 In order to elucidate the meaning of rational action, Schutz hypothesized what a rational actor would have to know, even though such completely rational actions might never be realized in everyday life. Such an actor would have to know: an end’s relationship with other ends, the consequences and by-products of realizing an end, the means suitable for the end, the interaction of such means with other ends and means, and the accessibility of those means. In addition, the rational actor would need to understand: her interactors’ understanding of all the previous factors, the interpretation of her act by others, the reactions of other people and their motivation, and the useful categories she had already discovered in the social world. Although social scientists might use such models of completely rational action to assess the rationality of everyday actors, Schutz cautioned social scientists that if their task were to describe life-world actors, they also needed to be wary of replacing the viewpoint of everyday actors with a fictional, non-existing world constructed by scientific observers. In fact, a central point of discussion in the published correspondence between Schutz and Talcott Parsons concerned the subjective viewpoint of the actor, whose sub-acts, for example, could not be adequately understood without comprehending the actor’s overarching project, whose temporal span is at first accessible only to that actor. Finally, it should be noted that Schutz himself produced two pieces of applied research in which he constructed ideal types of the Stranger and the Homecomer, taking account of what their experiences meant to them instead of what social scientists or others might think they meant.