ABSTRACT
The general significance for sociological analysis of objective hermeneutics issues from the fact that, in the social sciences, interpretive methods constitute the fundamental procedures of measurement and of the generation of research data relevant to theory. The tangible objects of the procedure of objective hermeneutics are records of real symbolic social actions or interactions, either written, oral, visual, or involving a combination of different media. The actual form of the records is merely a technical matter for the interpretive procedures of objective hermeneutics. The reconstructive interpretation of interaction texts permits the discovery of rules which constitute interaction texts as objective structures of significance, which reflect the latent structures of meaning of interaction itself. Cognitive representations of the world can be encountered only on a second level of reality which, as it were, lies beneath the level of latent structures of meaning.
