Natural Attitude Research Articles

Nomadic Tourism and Fleeting Place Encounters: Exploring Different Aspects of Sightseeing

This study scrutinizes the brief visual sensations of places and landscapes experienced by nomadic sightseeing tourists. It is argued that the comprehension of itinerant sightseeing excursions is influenced by the hegemonic time standards set by "travellers" and travel writers from foreign countries. To illuminate certain aspects of ephemeral experiences of places in mobile sightseeing tourism, the article refers loosely to the notions of natural attitude, contra-structure, and adventure. It is asserted that the transient encounter bestows access to adventure-like experiences of places and landscapes, as tourists are always in danger of being caught up in other roles, or of becoming embroiled in new everyday life routines, and may thus cease to notice the numerous facets of the places they visit. A noteworthy limitation of transient and ocular travel experiences is that certain aspects of foreign places cannot be understood or experienced in the course of a brief tourist visit alone. It is suggested that the time restrictions inherent in regular holiday tours usually result in a transient experience of places and landscapes as the only alternative for those desiring to gain first-hand and predominantly visual impressions of distant territories.

Från Murillo till El Greco. Spanska Mästare i finländsk allmän konsthistoria: Rötterna i 1800-talet och förvandlingen i det tidiga 1900-talet

Today, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya are unanimously regarded as the leading exponents of Spanish painting. During the romantic era, however, Murillo and Ribera were considered the unsurpassed interpreters of the Spanish temperament. In this paper, I describe the prevalence of Spanish Old Master painters in Finnish art historical writing from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The writings of two leading Finnish art historians, J. J. Tikkanen (1857-1930) and Ludvig Wennervirta (1882-1959), show the survival of Romantic values well into the twentieth century. At the same time shifts in the approach towards Murillo and El Greco, in particular, identify changes in the writers's outlook, reflecting current, normative variations in taste and the recognition of many different artists. Contrasting those painters who have been acknowledged with those who have not reveals a development from a Murillo-centred admiration in the nineteenth century to a veneration of El Greco in the early twentieth century. Realism had established the fame of Velázquez and the Spanish Baroque in Finland mainly through the genre painter Adolf von Becker (1831-1909). However, C.G. Estlander (1834- 1910) set himself against Becker, and Estlander's attitude to art history is marked by idealism. One explanation for this retardation is the fact that Finnish writers depended on obsolete texts; as late as 1901, Magnus Enckell (1877-1925) quoted Charles Blanc's (1813-1882) characterisation of the Spanish School from his École Espagnole of 1869. The replacement of Murillo with Velázquez and later El Greco, is also visible in Albert Edelfelt's (1854- 1905) letters from Spain, published in the daily press in 1881. By this time, Tikkanen had established himself as an art historian. Like Edelfelt, he preferred a naturalistic attitude towards art instead of an idealistic one. However, as late as 1910, his general art history still shows signs of early nineteenth century Romanticism, in particular regarding his view on El Greco. Wennervirta's article on El Greco, on the other hand, published only two years later, is a sign of the increasing veneration of the Greek-Italian Spaniard, who was revered for his "expressionist" and "transcendental" art. Only Tikkanen's revised edition of his general art history in 1925, adopts a viewpoint similar to Wennervirta's as regards El Greco's expressionism, a feature that by now was widely accepted. To a large extent, Finnish general art-history writing reflects the tastes that were directed from Paris. Wennervirta's lifelong engagement with El Greco, on the other hand, is an early example of the rising admiration of the eccentric painter from Toledo. The attitude towards Spanish art, created and maintained by Finnish art historical writing, is characterised by clichés. Spanish Old Master painting became canonised as a desirable love-affair for a progressive painter.

