The Foundation of an Interpretative Sociology: A Critical Review of the Attempts of George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz

Thomas Wilson (2005, p. 20) defines this as the problem of subjectivity in his discussion of the Schutz-Parsons debate. This is the more useful description of the problem from a general sociological point of view. However, from Schutz’s point of view such a terminology is misleading, because subjectivity was accepted by Schutz from the beginning. The explanation of intersubjectivity was his problem.

Beyond my attempt to treat both theories as fairly as possible, I indeed see no reasonable argument why the intersubjectivity problem should be more important than the individuality problem or vice versa.

In my opinion, an immanent critique based on logic is the only universal applicable method of critique. It is the weakest form of critique and does not lead in every case to a final judgment (if the compared theories have no logical contradictions, no theory is better than the other). This method also does not reveal the truth, since the assumptions are not questioned. (Even if a theory has no logical contradictions, the theory could be wrong if the assumptions are wrong.) It is also a form of critique which was at least accepted by two of three founding fathers of interpretative sociology. Max Weber called it the principle of value neutrality and Schutz (1943, p. 147; cf. Embree 2004, p. 285; Nasu 2005, p. 125ff.) demanded of theory constructions that they remain “in full compatibility with the principles of formal logic.” John Baldwin (2005, p. 490, 496) discusses Mead’s negative attitudes towards “inductive logic” and his positive evaluation of “refutations,” which seems to be at least not in contradiction with an application of an immanent critique, because an immanent critique implies a refutation based on deductive logic.

Hans Joas (1980, p. 11; cf. Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991, p. 6) criticized this approach of interpreting Mead’s work from a behavioristic perspective. His main argument is that such interpretations would bar one’s way to a deeper understanding of Mead’s standpoint, because Mead tried to develop a better behavioristic theory in clear distinction to John Broadus Watson’s behaviorism. But although I perceive this problem too, it is necessary for an understanding of Mead’s explanation of individuality to start from the behavioristic theory as it was stated by Mead (1934) himself: “We shall approach this latter field [social psychology] from a behavioristic point of view” (p. 2). If the behavioristic aspect of Mead’s theory were to be neglected, then his arguments would lose their logical consistency and could no longer provide a foundation for an interpretative sociology. Mead’s advanced behaviorism—in “opposition to the mechanical stimulus-response model” (Cook 1993, p. 76)—is the backbone of his theory.

Most of the symbolic interactionists interpreted Mead’s work as anti-deterministic and not objectivistic (Strauss 1978, p. 16; Joas 1980, p. 83; Wood and Wardell 1983, p. 90; Reynolds 1987, p. 69; Rochberg-Halton 1987, p. 465; Joas 1988, p. 424; Rosenthal and Burgeois 1991, p. 27; but see also: Warshay and Warshay 1986, p. 180; cf. Lewis and Smith 1980, p. 25; Johnson and Shifflett 1981, p. 152; Turner 2005, p. 476). Arnold Rose (1962, p. 13f.) gave several reasons why the pre-given cultural meanings do not determine the actors’ behavior completely.

Mead cannot explain the concrete selection process if different alternatives are associated to an attitude (cf. Kolb 1944, p. 291f.). Because for Mead “instrumental activity…is incorporated within the very structure of meanings in general” (Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991, p. 19), it is no longer possible to explain the selection of one meaningful path with a criterion of self-interest. Besides the fact that Mead’s theory lacks a logically consistent explanation of self-interested behavior, Mead’s concept of “taking the role of the other” excludes any reasonable explanation of violent behavior. If a culprit were to take the position of his or her victim, and therefore would feel all the pain he or she causes to his or her victim, then it is not very convincing to believe that he or she still would do what he or she wanted to do.

In the context of the “Methodenstreit,” Husserl’s phenomenology can be interpreted as an even more radical version of methodological individualism (Endreß and Renn 2004, p. 51). For Schutz not only is social reality the result of a large number of actions of individuals, but also the meaning—as the cause of these actions—is only given to the individual subjects (Coenen 1985, p. 33).

