The Foundation of an Interpretative Sociology: A Critical Review of the Attempts of George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz

George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz proposed foundations for an interpretative sociology from opposite standpoints. Mead accepted the objective meaning structure a priori. His problem became therefore the explanation of the individuality and creativity of human actors in his social behavioristic approach. In contrast, Schutz started from the subjective consciousness of an isolated actor as a result of a phenomenological reduction. He was concerned with the problem of explaining the possibility of this isolated actor’s perceiving other actors in their existence, their concreteness, and the motives for their behavior. I treat these two approaches and their associated problems as equally relevant. My evaluation is based on their success in solving their specific problems. The aim is to decide which of the two approaches provides the more adequate foundation for an interpretative sociology.

The taken-for-granted world: A study of the relationship between A. Schutz and J. Ortega y Gassed

This paper is a comparative study of Alfred Schutz and Jose Ortega y Gasset, with special attention to their respective characterization of social reality. For this purpose, the author draws on the explicit references Schutz and Ortega directed towards one another and develops a critical comparison of their theoretical systems. In addition to the reciprocal references which appear in their published works, valuable documentary evidence is provided by Schutz's letters and, first and foremost, by his marginal notes preserved in his own copy of Ortega y Gasset's Man and People. As far as the critical comparison of Schutz's and Ortega's theories is concerned, the weight of the discussion falls on Ortega's Man and People. A careful reading of this essay allows us to successively invoke the key components of Schutz's phenomenological characterization of the structures of the life-world. According to this strategy, and after some preliminary sections devoted to contextual, biographical, and sociocultural matters, the following topics are comparatively discussed: (1) the philosophical foundations of sociology, with particular attention to Ortega's doctrine of the Other as potential danger; (2) the taken-for-granted dimensions of the social world; (3) the multiple spheres of reality, and their structuration around the fundamental core of the radical reality of the I (for Ortega) or the paramount reality of everyday life, as the intersubjective world of culture (for Schutz); (4) the influence of pragmatism on their theoretical systems; (5) their strikingly similar characterization of the perspectivist stratification of the social world; (6) the inexhaustible complexity of the problem of intersubjectivity. Obviously, the common influence of Husserl, Weber, Scheler, and Bergson casts light upon the comparative consideration of any of these issues.     

B. F. Skinner and G. H. Mead: on biological science and social science.

Skinner's contributions to psychology provide a unique bridge between psychology conceptualized as a biological science and psychology conceptualized as a social science. Skinner focused on behavior as a naturally occurring biological phenomenon of interest in its own right, functionally related to surrounding events and, in particular (like phylogenesis), subject to selection by its consequences. This essentially biological orientation was further enhanced by Skinner's emphasis on the empirical foundations provided by laboratory-based experimental analyses of behavior, often with nonhuman subjects. Skinner's theoretical writings, however, also have affinity with the traditions of constructionist social science. The verbal behavior of humans is said to be subject, like other behavior, to functional analyses in terms of its environment, in this case its social context. Verbal behavior in turn makes it possible for us to relate to private events, a process that ultimately allows for the development of consciousness, which is thus said to be a social product. Such ideas make contact with aspects of G. H. Mead's social behaviorism and, perhaps of more contemporary impact in psychology, L. Vygotsky's general genetic law of cultural development. Failure to articulate both the biological and the social science aspects of Skinner's theoretical approach to psychology does a disservice to his unique contribution to a discipline that remains fragmented between two intellectual traditions.     

Appresentation and Simultaneity: Alfred Schutz on Communication between Phenomenology and Pragmatics

In his theory of communication Schutz exhibits a significant tension between two fundamental perspectives, phenomenology and pragmatism, and in the long run he fails to reconcile the contradictory implications these perspectives have with regard to his model of interaction.The main problem seems to be the notion of sense-constitution. Schutz develops two distinguishable accounts of constitution: an egological one and a model based on the phenomenon of direct interaction of empirical subjects. Two key concepts are related to these different modes of constitution: the model of appresentation with regard to language, symbols and signs, and the model of synchronisation as triangulation of streams of consciousness and outward action sequences. They are analyzed as significant for two different methods and two different theories of communication. I propose some reasons for Schutz's insistence on a phenomenological account of the ego and the constitution of sense, and offer a brief sketch of an alternative strategy that is implicit in Schutz's theory.     