Response to critiques

In my target paper, I attempted to build on the work of a number of excellent investigators, several of whom were invited to critique my paper. It is a privilege and an honour to respond to my critics, from whom I have learned so much. In their thoughtful commentary, Slater and Quinn cite a body of work that collectively suggests that newborns can discriminate among different faces, and show preferences for the mother’s face and for attractive faces. In all three sets of findings, the authors initially argue for a rapid learning mechanism. Although I do not disagree with their conclusion, I am troubled by the observations they cite. For example, to discriminate between a mother and a stranger, or to prefer an attractive versus an unattractive face must require access to subtle differences between/among faces; in addition, it is likely that such information is coded in higher spatial frequencies. Given the remarkably limited visual ability of the newborn infant (including the very impoverished contrast sensitivity function; see Dannemiller, 2001, for review), how are to we account for these findings? One possibility is that infants are basing their discrimination/ preferences on different cues than the adult, and/or employing different neural and perceptual mechanisms. If true, it may well be that the phenomena observed in newborns is qualitatively different than what is observed in the older infant or adult. Furthermore, we know that, even in the adult, there are individual differences in facial preferences. For example, Perrett et al. have demonstrated that the phase of a woman’s menstrual cycle will influence her judgment of male face preferences (Perrett et al., 1998; Penton-Voak et al., 1999). My point is that the mechanisms that guide newborn facial preferences may be fundamentally different than what guides such preferences in the older infant, no less the adult. Therefore, it may be misleading to suggest that newborn preferences for certain faces is a result of a face ‘module’ per se. Of course, a relatively simple way to evaluate whether faces represent a special class of objects is to see if they show comparable preferences for some non-face objects over others. If they do, would we conclude that there is an object module? Most likely, not. Rather, we would attempt to account for what distinguishes (perhaps psychophysically) one object from another. Nonetheless, it would be a slippery slope indeed if we began to add modules to the brain every time one object was found to be preferred over another. Would we, as Charlie Gross once reflected, have a module for recognizing our grandmother’s face? Slater and Quinn go on to conclude that infants ‘enter the world with a detailed representation of the human face’. Thus, despite their previous arguments about learning, here they appear to argue for a strong nativist position.

WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED

This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: native to the mind rather than acquired. Fiona Cowie argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different-and probably inconsistent-theses about the mind. Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into our brains at birth. This faculties hypothesis finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky. Cowie, marshaling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a crisp and timely critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition. Also in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible of scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious. Cowie addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process. Cowie challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues convincingly that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable. What's Within? is a clear and provocative achievement in the study of the human mind.

Critical Rationalism (Gomory’s Blurry Theory) or Positivism (Thyer’s Theoretical Myopia)

This article is the last of four in a debate between a critical rationalist (falsificationist) and a positivist (justificationist) about the value and utility of theory in social work. The critical rationalist position and its criticism of the positivist approach to theory and the pursuit of science in social work are reviewed and explained in seven theses and a little commentary. Some criticisms about how critical rationalists choose among theories and interventions are answered. Finally, the use and misuse of quasi-experimental research in social work are addressed briefly.

Phenomenological Literature: From the Natural Attitude to “Recognition”

