Originally published in 1980, Essential Interactionism: On the Intelligibility of Prejudice suggests a solution to the dilemma of how to derive intelligibility of a social scientific phenomenon. Most customary approaches use commonsense, dictionary definitions, operationalization or formal logic. Each is an attempt to make phenomena amenable to scientific discourse and is a response to the disarray of communication in social science. None of these customary approaches remain faithful, however, both to the social and scientific history of the phenomena and to the promotion of scientific discourse across theoretical and methodological boundaries.
Both the products and processes of science are human actions. The products are human linguistic actions which result from processes of intellectual, social and other actions. Scientific literature is the reports of these actions. The author’s proposal is to derive the intelligibility of a social scientific phenomenon by exploring the literature concerning that phenomenon, to study science as action.