Phenomenology: A Philosophical Foundation for Instrumental Rationality
During the late 1960s and 1970s, the term ‘phenomenology' or ‘phenomenological' was in common use among sociologists (Lassman 1974; Wolff 1978). A ‘phenomenological approach' or a ‘phenomenological method' was juxtaposed to what was taken to be a dominant ‘positivist' method in social science.
These phrases are in quotation marks because they were often used loosely - the latter to refer to any study that used statistics, the former to any that considered the actor's point of view. The terms are now less popular, but they are still sometimes used in this way in sociology and social psychology.The ways in which philosophical approaches influence social research are never quite clear-cut. Weber was not a phenomenologist, yet he was concerned with the actor's point of view and some classic Weberian studies employ statistics (see, for example, Rex and Moore 1967). In psychologically oriented disciplines, phenomenology was perhaps more appropriately opposed to behaviourism, which denied that introversion could possibly be a source of knowledge; it might now be appropriately opposed to cognitive psychology since it is concerned with much more than the development of conceptual thought. Used in its proper sense it refers to a complex philosophical position which can be placed in the same wider Kantian framework in which we placed Weber - concerned with the way in which we impose meaning on the world.
The prime mover of phenomenological philosophy was Edmund Husserl (see, for example, Husserl 1930-39, 1965). His way of linking consciousness to the external world was to try to describe the way in which consciousness worked on and transformed our sense perceptions into recognizable objects. ‘Sense perceptions’ for the phenomenologist go beyond what we can see and measure, which is often all that matters for the strict positivist and empiricist.
We can gain knowledge not only from sense perceptions other than sight but also from works of the imagination and the use of language (see, for example, Merleau-Ponty 1974).A phenomenological investigation involves an exercise known as a ‘reduction’ or a ‘phenomenological reduction, an attempt to set aside what we already know about something and describe how we come to know it; it is a matter of tracing the processes by means of which we give meaning to the world. It involves a suspension of our everyday, common-sense beliefs and an attempt to describe how we come by those beliefs. The translation of this philosophy of consciousness into a philosophy of social science comes primarily through the work of Alfred Schutz (1962-66, 1972), who studied under Husserl and who fled to Europe on the rise of Hitler, smuggling out some of Husserl’s work. He spent the next decades dividing his energies between social philosophy and banking.
His relevance here is that he offers a phenomenological foundation of Weber’s methodology which supplies us with a good example of the phenomenological reduction and adds to our awareness of the processes involved in understanding. If I set aside my common-sense knowledge of the world, if I try to stop seeing these things in front of me as a computer screen, a printer, a desk, a window, trees, grass and so on. I am left simply with a jumble of sense perceptions, colours, sounds and sensations. Schutz suggests that out of this stream of sensations we identify elements which are similar, perhaps because they share a colour, shape, certain texture or quality of movement. We identify what Schutz would call typical or recurrent elements from the stream of experience - a process of typification. If I look directly ahead I see a lot of green, some blue, some white, some brown and so on. The green remains comparatively constant, but I begin to distinguish different shades at different heights in different places, whereas the blue and white stuff seems to be moving.
These are the first stages of typification. As the process continues, my consciousness makes finer distinctions but also carries out syntheses which go beyond what is perceived. I can only see one surface of my desk when I look down, yet I grasp it as a three-dimensional solid object.Eventually we end up with a description of what phenomenologists call the ‘natural attitude, the everyday world of grass and trees and sky and clouds, desks, computers and so on. We build up typifications of typifications - I come to distinguish between different
types of grass, clouds that threaten rain and those that do not and so on. All this is achieved through acts of differentiation and synthesis carried out by my consciousness.
The Phenomenology of the Social World concerned itself with the way we build up typifications of other people, classifying them into types with particular qualities from whom typical courses of action can be expected. This gives us our common-sense, taken-for-granted knowledge about the social world which guides us in our actions from day to day. We know things about human beings in general, what typically distinguishes them from cows and monkeys and trees; and we know things about particular types of human beings - men, women, black people and white - which enable us to distinguish them from each other. As we move beyond this type of group we build up typifications of family and friends and the closer the relationship the more specific our expectations. But however close our relationship, it is still based on a bedrock of typification.
For the phenomenologist, then, the social world is built up from a complex multitude of typifications which we organize into ‘meaning contexts, a taken-for-granted stock of knowledge which we share with others. We choose which typifications we employ according to the ends, the projects we pursue at the time. The social scientist has his or her own specific project and here we move into Weber's methodology.
The specific project of the social scientist is to build rational, ideal types of social action. Schutz calls these ideal types ‘second-order typifications’. They are constructed out of the typifications of the actors we are studying, the everyday stocks of knowledge that they employ. He talks about constructing ‘rational puppets', in a sort of rational puppet theatre. We can put our puppets in different situations, and if we know their goals we can predict their actions, were they to act rationally in pursuit of their goals.In sociology Schutz's work was one of the starting points for Harold Garfinkel's development of ethnomethodology, the study of the taken-for-granted rules which provide us with a sense of social relationships and social structures (Garfinkel 1967). Similar ideas are taken up by Anthony Giddens in his development of structuration theory (Giddens 1976, 1984). However, it does not tell us anything new about that reality. The meanings we subject to the phenomenological reduction, which we ‘bracket' at the beginning of the investigation, are the same meanings we end up with after the investigation - we just have a better understanding of their construction. This emphasizes what is already implicit in Weber's work: that social sciences construct their theories and explanations out of our everyday knowledge of the world, or rather the knowledge of the social actors we are studying. Unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences do not produce a new conceptual language, rather they modify everyday language. It is often said that sociology especially, and to a lesser extent psychology, simply tell us what we already know, and these versions of the interpretive approach tend towards doing just that. The assumption of rationality in Schutz's work is still an instrumental one - it is the pursuit of practical ends.
There is, however, an important shift in Schutz's work. Whereas Weber was clearly concerned with flesh-and-blood people acting in the world, Schutz tends to move everything into consciousness. The first use of the term ‘social construction' was in Berger and Luckmanns book The Social Construction of Reality published in 1967, and they owed a heavy debt to Schutz. However, they were able to integrate phenomenological ideas with more structural and materialist explanations. Increasingly, the term has come to refer to processes within consciousness, to different interpretations of the world rather than actions upon an external world.