I do not agree with Vaitkus’ (1991, p. 150f.) conclusion that Schutz saw the explanation of intersubjectivity as “essentially a problem of the social group.” This is, in my opinion, not the case for the early works of Schutz, because he abstracted from the shared life-world of the actors in his assumptions. And it is only true in part for his late works. I am not convinced that for Schutz “there is no aspect of the other given to me, materially or otherwise, which is not interpreted upon the basis of a prior knowledge of the social world.” I think that Schutz treated this problem from the perspective of a new member of the group (Schutz 1932, p. 184; 1964a, p. 70; 1944, p. 501; cf. Coenen 1985, p. 82f.). The new member has no prior knowledge of the social world in contrast to the old members, who are acting in typical patterns. It is an egological problem to explain how this new member as an immanent ego can learn the pre-given intersubjective meaning structure of the old members (Coenen 1985, p. 85). Schutz’s approach is in this sense still a mundane egological analysis (Coenen 1985, p. 33; cf. Schwinn 1993, p. 227), although it is a group problem to explain how the group can reconstruct its shared life-world over time.

Schutz never abandoned a phenomenological research strategy “grounded in Husserl’s transcendental analyses” (Vaitkus 2005, p. 117; cf. p. 97ff, 113f.; Srubar 2005, p. 242; Barber 2006b, p. 155). Table 2 shows that Schutz did not reverse his research approach: he only limited the range of the phenomenological reduction (cf. Barber 2006a, p. 24). And in this sense, he was still trying to solve Husserl’s intersubjectivity problem. He did not choose the pragmatic individuality problem. Schutz wrote, for example, in a letter to Aron Gurwitsch the following statement: “You know very well that my goal in all my works and also in this one is a phenomenological analysis of the natural Weltanschauung.” (Schutz and Gurwitsch 1989, p. 177) However, see also Joachim Renn’s (2006, p. 6ff.) contradictory interpretation, in which the mundane character of Schutz’s analysis is presented as “closely related to philosophical pragmatism” (p. 13).

For an opposing view see: Meist 1980, p. 586.

Coenen (1985, p. 43) also questions the possibility of constructing a general scheme of interpretation in Schutz’s early approach, but he has a different reason. For him Schutz failed because a so-constructed scheme would never guarantee a correct interpretation, since the ego’s interpretations are necessarily independent of the alter ego’s orientations. However, I think that Coenen misses the point: a theory which explains how actors can understand each other perfectly is neither needed nor realistic, because in fact misunderstandings do occur in reality. The question is therefore whether it is possible to deduce a general scheme of interpretation which most of the time provides adequate interpretations and leads sometimes to misinterpretations. And in my opinion Schutz failed to do this in his early approach.

Hwa Yol Jung (1999, p. 95) points out that the phenomenological inclusion of the concept of “project” (Entwurf) allows “rational” explanations of human behavior. However, the difference between an interpretation of rational motives in the tradition of Neo-classical Economics and Schutz is that Schutz emphasizes the explanation of the actor’s because-motives (or preferences in economic terms). In the Neo-classical tradition preferences are deduced from the behavior under the assumption that the actor was rational. But since Schutz did not assume that actors are always rational, their because-motives became problematic in his research approach (Eberling 1999, p. 124; cf. List 2004, p. 32ff.; Barber 2004, p. 57f.; 2005, p. 187ff.; Wilson 2005, p. 20).

See Knoblauch et al. (2003, p. 26f.) for an interpretation of Schutz’s sociology of language which goes in this direction.

In contrast to Mead, Schutz’s theory can explain the choice of one out of a set of meaningful paths and the deviations from the meaningful path in interactions. He has a second criterion of choice (the economic concept of utility in the sense of a subjective motive connection), which is easy understandable by other actors. (It is for example very easy to understand that an actor prefers $10 over $1.)

And indeed several symbolic interactionists are using Schutz’s concept of typifications (Hewitt 1976, p. 119f.; Denzin 1989, p. 77f.; Goffman 1974, p. 11; cf. 1983, p. 5; Reynolds 1987, p. 95). However, this inclusion of phenomenological concepts by some symbolic interactionists does not imply that they also accepted a phenomenological approach. For example, Gregory Smith (2006) concludes in his analysis of the phenomenological influence on Erving Goffman that “in approximate terms Goffman was a Meadian social behaviorist” who assumed an “objective social world of human conduct” in contrast to a phenomenological investigation of the intersubjectivity problem (p. 404).

If an objective meaning structure exists, then observed actors and researchers apply the same meaning to a behavior. Therefore the Cartesian Dilemma does not exist in those approaches.