F. H. Bradley and the philosophy of science

It is sometimes thought that Absolute Idealism was undermined by its inability to deal with science. Through a critical discussion of F. H. Bradley's philosophy of science, this idea is challenged. His views on science are divided into a positive and a negative part, and it is argued that, although he found the scientific world view to be essentially false, he was nonetheless able to develop a sympathetic and intelligent philosophy of science. This was basically pragmatic and instrumental in tone, and gave to science a large measure of autonomy from philosophy. His doctrine is connected with certain contemporary ideas in the philosophy of science.     

Correlation between inspection time and psychometric abilities: A personal interpretation

More than 25 years of research suggests that the measure inspection time (IT) does capture low-level aspects of cognitive functioning that contribute to human intelligence. However, recent evidence does not support earlier claims that IT estimates the speed of a single mechanism like “sampling input” or “apprehension.” Rather, together with other tasks that employ pattern backward masking to limit the duration for which information is available for processing, IT is probably sensitive both to focused attentional capacities to detect organization and change under severe time constraints and to decision processes, ongoing beyond mask onset, that monitor responding. Among normal young adults, IT is correlated with the broad psychometric factor Gs (“speediness”). This mediates correlation with general intelligence. In this group, IT is not correlated with Gf. However, whether this outcome generalizes to samples of persons with an intellectual disability, to young children, or to elderly persons is not yet known. Psychological processes underpinning IT are currently only speculatively defined, but it should prove possible to unravel these by experimentation. To this end, backward masking procedures are arguably more theoretically tractable than reaction time tasks because they reduce the impact of higher-level cognitive strategies on performance. On this basis, IT may hold promise as a means for developing partial explanations for intelligence in psychological terms. However, whether this is realized depends on identifying the psychological functions that support IT.     

Arthur F. Bentley and the foundations of behavioral science

Arthur F. Bentley's early work on the foundations of behavioral science has been neglected by students of the history and philosophy of social science. Bentley believed that the development of behavioral science required extensive reflection on and criticism of the categorial presuppositions of both everyday and scientific knowledge. This paper is concerned with Bentley's criticism of psychological explanation, his theory of observation, and the basic concepts of his behavioral science.     

Alfred Schutz: Philosopher and Social Scientist

Aron Gurwitsch's critique of Schutz's essay The Stranger is the starting point for this consideration of Schutz's relationship with phenomenology. This relationship is based on Schutz's emphasis on the value of the average as a phenomenological structure. In opposing sociology to philosophy, Gurwitsch takes this value as inferior in comparison with what he sees as cardinal issues of transcendental phenomenology. What Gurwitsch finds incompatible with phenomenological inquiry – the idea and practice of the natural attitude within the social sphere – Schutz turns into the core of his philosophy. The phenomenology of the natural attitude is as essentially philosophical as any reflectively practiced human science. The problem of how everydayness is constituted requires a phenomenological insight that leads the explorer – through reconstructing the meaning in terms of the mundane – straight to the origin.     

A mathematical characterization of interpretation between theories

Of the various notions of reduction in the logical literature, relative interpretability in the sense of Tarskiet al. [6] appears to be the central one. In the present note, this syntactic notion is characterized semantically, through the existence of a suitable reduction functor on models. The latter mathematical condition itself suggests a natural generalization, whose syntactic equivalent turns out to be a notion of interpretability quite close to that of Ershov [1], Szczerba [5] and Gaifman [2]. This author's contribution was completed during a fellowship held at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 1982–3. Both authors would like to thank Wilfrid Hodges for his valuable comments and advice concerning an earlier version of this paper.     

Death: Bridge between science and spirit

It is argued that contemporary health science, being part of a general cultural trend toward the materialism of scientific rationality, has reduced human health to a system of machine-like events. This philosophical trend has had the indirect effect of excluding the human spirit from playing any significant role in our understanding of man's health and well-being. The recent effort of biomedical science to extend this materialist philosophy into the area of human death and dying is examined in the context of this ideological trend. It is suggested that the trend has brought about an ever-widening conceptual gap between the realms of spirit and matter. The issue of bridging this contemporary conceptual gap is discussed in terms of recent research findings that suggest that the human brain may be capable of intergrating the logic of two seemingly irreconcilable ways of thinking into a whole which is enriched from the presence of both. This holistic possibility is discussed in the context of the philosophies that support the existence of spirit and matter.