The element which makes up the life of phenomenology ... is "fiction." Edmund Husserl, Ideas I In this essay I aim to discuss a few writers of phenomenological literature as seen in the wake of Husserlian phenomenology, and to summon a response from these writings to some issues in phenomenology as Husserl conceived it. In Rainer Maria Rilke, Francis Ponge, and Alain Robbe-Grillet (not to mention Sartre) we find serious poetic-literary examinations examinations of the subject's relation to objects-a relation that Husserl thought could be finally accounted for by the phenomenological reduction and the notions of intentionality and constitution. The poetic-literary writer, however, competes with the philosopher in regard to facility of description, and this relationship is presented, albeit still in a phenomenological vein, in contending ways in these literary writings. At issue in this essay are two specific concerns: firstly, the problem of description in Husserlian phenomenology in light of poetic-literary description; and secondly, the relationship of poetic-literary description to the phenomenological, eidetic, and transcendental reductions. I will suggest that literature yields profits for phenomenology "proper" even in cases where the divergence from Husserl's procedures and aims is significant. Such an examination, however, cannot legitimately begin without at least mentioning the well-known efforts, in the history of modern philosophy, to regulate the imaginative language of literature, and to exclude it from philosophical articulations.1 Following Plato's concerns about the distance of poetry from truth as he conceived it, modern philosophers restrained elements of the imagination that give way to free association or to plays of meaning, incompatible with Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas"2 or departing, according to Hume, in "falsehood and fiction" from "real matters of fact.3' As much as Descartes himself admired literature, it could not find a place in "first philosophy"; moreover, in the Meditations he associates the imagination with the instability of sense-- experience, which could always "prove to be an illusion, a coherent dream"4 and which could give rise to the incoherent associations of madness. Yet some of the most literary moments in Descartes' Meditations occur when Descartes sets out to describe the experience of objects as known by sense-perception, moments that, in light of modern European literature, foreshadow Rilke's fantastical description of ordinary things in the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910); Sartre's discussions of objects in Nausea (1939); Alain Robbe-Grillet's post-Sartrean, hyper-phenomenological obsession with the surfaces of things (Dans le labyrinthe, 1959; La Jalousie, 1957); and Francis Ponge's procedure, in the poems of Le parti pris des choses, of seducingly "caressing" things with words until the writer can, as it were, imaginatively take up residence within them.5 Before Descartes makes the reduction to the pure concepts of the intellect, he suspends his ordinary faith in appearances-- suspends the natural attitude6 and thenceforth allows himself to imagine7 that perhaps he is not sitting by the fire in his winter cloak, but wrapped in bed and only dreaming that he is so. Descartes is quick to associate sensory illusions and dreaming with madness; in madness one could think that one's own head is made of pottery, or of pumpkins, or of glass! Only in poetic-literary language could such suggestions, at least with impunity, be explored-and indeed, such literature has surfaced in the past century and recently.8 The relationship between philosophy and literature, however, was to shift with phenomenology, for, as Merleau-Ponty articulates, in the spirit of Husserl's concern for the lifeworld, "everything changes when a phenomenological ... philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of uncovering its `conditions of possibility,' but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world. …

Merleau-Ponty And Bergson: Bodies of Expression and Temporalities in the Flesh

The attempt to address the question of difference, within and between bodies, becomes an important theme in Merleau-- Ponty's work at the time of The Visible and the Invisible.1 Already in the Phenomenology of Perception, there are indices pointing to singular bodies and unique styles of existence-but these are hidden by the general appeal of that text to the sameness of bodies, and the exchangeability of experiences.2 As the bearer of my zero-point of orientation in space, my body and the other's may represent exchangeable perspectives. But this symmetry breaks down when the body is seen as a temporality.3 This move begins in the Phenomenology with the study of the body's expressivity. As the body's expressive and melodic character is emphasized, Merleau-Ponty's picture of the body becomes one of a singular, fluid becoming-- converging in the later works with Bergson's account of duration. Drawing on Bergsonian ideas of duration and intuition, the later Merleau-Ponty will find resources to confront the question of difference. The Early Merleau-Ponty and the Body as Expression Rethinking the Temporality of the Lived Body The body's expressive powers are not restricted to so-called personal acts, acts of conscious will and choice. These powers can be seen in the body's sensory relation to the world-so that every sensation, every experience of color and every movement of the hand, expresses my whole existence as a singular becoming. In the chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception entitled "Le sentir," the lived body's experience of colors and of tones is explored in terms of the resonances and correspondences that the body feels when in contact with the sensible. According to Merleau-Ponty, "blue is that which [solicits] me to look in a certain way, that which allows my gaze to run over it in a specific manner" (PhP 210). Colors have a vital significance that my body lives in its own way." As do sounds: "within the musical note a 'micromelody' can be picked out and the interval heard is merely the final patterning of a certain tension felt throughout the body" (PhP 211). My body appears here as a particular tension or rhythm that responds to the colors seen and the tones heard, that replies to the sensible which is itself "a certain rhythm of existence" (PhP 213). Thus the lived body is a power [puissance] to synchronize with its environment, to "reverberate to all sounds, vibrate to all colours" (PhP, 236).5 This exploration of le sentir as resonance and rhythm is brought to light by a "radical reflection" according to Merleau-Ponty. In such reflection, "I must be particularly careful not to begin by defining the senses; I must instead resume contact with the sensory life [la sensorialitel which I live from within" (PhP, 219-20). This is then a different methodology from the one that takes its point of departure in the fully constituted body of "natural perception" (PhP, 225). There is a move in this chapter of the Phenomenology to explore sensation below the presumptive unities of perceiving subject and perceived world. And although Merleau-Ponty opts at the end of the chapter to return to "a natural attitude of vision" and a unified perception, the first part of "Le sentir" follows the route of sensations and "break[s] this total structuralization of vision" (PhP, 227). This radical reflection can be seen again in the painter's vision in L'a"et l'Esprit, and in the method of hyper-reflection presented in The Visible and the Invisible.6 In both cases we find it opposed to a kind of "profane" or natural vision that aims at recognition-that cuts the world up into solids which can be categorized and identified, which can be easily managed. The study of sensation tends to bracket this natural vision; it provides a different framework for conceiving the body's unity and its relation to the world and to others. This is the framework we are interested in exploring in this essay. What the above examples of resonances to colors and sounds show is the intertwining of sensing and sensible that characterizes le sentir for Merleau-Ponty. …

