My dissertation project is an account of the genealogy of a particular style of reasoning, the biological vernacular. I was using a combination of discourse analysis, constellation research and latent meaning analysis to analyse a specific truth regime or assembly of knowledge production. I showed that the physiological sciences in the 18th and 19th century entered several conceptual crises. New developments and discoveries had rendered the existing theoretical languages and social epistemologies inefficient to cope with experimental progress. In the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, biology found a theoretical language that could help overcome these boundaries. In the latter half of the 19th century, psychology and physiology began to drift apart and it was in this critical phase that the language of the “social” emerged between Ralph W. Emerson, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, William James, Alexander Meiklejohn and others. They spoke a scientific dialect or epistemological vernacular that emerged from Kantianism in the form of the teleomechanist program and the romantic movement in biology, experimental psychology, and, eventually, industrial physiology. In Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th century, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Emile Durkheim worked within an equivalent vernacular. Their theory-building was a result of the semantic perquisites the teleomechanist program and its style of reasoning. In the 1930s, the social sciences entered into another form of crisis: There were as many sociologies and as many theoretical languages as there were individual sociologists. Talcott Parsons became the most prominent of a group of scholars who made the effort of working on a common language to solve this problem. My conclusion shows that as an enunciation system, Talcott Parsons’ theoretical language has its origin in the biological vernacular. Parsons, in this account, was not a creative genius behind a grand theory. Instead, he was enabled by the discourse towards enunciating ideas that were supposed to be translatable. They were formed in the same vernacular. At the same time, Parsons’ discourse was constrained by the politics of networks and institutions, which allowed only for a careful introduction of his ideas.

Ziel dieser Studie ist es zu belegen, dass Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts aus dem Diskurs von Philosophie und Physiologie eine Theoriesprache geboren worden ist, die unter dem Oberbegriff Biologie eine Reihe von Semantiken hervorgebracht hat die späteren Disziplinen, wie der Experimentalpsychologie oder der Soziologie als Leitmetaphern dienten. Der heutige Zugang zu diesem wissenschaftlichem Dialekt ist mitunter durch neue Semantiken und Sprachformen der Wissenschaft schwierig geworden. Ein besseres Verständnis der Werke etwa Max Webers, Emile Durkheims oder Talcott Parsons, wird allerdings durch Aufklärung der inhärenten Semantiken durch genealogische Analyse ermöglicht. Am Beispiel der Genealogie der Theoriesprache von Parsons unter der Leitfigur des Dualismus Regulativ/Konstitutiv und der Brückenfunktion der Kommunikation soll dies eindrucksvoll demonstriert werden. Dabei wird davon ausgegangen, dass Diskurse und Sprachen die produktiven Bedingungen, Konstellationen in Institutionen und Netzwerken die restriktiven Bedingungen der Theorieentwicklung darstellen. Die produktiven Bedingungen sollen durch Hervorhebung konstanter Semantiken im Diskurs und in Archivmaterialien aus dem Parsons Nachlass aufgezeigt werden.