qualitative research, such as participant observation and ethnography and, more recently, discourse
analysis tend to have developed independently of these particular philosophical schools. The former
methods where a researcher goes 'into the field' to observe in 'real time' the social activities of a
community or other group of people, arose in anthropology and came to be incorporated into sociology
mainly by way of symbolic interactionism and which only later acquired philosophical credentials from the
work of G.H. Mead (see e.g. Mead 1934; see also Plummer 1991).
One of the major consequences of the attempt to take seriously the fact that the members of society live
in a world of meaning, is to bring language to the fore as a topic of social scientific philosophising. In the
next two chapters we will address some of the issues arising from this attention to language.
Notes
1. This term is owed to Alfred Schutz (1962).
2. There are various ways in which this is done but these differences do not affect the argument being
made here.
3. Cicourel (1964: 198). See also Pawson (1989) for a critique of occupational rating scales.
4. For a selection of articles on the sociology of knowledge, as this viewpoint came to be known, see
Curtis and Petras (1970).
5. This is not dissimilar to the arguments about the nonexperimental character of social research as
recognised by many positivists and, in Pearson's hands, the justification for correlational methods.
However, generally positivists would not have given anything like the same weight that Weber did to
the role of the investigator in selecting and devising structuring schemes.
6. Weber maintained that intellectual inquiry is value-relative but also insisted on ethical neutrality in
scientific activities. Insisting on a distinction between fact and values, he strongly argued that there can
be no question of one value being 'scientifically' shown to be superior to any other. The choice among
values is a matter of decision and faith. Indeed, he complained against university teachers who pressed
their political views from their academic positions as an abuse of their reputation and authority. See
Lassman and Velody (1989) and Hughes et al. (1995: ch. 3).
7. Schutz never fully worked out the typology of domains, though he is clear lhat they shade into one
another.
8. What we mean by this is a way of thinking rather than a set of techniques. Although a main concern of
Lazarsfeld was to develop a collection of techniques for empirical social research, importantly this
involved elaborating a way of thinking about social scientific problems so that they could be
empirically investigated. For its own good reasons, ethnomethodology is uninterested in developing
techniques of the kind that Lazarsfeld played a large part in developing.
9. Another exception here is Weber, of course.
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