The Meaning of Culture and the Culture of Empiricism in American Sociology

This paper is a commentary on Christian Smith’s “The Conceptual Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Cultural Sociology.” This paper accepts Smith’s finding of conceptual incoherence at the disciplinary level and argues that it is a symptom of empiricism in American sociology. The paper suggests we employ conceptual analysis as practiced by analytical philosophy and proceeds to show how the use of that methodology can resolve the problem regarding the meaning of culture. In the end, the paper defends a conception of culture along the lines of Archer’s (1996) intelligibilia, interpreted as action and its products bearing social reasoning. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.