#12628 - Schutz The Phenomenology Of The Social World - Sociological Theory

Alfred Schutz - The Phenomenology of the Social World

Chapter One - The Statement of Our Problem: Max Weber’s Basic Methodological Concepts

1. Preliminary Survey of the Problem

• Debate between social scientists who treat social phenomena as if they were natural phenomena (causally determined) and those who see social phenomena as belonging to a world of ‘objective mind’, intelligible but not under scientific laws (interpretive sociology)

  • in the latter, social scientists’ attitudes are determined by their own presuppositions

    • but simply interpreting the social world according to our presuppositions (subjective biases) runs contrary to good research, which should be unbiased

• Weber thought that the social sciences should abstain from value judgements

  • importantly, he reduced all social relationships/structures/cultural objectifications/realms of objective mind to elementary forms of individual behaviour (as did Simmel)

    • sociology is to study social behaviour by interpreting the subjective meaning of the intentions of individuals

      • this is to be done through constructing ‘ideal types’

  • Weber had good theory, but didn’t explore its presuppositions

    • he makes no distinction between:

      • action and act

      • meaning of the producer and meaning of the produced

      • meaning of my own action and meaning of someone else’s

      • self understanding and other-understanding

    • doesn’t show how meaning is constituted

  • in order to understand the way the other self is grasped as an ideal type, we need to recognise the way acts are interpreted as a part of the whole social world

    • Weber took for granted the meaningful phenomena of the social world as a matter of intersubjective agreement, without examining what constitutes meaning

• Hence we can see the complicated relation between the social sciences and their subject matter - the structure of the social world is meaningful for its actors and also for its scientific interpreters

  • in experiencing others as others we understand their behaviour, and assume they understand ours

    • it is through these acts of interpretive meaning that the structure of the social world is constructed

  • the social scientist interprets the world of already constituted meanings - the meaningful acts of people in their everyday experience

    • there is a stratification of meaning-interpretation, and these are two types: the meaning-understanding of everyday life, and the sophisticated meaning understanding of the ideal types in interpretive sociology

  • macro sociology can always be reduced into processes of interpretation/meaning establishment in individuals

• So, the project is: we need to understand meaning in order to analyse the meaning-structure of the social world

2. Max Weber’s Concept of Meaningful Action

• Weber: the task of interpretive sociology is to understand/interpret social action

  • social action is action in which its subjective meaning takes into account the behaviour of others, and interprets this behaviour

    • action is human behaviour in for which the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning

• Weber distinguishes between affectual behaviour and action, where affectual behaviour consists in physical response to stimulus. Here no meaning is attached

  • there is also habit, traditional behaviour, where meaning was once attached, but the act is now carried out by automatic reaction

  • Weber sees meaningful behaviour as rational behaviour; behaviour oriented towards particular ends

    • this presupposes that the meaning of an action is identical with its motive - noob

  • in fact the behaviour/action distinction breaks down, because it is possible for us to interpret any behaviour, if we concentrate on it, as meaningful in some respect

    • hence the problem moves to the difference between the meaning of behaviour and the meaning of action

• Weber also presupposes the meaningful existence of the other self, without exploring how it is meaningfully given to us

3. The Pregivenness of the Alter Ego and the Postulate of the Understanding of Subjective Meaning

• An investigation of the subjectively intended meaning of others presupposes a theory of the knowability of the other self

  • in interpreting, we assume that a person does mean something and that we can find out what it is

  • clearly, the subjective meaning of someone’s behaviour isn’t the same as the meaning which his external behaviour has for me as an observer

    • physical objectifications of meaning are merely indications of the intended meaning of the actor

    • to say that the activities of the other are a field of expression does not imply that we are only interested in consciously intended acts

• Interpreting subjective meaning is more than simply viewing external behaviour and attributing an attitude - joy, sorrow, pain etc - to them

  • if we must denote why the person exhibits the attitude he does, then subjective meaning is not directly revealed

    • (is subjective meaning directly revealed if we witness someone crying and attribute an emotion to them? what about mistakes?)

• Weber distinguishes between direct observational understanding and understanding in terms of motive (explanatory understanding)

  • direct observational understanding includes the rational understanding of ideas (e.g. 2x2=4, or understanding rage in terms of facial expression)

  • explanatory understanding uncovers why the individual expresses himself thus; the meaning an actor attaches to a particular expression; what makes him do it in a particular circumstance

    • the subjective meaning is this intended meaning; the place of the action in an intelligible sequence of motivation

      • (though presumably the subjective/intended meaning is not just any intelligible sequence of motivation, but that of the actor)

4. Critique of Max Weber’s Concepts of “Observational” and “Motivational” Understanding

• Weber is using ‘intended meaning’ in two (perhaps contradictory) senses:

  • the subjective meaning of the actor, which can be understood observationally

  • the broader framework of meaning in which an action interpreted according to its subjective meaning belongs

• How can we arrive at understanding of subjective meaning through direct observation?

  • direct observation can tell us whether someone is e.g. angry, but not what that anger means to him subjectively

  • Husserl distinguishes between the content and the epistemic attitude of a judgement

    • the content (e.g. of 2 x 2 = 4) stays the same throughout

    • but the epistemic attitude determines what the utterer means - whether he believes it, suspects it to be true, assumes it to be true for some purpose, etc

  • there is an analogous problem to this in the observational understanding of an act

    • what if the person looks like he is wood chopping, but only appears to be doing so? what if rather than opening the door, he’s holding it in place to repair it?

    • outward behaviour doesn’t settle the intended subjective meaning of the act

      • conversely, outward behaviour can settle (or provide a basis for) an objective context of meaning

• How can we come to a motivational understanding of an action?

  • Weber: this means understanding the meaning context within which the action belongs, once we understand the action’s subjective meaning

    • but he also talks of this as a meaning context which would be appropriate from our point of view, which is confusing/contradictory

    • in any case, the point here is that motivational understanding can’t be reached through observation alone

      • we need knowledge of the actor’s past and future

        • knowledge of their past to find an intelligible meaning context

        • knowledge of their future to see if the meaning their actions have for them fit that meaning context

  • temporally, motive can be understood in two ways:

    • as oriented towards future ends

    • as the result of past experiences, which lead me to behave as I do

    • both of these lie outside the time space of the act

• Weber doesn’t distinguish between observational and motivational language

  • is motive the same as intended subjective meaning?

    • an actor can give an account of motive, but will this be exhaustive?

    • surely the meaning of an action for the actor is self-evident anyway

      • if this is the case, and an actor can search for the motive, then motive and meaning must be distinct

• So if motivational understanding is only available to those who know the subjective meaning (namely, the actors in question), what context of meaning can an observer arrive at?

  • he can place it in a framework intelligible to himself

  • if our starting point is what we can know - objective meaning - then the observational/motivational distinction is arbitrary anyway, because both start from the same objective meaning-context

    • for instance, we could observe a series of events that jointly give us a sequence, or motive

    • but there is an important distinction here - when we interpret physical behaviour as the action of another consciousness, we imply the existence of a motive

      • this is not necessarily so from simply observation

      • also, motivation understanding is not limited to directly experienced social reality, but can interpret the actions of many distant folk

        • this is because its starting point isn’t ongoing action, but the accomplished act

5. Subjective and Objective Meaning

• Subjective meaning is the meaning given to the act by the actor

  • an objective meaning is any meaning given to the act by those other than the actor, who...