Do Boys Have to Be Boys? Gender, Narrativity, and the John/Joan Case

Do Boys Have to Be Boys? examines the famous John/Joan case of twin sex reassignment in order to comment upon the way that gender as a concept operates in the nature vs. nurture debate concerning the development of gender identity. I use basic elements of narrative theory to investigate how scientific assumptions about what gender is ignore the ways in which stories about gender overdetermine what counts as a legitimate way to be a sex. In the end, I challenge scientific and medical uses of gender that promote simplistic ontologies of gendered being, and demonstrate that utilizing an epistemological approach to gender allows the researcher to destabilize and undo the natural attitude toward gender that supports traditional gender ontologies.

How Natural Can Ontology Be?

Arthur Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA) is intended to provide an alternative to both realism and antirealism. I argue that the most plausible meaning of “natural” in NOA is “nonphilosophical,” but that Fine comes to NOA through a particular conception of philosophy. I suggest that instead of a natural attitude we should adopt a philosophical attitude. This is one that is self-conscious, pragmatic, pluralistic, and sensitive to context. I conclude that when scientific realism and antirealism are viewed with a philosophical attitude there are still legitimate philosophical questions to address.

The role of cognitive and normative frames in policy-making

The analysis of public policy has recently been characterized by the development of an approach which emphasizes the influence of cognitive and normative elements in public policy - making. The main purpose of this article is to offer a critical review of different models related to this approach, based on notions of paradigm, of advocacy coalition , or of the référentiel . In spite of some differences, these conceptualizations all shed light on the influence of 'world views', mechanisms of identity formation, principles of action in public policy analysis. These models, separate from those informed by a rationalist position, are also capable of explaining the processes of 'extraordinary' change in public policy. However,an excessive emphasis on cognitive and normative variables has sometimes underestimated the forms of mobilization to which these frames are subject. This article tries to integrate certain neglected variables: the interests of actors, and the role of institutions.

Taking Husserl at His Word

For Husserl, natural attitude and hence any further explication of it is put out of play, bracketed by phenomenological epoche, which, of course, is not to deny its existence, but only to turn our theoretical gaze elsewhere. As Husserl remarks, the single facts, facticity of natural world taken universally, disappear from our theoretical regard (Id 60/68). The project of young Heidegger, I will argue, is precisely a concern with facticity, taking up this forgotten project in phenomenology, and thus attempting an explication of natural attitude, considered so extraordinarily important by Husser!. Heidegger thus effects something of a relocation of phenomenology, turning its analysis to a different site: pretheoretical experience. Further, Heidegger also seeks to honor precognitive nature of this pretheoretical experience, or what he will call faktische Lebenserfahrung. As such, young Heidegger is very concerned with Husserl's theoreticization offacticallife. To avoid same in his 'new' phenomenology, Heidegger must develop a new conceptuality: formal indication

Attitudes toward large carnivores among sheep farmers, wildlife managers, and research biologists in Norway

