Subjective meaning is the significance an actor attaches to their own conduct — the reason, purpose or definition of the situation that makes the act intelligible from the inside. For Max Weber, this is what makes behaviour into action and what makes sociology different from the natural sciences. A stone falling has no meaning to recover; a person fasting, voting or striking acts on a sense of what they are doing, and no account that ignores that sense can be an explanation of it.
Where it comes from
Weber built his definition of sociology around the term: the discipline seeks the interpretive understanding of social action, and understanding means grasping the meaning the actor invests in it. Alfred Schutz later argued that Weber had left the notion under-analysed. In The Phenomenology of the Social World, Schutz distinguished the in-order-to motive, which points forward to a projected outcome, from the because motive, which points back to the actor's biography, and located both within the taken-for-granted stock of knowledge of the everyday life-world.
How it works
Because meaning is not observable, it must be reconstructed. Verstehen is the operation by which the analyst does this — moving from observational understanding of what is being done to explanatory understanding of why. In practice this means unstructured interviews, life histories, participant observation and the close reading of documents, methods that let actors describe situations in their own categories rather than in the researcher's.
Points of debate
The standing objection is verification. If meanings are inner states, how can one interpretation be shown to be better than another? Weber's answer was twofold: an interpretation must be meaningfully adequate, making psychological sense, and causally adequate, fitting what typically follows in comparable cases. Critics from the positivist side hold this insufficient and doubt replicability; critics from the structural side add that actors' own accounts may misrecognise the conditions shaping their conduct, so subjective meaning cannot be the final word.
For the UPSC answer
Treat subjective meaning as the object and verstehen as the method — the pairing is what examiners look for. Show that Weber guarded against arbitrariness through the twin tests of meaningful and causal adequacy, and add Schutz for depth on the two types of motive.
References & further reading
- Weber, M. (1922). Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Schutz, A. (1932). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.