Brief Lecture Notes

WALLACE & WOLF: CHAPTER 6: PHENOMENOLOGY Our text defined as phenomenology as things as they are apprehended in their "immediacy" by the social actor. As an example: suppose somebody walked over to you as you are listening to me talk and asked you how my words that you what those noises are that you hear. You would likely collect absurd question because everybody knows what words are and what they sound like. We arrived at the notion of "hearing words" through socialization, the process by which we learn how to perceive and how to interpret the world, or as phenomenologists put it, "how to BE" in the world. Yet you if the person who ask you the question appeared to be an alien, you would probably take the question seriously and explain the meaning of a conversation to them. Phenomenology asks us not to take notions we have learned for granted, but to question them instead, to question our way of looking at our way of being in the world. In short, this perspective asks us to take the role of the stranger, the role of a visitor in a foreign country. Thespace intellectual roots go back to Huserl, who defined phenomenology as an interest in those things that can be directly apprehended by our senses. (Differentiate this from materialism) Schutz, a social philsopher from Germany, incorporated Max Weber's VERSTEHEN into his version of phenomenology. He argued that the meaning that the individual imparts to a situation in everyday life is critically important; he put the spotlight on the individuals own definition of the situation. For Schutz, the definition of the situation includes the assumptions that we draw from our common stock of knowledge. That is we have SOCIAL RECIPES of conceptions of appropriate behavior that allow us to think of the world has made up of types of things like books cars houses clothing, and so on. This is similar to Mead's concept of the GENERALIZED OTHER. In other words, he views individuals as constructing a world by using the typifications, or IDEAL TYPES, passed on to us by our social group. At root of this is how taken for granted knowledge, everyday typifications, and other recipes allow us to see the work of acting in our everyday world as a orderly especially with the process is successful. In short, we assume that other people know a vast amount about the situation, and it's this "trust" in our shared understandings that keeps things humming. HAROLD GARFINKEL: ETHNOMETHODOLOGY Garfinkel's book, ETHNOMETHODOLOGY, influenced another trend in phenomenology. He wanted to construct a perspective that would fill one aspect of Parson's action theory, that is, he wanted to explain the "motivated actor." our concern here is not to link him to functionalism, but rather to illustrate what he added to phenomenology that makes him worth reading. What he wanted to do is to understand the commonsense everyday situations that we'll take for granted by treating them as problematic. (An example here would be our reaching experiments in touching noses and examining space.) ethnomethodology is to understand commonsense everyday, normal, taken for granted life situations. Unlike Durkheim, who said closed treat social facts as things," Garfinkel argued that we should see them as a process, has an ongoing accomplishment of the concerned activities of everyday life. That is they were never something we should simply take for granted were soon existed quote out there" independent of people. Rather they are something that has to be re-enacted with every encounter. And, this is where we bring back INDEXICAL EXPRESSIONS.

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