Abstract
The “phenomenological” sociology of Alfred Schutz has found many followers as the most promising way of understanding the social reality by reducing it to the sense-making activities of men and women. However, a careful examination of his argument reveals that it contains some difficulties of great concern : is his conception of the “scientific model of rational human actions” as the ideal-typical construct of social world compatible with the core doctrine of phenomenology ? How does this model come to interrelate with the problem of human freedom ? Doesn't his “Postulate of adequacy” suffer from a self-contradiction ? It seems to me that these difficulties come from his basic assumption that the methodological foundation of social sciences lies in the “constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude”. In this paper, some reflections are made on the three postulates which, Schutz claims, validate the social scientific constructions in order to shed light on these difficulties inherent in his “phenomenological” sociology.
