Reflexivity

Reflexivity: A Very Brief History

Different philosophical traditions inform how we view the role of reflexivity in thought and practice. Reflexive acts have been understood in terms of their possibility of inducing a heightened state of self-consciousness in the service of self-transformation, while those writing in the pragmatist tradition have examined reflexivity within language acts as the means through which mind, self, and society are linked.

From a social-scientific viewpoint, a reflexive focus helps understand the relationship between social-scientific knowledge and social practice by acknowledging a mutual interdependence between the observer and the observed.

For Max Weber, the practices of social science must replicate the same qualities that the philosopher Immanuel Kant found within the human mind. The social sciences cannot just collect social facts but are reflexive practices in terms of being ideas about ideas, as reflected in Weber's notion of ideal type, which serves as an analytic instrument for the ordering of empirical reality.

Alfred Schütz was critical of Weber for failing to see the episodic nature of human conduct in which we find that meaning is the event, or an act is a meaningful process. From this point of view, Verstehen (“understanding”) is not a method for doing social research but what social scientists should study because the life-world exhibits the basis for our primary experiences of the world itself.

The life-world enables orientation through taking its self-evidence, or prereflexive constitution, for granted. These basic “meaning structures” are analytically rearranged by the social sciences, with the consequence that they do not accurately reflect the basis of social relations. Schütz thus argued that social-scientific constructs must satisfy the postulate of adequacy—that is, be compatible with the constructs deployed in everyday life.

This study of “lay reflexivity” is not a subjective state of affairs unique to each individual but an intersubjective one obtained through publicly available forms of communication, including language. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, took the analysis of these “experience structures” to examine the situated and practical manner in which the processes of recognition and production take place in everyday life through its inherently reflexive character. Other social scientists have been critical of ethnomethodology for not challenging the influence of dominant social structures on everyday life.

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