The intensity of the carnivore versus livestock conflicts in Norway is increasing. This study compares the attitudes toward large carnivores (bear, wolf, lynx, and wolverine) among Norwegian sheep farmers, wildlife managers, and research biologists, using Kellert's (1991) attitude typology. Wildlife managers and research biologists endorsed ecologistic and naturalistic attitudes, and had low scores on the dominionistic, negativistic, and utilitarian attitudes. Researchers had higher scores than managers on the moralistic attitudes. Sheep farmers expressed the opposite attitude profile through high dominionistic, negativistic, and utilitarian, and low ecologistic, moralistic, and naturalistic attitudes. In a multiple regression analysis age, gender, education, occupation, and residency during childhood were associated with attitudes toward carnivores.

On keeping the faith in matters scientific

Evidence abounds that a segment of our field views the current status of communication research with alarm. Whether the specific issues involve the logic of theory construction, the methodologies employed in collecting and analyzing data, or the criteria used in assessing scientific evidence, the refrain is constant: prevailing research practices are fruitless and wrong-headed and our wrong-headedness will be remedied by an alternative approach that will lead to a tree scientific understanding of human communication. In other words, the lost souls responsible for promulgating heathen research practices of old are urged to repent and to accept the word of the philosophical and scientific messiahs who have come to save them. A new gospel is compelling when sinners are convinced that they have really sinned or when they are persuaded that it is indeed new and better than the prevailing theology. Unfortunately, we find the scriptures of alarmists jumbled. Rather than presenting a ringing reaffirmation of our own faith, we will content ourselves with pointing out several of the confusions and ambiguities encountered in the critics' writings. There are two kinds of confusions and ambiguities: those associated with practices which are characterized as the reigning paradigm and those associated with certain alternative paradigms that have been advocated. Although our comments are relevant to the problem of assessing scientific evidence, they also relate to broader issues concerning the epistemological moorings of communication research. INDICTMENTS OF THE REIGNING PARADIGM: OR, ARE YOU POSITIVE THAT'S A POSITIVIST? Disciples of the new research order frequently warn that stubborn adherence to prevailing practices forces the researcher to worship at the pagan shrine of an outmoded, discredited logical positivism. Despite the religious fervor of their remarks, it is often difficult to discern just how or in what ways these critics equate current communication research practices with positivism. Indeed, some skeptics have dismissed the effort to make such an equation as a red herring which relies on a naive or distorted view of logical positivism. For instance, Robert Bostrom stated in a recent paper that close attention to most of these polemics reveals a standard tactic: the construction of a far-fetched and altogether unrepresentative set of assertions which are blandly identified as the essence of the positivistic position.(1) As we attempt to untangle some of the ways that prevailing research practices have been linked with positivism, it will become apparent that we are at least partially sympathetic with Bostrom's indictment of this practice. In some cases, allegiance to logical positivism is equated with paying homage to the covering law model of explanation. Typically, the argument proceeds as follows: (1) logical positivism champions the covering law model of explanation; (2) the covering law model demands universal, invariant generalizations; (3) no such generalizations have been discovered in communication; therefore, (4) the covering law model is deficient; and (5) logical positivism is deficient. This argument is patently specious, both on intellectual and practical grounds. Nowhere in the literature of logical positivism does one encounter the claim that covering laws constitute the sole acceptable means of scientific explanation. In his classic analysis, Carl G. Hempel distinguishes three types of scientific explanation, two of which rely upon statistical or probabilistic premises.(2) An astute critic of the law-governed approach to theory construction, Donald Cushman, has characterized the logical positivist position regarding explanation thus: According to this view [positivism], laws enunciate the uniform concomitance of phenomena, the prototype instance of which is either a universal implication (all A are B) or a problematic correlation [italics ours].(3) Simply stated, total allegiance to the covering law model of explanation is not an inherent feature of a positivistic perspective, nor does knowledge of one's position regarding the efficacy of covering law explanations permit his or her classification as positivist or non-positivist. …

A fenomenologia e a epochê

Este artigo tenta dar uma visão geral sobre a epoché fenomenológica, relacionando-a ao problema da constituição do saber fenomenológico, e também da fundamentação da Ciência. A epoché, formulada assim de forma universal é considerada como uma alteração radical da atitude natural.

