>
>This may seem a bit sketchy [and if it is wrong somebody correct me
>before I do more harm:-)] but here goes: Phenonemological philosopher
>Husserl believed that all an individual could really know could only come
>from the individuals senses and that anything else was purely speculation
>(which should be avoided). However we know from personal experience that
>we all speculate to one degree or another especially as we start to
>conceptualize abstract concepts. Since our understanding of things that
>we have not directly experienced can only come through having the concept
>described to us, and the process of description can only be done in a
>symbolic manner, such as language, a picture, music, hand gestures, etc.,
>Our thinking and deliberation on such matters will ultimately be
>tied to the symbols we use to understand the concept, and more
>specifically to those that were used to describe the concept in the first
>place. However, even those things which we know through our own personal
>senses are thought about symbolically. Whenever we think of "tree", that
>is a label, a sign if you will, that has been socially created to
>represent a specific type of biological "thing". When you use the label
>"tree" in your thinking, deliberations, or communication, you are pulling
>the symbol from what Alfred Schutz called a "common stock of knowledge".
>This is like a store house which we all pull from and it enables us to
>all be using the same signs and symbols to think, deliberate, and describe
>things. We acquire the common stock of knowledge from our social group.
>
>
>I hope this helped, or at least didn't hurt :-)
>
>Timothy B. Gongaware
>Ohio University
>
>tg125990@oak.cats.ohiou.edu
>
For a difficult read like Husserl to be presented so succinctly and simply
is an accomplishment. One of the problems of attempting to present a
difficult read so simply in straightforward language is that something may
get "lost in the translation." I note a strong if inadvertant element of
psychological reductionism emerging in the succinctness that endangers the
perspective of how society is created.
When I speak of how society is created, I am referring to an ongoing process
concommitant and imbedded in interaction. In the everyday life which is
elemental to a Schutzian perspective, our commonsense stock of knowledge has
come about through our human interaction. Notice that a radical perspective
on this would include much of our knowledge as sociologists would include
such a commonsense stock of knowledge, so that when we talk of "objects" or
"symbols," there is always a tendency for the commonsense object and symbol
to be sloughed on to the theoretical constructions of "objects" and
"symbols" as defined within SI.
It is here where language constitutes one of the crucial junctures between
the commonsense and the theoretical, because if our response to "object" is
socially-conditioned even when we are acting in our roles as sociologists,
or, if in our attempt to circumvent the danger of confusing the commonsense
with the theoretical we reify the theoreteical concept, and, of course, this
is at least equally a fallacious step.
For instance, in the example of the tree, it is important to understand that
the common stock of knowledge among "tree-huggers' and among "tree-cutters"
appears to be quite divergent if we judge that knowledge from the respective
actions of the two groups. If the disagreement betweeen the two groups
(hypothetical in this instance) is maintained, we can also understand this
disagreement as emerging because each group is turning their respective
"store houses" into fortresses to maintain specific social realities.
I think that Timothy has turned this thread into an interesting setting for
a dialogue, and we should be grateful for it. The social constructionists
-- whose names have been invoked in this thread -- enrich our conceptual and
theoretical perspectives; however, there is another group who have taken the
wisdom of Husserl and Schutz and developed even a more enriching perspective
(IMVHO) deriving from the work of Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel
Schegloff, Melvin Pollner, and others in the areas of ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis.
To put it succinctly and simply -- with all the dangers of attempting to do
that, is that in interaction we are always attempting to understand the
taken-for-granted, unnoticed and unnoticable rules in which interactors
engage in this ongoing reality creation. In conversation, that unprescribed
talk in which there are no rules apparent, there are rules which were
discovered by the conversation analysts nearly 20 years ago and upon which a
body of work has been built. Yet, in our everyday life, we follow these
rules as easily as birds seem to follow their leaders in their flights
engaging in that activity called flocking (an activity noted in among
children at certain kinds of play).
For those unacquainted with this perspective, may I suggest Garfinkel,
Harold, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967, and Sacks, Harvey,
Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics for
Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation," Language, 50:696-735.
Jerry Blaz/The BOOKie Joint
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Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.
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