Abstract
Lester Embree has observed in an essay that “methodology is where human scientists and philosophers can meet” (1980: 367). I agree with this observation, but it needs to be understood adequately. He obviously recognizes this necessity, since he refers primarily to Alfred Schutz’s methodology, making a passing reference to a methodology in a narrow sense which forgets the original intent and deals merely with statistics and/or computer technique (cf., ibid.: 371). He implies that if the term “methodology” is understood in the narrow sense, human scientists and philosophers cannot or need not meet in a methodology and that Schutz developed a methodology in a broad and adequate sense.
I would like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to Professor Frances C. Waksler for her helpful, penetrating and valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
This empirical and theoretical research started under grants from Waseda University and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2006. The syllabi from 1965 to 2006 for sociology courses have been collected from twenty-five major universities in Japan and are now going to be analyzed from the viewpoint of the sociology of knowledge.
- 2.
This selection is offered not arbitrarily but in reference to the topics which Schutz suggested as the subjects for students’ term papers (cf., 1951b).
- 3.
As for Schutz’s theory of relevance, see Schutz (1970) and also Embree (1977), Srubar (2007: 151–171), Nasu (2008, forthcoming).
- 4.
This leads to the distinction between “in-order-to” motive and “because” motive introduced by Schutz.
- 5.
I have elsewhere discussed Schutz’s criticism and a way to attempt to refine Weber’s definition of social relation: see Nasu (1998), especially pp. 136ff.
- 6.
Schutz formulated “the general thesis of the alter ego” and pointed out correctly that “I know more of the Other and he knows more of me than either of us knows of his own stream of consciousness” (1943: 175). This is, however, another story, worthy of future consideration.
- 7.
- 8.
Schutz conceives “constitution” as “clarification of the sense-structure of conscious life, inquiry into sediments in respect of their history, tracing back all cogitata to intentional operations of the on-going conscious life,” and said that it is just these discoveries of phenomenology which are of lasting value for the foundation of the social sciences (cf., 1957: 83).
- 9.
Embree said that “Schutz believed methodological clarification essential to the progress of science” (1980: 373; italic added). I believe firmly that Schutz’s attempts to make precise basic sociological concepts and to make adequate social research and social scientific constructs will contribute to the progress of science. But just one point should be added here. It is what “the progress of science” means. According to Schutz’s methodological framework, the “progress of science” has no unilateral and evolutionary implications as does Parsons’ idea, in which four different levels of systematization of conceptual schemes are distinguished in order of their ‘primitiveness’ relative to the final goals of systematic endeavor, that is: (1) ad hoc classificatory systems, (2) categorial systems, (3) theoretical systems, (4) empirical-theoretical systems (cf., Parsons-Shils, 1951: 50–51). What Schutz’s methodology can contribute to is, I argue, rather the progress of science in Weber’s sense. He said that “the thought apparatus which the past has developed … through arrangement of the immediately given reality into concepts which correspond the state of its knowledge and the focus of its interest, is in constant tension with the new knowledge which we can and desire to wrest from reality. The progress of cultural science occurs in this conflict. … Thus, the history of the sciences of social life is and remains a continuous changing process passing from the attempt to order facts in thought through the construction of concepts – the dissolution of the thought constructs so constructed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon – and reconstruction anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed. … This process shows that in the sciences of human culture concept-construction depends on the setting of the problem, and the latter varies with the content of culture itself” (Weber, 1904: 207). Obvious similarities can easily be found between Weber and Schutz in respect to the view of the social sciences and their progress.
- 10.
I have elsewhere discussed the relation between Schutz’s idea on the “well-informed citizen” and the methodology of the social sciences: see Nasu (2005).
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Hisashi, N. (2010). Methodology of the Social Sciences Is Where the Social Scientists, Philosophers and the Persons on the Street Should Meet. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_25
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