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The article relates the details of a meeting between sociologists Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga in 1978. The discussion between Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga took place at the Iwanami Shoten publishers office in Tokyo, Japan on the afternoon of December 12, 1978. Parsons arrived in Tokyo at mid-day, after having taken the train that had departed from Osaka around 9:00 a.m. that morning. In a letter written to Parsons, a few weeks before the Parsons' visit to Tokyo, Professor Tominaga described the Iwanami Shoten session as a colloquy with himself concerning the retrospection of Parsons on the formation of his own sociological thought. What Tominaga had in mind was something along the lines that Parsons had written for Daedalus. Iwanami Shoten had already shown some interest in Parson's work, having published in 1958 a Japanese translation of Economy and society, with an introduction by Tominaga. Parsons was paid an honorarium of 50,000 yen for the discussion, the same amount that he was given for his lecture later in the day. A few days prior to the discussion, Tominaga had supplied Parson with the following list of provisional questions: voluntarism vs. utilitarianism, motivation vs. value orientation, nature of system theory, relation between the Theory of Action and the Structural-functional theory, phenomenological approach.

The article focuses on the sociology of knowledge. Despite occasional outbursts, the sociology of knowledge has failed to emerge as a clearly defined area of research. Many social scientists have endeavored to define the sociology of knowledge as a disciplinary matrix, whose main identifying feature would be to empirically explain the relationship between ideas and social structure. Sociologist Karl Mannheim and his sociology of knowledge have been prominent targets for the presentist project in the social sciences, most notably through the efforts of another sociologist Robert Merton. The practice of sociology of knowledge is at odds with the overall concerns of a scientific community to enforce consensus of belief and method among its members. Despite the failure of Merton's groundwork to give form and substance to the sociology of knowledge, an inchoate field addressing similar issues has emerged.