ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the former offshoot of Weber's work, Parsons's general theory of action, and with a related attempt at objective interpretations of meaningful phenomena: structuralism. Sociology, as developed within the framework of behaviourism and its empiricistic metascience, cannot concern itself legitimately with social phenomena that are irreducible to the behaviour of individual actors. One such phenomenon is, of course, society, but even 'the social' as a category is here in danger of losing its independent character leaving sociology without a distinctive subject matter. Historical phenomena are characterized by the fact that they embody cultural values which, through being meaningful, attract the historian's interest: they are constituted by a 'value-orientation'. The linguistic analogy, like any other, can be fruitfully employed, as long as one remains conscious of its limitations and is aware of the danger of moving from the heuristic to the ontological level.
