Article Why social scientists still need phenomenology Christopher Houston Macquarie University, Australia Abstract Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phe- nomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-` a-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-` a-vis their own natural attitudes. Keywords Bourdieu, constitution, epoche, natural attitude, phenomenology, social science Introduction Phenomenology is first and foremost a philosophy, initiated in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Yet its theoretical approach, subject matter, and methodology have proven continuously productive in nearly every discipline. 1 What insights does phenomenology provide for the social sciences today? At its simplest, a phenomenological social science privileges study of the ‘world’ – situations, events, living beings, places, objects, ideas, etc. – as it is experienced. Corresponding author: Christopher Houston, Macquarie University, Balaclava Road, Macquarie Park, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: chris.houston@mq.edu.au Thesis Eleven 2022, Vol. 168(1) 37–54 ª The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/07255136211064326 journals.sagepub.com/home/the