Over het interpreteren van handelingen-Kernpunten uit het debat tussen Schutz en Parsons

Samenvatting

In 1940 Talcott Parsons & Alfred Schutz corresponded on the theory of action & the subjective viewpoint in sociology. Their debate remained inconclusive & was published in The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons (Grathoff, R. [Ed], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); it is now possible for others to disentangle the debate using new philosophical & sociological insights. L. Laudan's conception of science as a problem-solving activity (Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) is able to discriminate between the empirical & the conceptual achievements of a theory &, consequently, to evaluate differentially various aspects of Schutz's & Parsons's treatments of the theory of action. It can be shown that Parsons's criticism of Schutz's so-called phenomenological idea of facts is not correct, & that Schutz's treatment of sociological facts is as Kantian as Parsons's. Schutz's thesis on the actor's exclusive knowledge of his projected actions might be emended using Ludwig Wittgenstein's analysis of doubt & certainty (On Certainty, Oxford University Press, 1974). It can be concluded that the thesis expresses certainty with respect to actor's identification rather than knowledge of a state of affairs. Hence, Parsons's refutation of Schutz's thesis is not to the point. Modified HA.