Jürgen Habermas and Thomas Kuhn consider theory to be this structuring of reality conditioned by various factors: the researcher’s interest, sometimes unconscious, in a particular epistemology or conception of knowledge; the socio-cultural context in which the research takes place; and the value system and methodology favoured by the researcher (Éthier 2010). The fundamental orientations of the theory vary from the so-called essentialist theories to the so-called empirical ones. For the former, the aim is to uncover the essence of the various social entities either through philosophical reflection or through intuitive understanding. They are “normative” and attempt to show that the best form of social organisation should guide human behaviour. On the other hand, the empirical orientation sees the theory as a logically coherent set of propositions subject to verification or falsification by confrontation with the facts. The aim of these theories is to explain the data that relate to various social behaviours, interactions, and processes. They involve a description and classification of these data and tend more or less directly to a prediction of the phenomena they explain (Éthier 2010).