Abstract
This essay provides evidence to support a promising conceptual and potentially practical set of ideas at once both principled and effective found in the work of Max Weber and Alfred Schutz addressed to the issue of ‘adequacy’ as a goal in social research. Efforts to achieve adequacy beyond the epistemological conditions required by Weber’s demand that evidence meet both causal adequacy and adequacy on the level of meaning were significantly refocused by Schutz’s later concern, responding specifically to Weber, that the social sciences also address themselves to his postulate of adequacy. It states that “Each term used in a scientific system referring to human action must be so constructed that a human act performed within the life-world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical construction would be reasonable and understandable for the actor himself, as well as for his fellow men”. A serious attempt to implement a more expansive notion of adequacy by practically activating this postulate in the ways suggested can be beneficial not only for the social research situation but in everyday life as well.
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‘In the cultural sciences, the knowledge of the universal or general is never valuable in itself.’ Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, 80.
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Wilson, H.T. ‘Adequacy’ as a Goal in Social Research Practice: Classical Formulations and Contemporary Issues. Hum Stud 44, 473–489 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09602-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09602-6