Abstract
The three kinds of ideal types recognized by Alfred Schutz are described and then typification in everyday life and typification in cultural science are analyzed and the latter related to the postulates of subjective interpretation and adequacy, the latter not being truth.
Thus, the exploration of the general principles according to which man in daily life organizes his experiences, and especially those of the social world, is the first task of the methodology of the social sciences. (I 59)
Embedded citations refer to works of Schutz that are listed at the end of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Schutz wrote to Aron Gurwitsch on April 20, 1952 that “in the social sciences there is the increasing tendency to replace the concepts of type and ideal type by the concept of ‘construct,’” also mentioning Howard Becker’s suggestion that “constructive type” replace Weber’s “ideal type” (V 250, cf. I 61).
- 2.
Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982), p. 98, cf. 17, and reprinted in CP VI.
- 3.
(IV 122, gloss in the original.) Another passage is more comprehensive: “In his daily life the healthy, adult, and wide-awake human being (we are not speaking of others) has this knowledge [“about the world, the social world as well as the natural”], so to speak, automatically at hand. From heritage and education, from the manifold influences of tradition, habits and his own previous reflection, his store of experiences is built up. It embraces the most heterogeneous kinds of knowledge in a very incoherent and confused state. Clear and distinct experiences are intermingled with vague conjectures; suppositions and prejudices cross well-proven evidences; motives, means and ends, as well as causes and effects, are strung together without clear understanding of their real connections. There are everywhere gaps, intermissions, discontinuities. Apparently there is a kind of organization by habits, rules, and principles which we regularly apply with success. But the origin of our habits is almost beyond our control; the rules we apply are rules of thumb and their validity has never been verified. The principles we start from are partly taken over uncritically from parents and teachers, partly distilled at random from specific situations in our lives or in the lives of others without our having made any further inquiry into their consistency. Nowhere have we a guarantee of the reliability of all these assumptions by which we are governed. On the other hand, these experiences and rules are sufficient to us for mastering life” (II 72). The passage goes on to include calling knowledge of the sort described “cookbook knowledge.”
- 4.
Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Prague: Academia Verlag, 1938), cf. especially Schutz I 277–283 and, of course, the late essay, “Type and Eidos” (III 92–115). Cf. Lester Embree, “Two Concepts of Type in the Work of Alfred Schutz,” Schutzian Research, Vol. IV (2013).
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Works of Schutz
Works of Schutz
Note: Unless done otherwise, the following works will be cited with the embedded abbreviations as listed down the left margin below, plus the page number(s).
I = Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).
II = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. II, Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broedresen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
III = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. Ilse Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
IV = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
V = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. V, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
VI = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. VI, Literary Reality and Relationships, ed. Michael Barber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).
PSW = ––, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
PP = –––––, “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretive Social Science: An Ineditum from Spring 1953,” Husserl Studies, Vol. 14 (1998): 123–149. Reprinted in Dermot Moran and Lester Embree, eds., Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2004, III, pp. 119–145. Also available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52u22v305u28g04/
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Embree, L. (2015). Ideal Types. In: The Schutzian Theory of the Cultural Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13653-0_15
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