Abstract

Alfred Schutz's phenomenology provides a philosophical context in which the sociology of knowledge can find its locus and limits. Schutz's The Phenomenology of the Social World describes those structures which are essential to consciousness, intersubjective understanding, and the social world. Unlike Husserl, whose transcendental method brackets the social world, Schutz turns to a phenomenology of that world in non-transcendental terms. Hence, his account of social reality is based on a phenomenology of what Husserl called the "natural attitude." ;There are four determinants of the "distribution of knowledge," which is Schutz's way of posing the concept of traditional sociology of knowledge: time, space, the individual's "stock of knowledge at hand," as Schutz expresses it, and the social. These four "distributors" of knowledge, acting in concert, result in a necessary discrepancy between the meanings intended and understood in any interchange between societal partners whose histories, spatial location, contents of consciousness, and social affiliations inevitably will not coincide. ;I argue that Schutz's position reveals that there are two limits of social-scientific objectivity: one cannot reflect and guarantee that reflection's objectivity at the same time; the sociologist can never understand the Other exactly as the Other understands himself. Furthermore, I extend Schutz's analysis of motivation by showing that philosophical definitions of "essence" can be both socially determined and true. ;This compatibility in Schutz's stance between social determinism and truth permits an alternative to the extremes of absolutism and relativism . Schutz articulates the premise taken for granted by sociological relativism, that all knowledge is socially determined. Hence, the relativistic critic of Schutz presupposes what Schutz explains. Finally, classic versions of the sociology of knowledge, which often focus on the economic and political grounds of culture, have inadequately considered the fundamental philosophical questions of intersubjective understanding. Those questions, I suggest, illuminate the "Otherness" of the Other--an Otherness which the sociologist of knowledge overlooks. ;In addition to reading all of Schutz's published works, I have examined in its entirety his unpublished manuscripts in the Schutz Archive in The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.