 In “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” Schutz addressed the broader issue of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences in general. In that essay, Schutz responded to Ernest Nagel’s positivistic view that the social sciences should make use of natural scientific methods, identifying evidence with sensory observable data and criticizing the Weberian method of “understanding” as appealing to uncontrollable and unverifiable introspection. Schutz agreed with Nagel on several counts, namely that social scientists needed to validate theoretical beliefs, that lack of predictability in the social sciences did not disqualify their scientific character, and that Weber would have been wrong if his method of “subjective interpretation” implied empathy with unobservable, introspective states. The problem was, though, that the natural scientific approach to the social sciences, insofar as it separated verifiable observable behavior from unverifiable inner states (purposes, emotions), seemed to play on the map drawn by Descartes who divorced body from mind and allowed only statements about the former to be scientifically verifiable. Further, the natural scientific approach depended on a basic presupposition since without first examining the object of social science—social reality, in Schutz’s terms—one would be simply presupposing that the methods of the natural sciences were appropriate to its study. Therefore, Schutz attempted first to clarify social reality, described in depth by his own phenomenology of the social world, and to indicate how actors sustain that reality by understanding each other’s in-order-to motives in typical terms (e.g., going to school, making a purchase, marrying). Such mutual understanding takes place without either somehow or other penetrating into the other’s private, inner sanctum, or reducing the other to the status of animal organism responding to stimuli. Given this account of social reality, in which actors give meaning to their world, as opposed to physical reality whose objects (e.g., electrons, quarks) do not interpret their world, Schutz argued that the appropriate social scientific method involved developing constructs of everyday actor’s constructs. Social scientific constructs, ideal types in Weber’s sense, aimed at capturing the subjective meaning of the actor, that is, according to Weber’s intentions, the meaning of the actor as opposed to the social scientist and not some introspective inner process. Schutz conceived statistical and other formulations of social scientific laws as a legitimate kind of intellectual shorthand, always presupposing the meaningful activity of the individual social actor, the “forgotten man” of the social sciences (Schutz 1964, 6–7). To ensure the kind of validation that Nagel sought, mistakenly though, by restricting himself to sensory observable data, Schutz proposed that social scientists displace their everyday practical interests in favor of a guiding interest in accurate scientific description and observe postulates of logical consistency and adequacy to the experiences described.