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The purpose of this article is to show that scientific theory is a social system consisting of communication. Applying this to sociological theory, we realize that it is not just a theory of the social, but it is itself the social. Talcott Parsons, referring to Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, regarded scientific theory as a transcendent Idea in his The Structure of Social Action. However, as Niklas Luhmann’s theory of self-referential social systems points out, science is a real communication system that exists in the actual world through mediums such as publications. In fact, Parsons himself had acknowledged that his abovementioned work was an empirical monograph based on the published works of the great forerunners.<br />
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