Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference

Cheris Shun-ching Chan—Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University cheris@northwestern.edu I’m interested in discussing the issue of motives and meanings. Schutz (1967[1932]) distinguishes meanings and motives and suggests that both have their subjective and objective relevancy. Accordingly, meanings concern how social actors determine what aspects of the social world are important to them; whereas motives involve the reasons social actors do what they do. Subjective meanings refer to the mental construction of reality while objective meanings exist as the shared possession of the collectivity of social actors. Schutz suggests that only the objective meanings are subject to sociological studies. Likewise, motives include “in-order-to motives” and “because motives.” The former type of motives is part of the deep consciousness that is inaccessible to scientific investigation. Only the “because motives” that involve retrospective glances from the social actors that are open to sociological enquiries. My question is: since motives and meanings are so closely intertwined, how can we distinguish them in our analysis? How can we separate the “subjective” and “objective” motives and meanings and measure the “objective” ones?