Talcott Parsons - The Structure of Social Action (1949)

14 Sourced Quotes

View all Talcott Parsons Quotes
The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.

Talcott Parsons
Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems.

Talcott Parsons
It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

Talcott Parsons
A scientifically unimportant discovery is one which, however true and however interesting for other reasons, has no consequences for a system of theory with which scientists in that field are concerned.

Talcott Parsons
A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed. In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set.

Talcott Parsons
Sociology should...be thought of as a science of action—of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

Talcott Parsons
The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other.

Talcott Parsons
If there are four equations and only three variables, and no one of the equations is derivable from the others by algebraic manipulation then there is another variable missing.

Talcott Parsons
It is a fact that social existence depends to a large extent on a moral consensus of its members and that the penalty of its too radical breakdown is social extinction. This fact is one which the type of liberal whose theoretical background is essentially utilitarian is all too apt to ignore.

Talcott Parsons
Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems.

Talcott Parsons
The structure of a theoretical system tells us what alternatives are open in the possible answers to a given question. If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.

Talcott Parsons
The importance of certain problems concerning the facts will be inherent in the structure of the system.

Talcott Parsons
Theory not only formulates what we know but also tells us what we want to know, that is, the questions to which an answer is needed.

Talcott Parsons
A fact is not itself a phenomenon at all, but a proposition about one or more phenomena.

Talcott Parsons