The Relevance of Nonsymbolic Cognition to Husserl's Fifth Meditation

In his Cartesian Meditations at the outset of the Fifth Meditation, Edmund Husserl proposes to sketch an account of how the meaning "other person" comes to be bestowed on certain items encountered in the perceived surrounding world. As he states the matter, he proposes to "discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense `other ego' becomes fashioned."1 An account of the constitution of such a sense is a necessary step in an account of how objects in the world come to have the sense "there for others." The latter demonstration is itself, of course, a necessary step in the larger phenomenological project of showing how the perceived world comes to have the sense it has in the natural attitude of everyday adult life. In introducing his projected account of sense constitution, Husserl presents it as an answer to the general charge that phenomenology entails transcendental solipsism. He judges, and rightly so, that the introduction of the sense "other" adds a dimension of meaning that converts the perceived world into a common world, with the result that all apparent support is withdrawn from the accusation that phenomenology is transcendental solipsism. Unfortunately, his placing of an allusion to solipsism at the beginning rather than at the conclusion of his account (or better still, in a footnote), has often led to a construal of that account as an attempt to answer the philosophical problem of solipsism. Such an interpretation is clearly mistaken. Sense constitution is an exercise in semantics, and not in ontology. Consequently, the account can hardly be intended as a refutation of solipsism, much less a refutation via a demonstration of the existence of other persons. Admittedly, the situation is somewhat apt to engender confusion. An account of semantic constitution traces out the nature of the evidential situation grounding the constituted sense, and hence closely parallels an epistemological account of knowledge constitution. In addition, Husserl claims in his discussion of skepticism in Ideas I that an appreciation of the evidential situation suffices to reveal "the countersense" committed by those skeptical theses that view essential peculiarities of evidence as deficiencies.2 As a result, it is inevitable that the account of semantic constitution should contain, implicitly at least, a rebuttal of certain solipsistic theses, namely those committing a countersense of the sort noted by Husserl. Be this as it may, the solipsistic theses affected could not include the classical solipsistic thesis that questions the existence of other minds, where "a mind"' has the sense of "a private world of representations." The reason is simply that the sense, "private world of representations," can only be a subsequent addition to the sense "other person" being constituted in Husserl's account, and hence a sense available for solipsistic maneuvers only on the later occasion of its constitution. The present essay proposes to answer two sorts of objections commonly raised against the constitution of the sense "other" sketched in the Fifth Meditation. One sort features the claim that the sense constituted in Husserl's account is not the genuine sense of "other subject"--that the proper sense includes essential dimensions ignored in the account, dimensions such as the person's social status and function,3 or the person's radical irreducibility to another person's possible acts of consciousness.4 The second sort of objection centers on the claim that the proposed derivation is circular, that is, that it must presuppose what it sets out to constitute. Here some elaboration is in order. Objections of the second sort readily grant that Husserl is right in his estimation of the nature of the task, that to avoid circularity the projected constitution of the sense "other subject" must begin at a semantic level that contains no trace of that sense--a level Husserl terms "the sphere of ownness. …

Seeing and Believing

Scientists rely on data and evidence to construct scientific knowledge or justified beliefs about the world. How are data and scientific beliefs related? In what ways do scientists respond to data? Sixty scientists were interviewed. Content analyses of scientists' accounts of their experiences with contrary data revealed their views of the relation between scientific belief and data. The scientists expressed a range of epistemological positions. Positivist and constructivist positions were articulated almost equally. More than half of the scientists held more than one epistemological position, and shifted between positions in their accounts. Scientists' accounts were used to generate a model of the variety of ways in which scientists respond to contrary data. The model shows six alternative paths that scientists could take when faced with contrary data, and makes predictions about the likely behavior that follows.

Husserl's phenomenological discovery of the natural attitude

In this paper I will give a systematic account of Husserl's notion of the natural attitude in the development from its first presentation in Ideas I (1913) until Husserl's last years. The problem of the natural attitude has to be dealt with on two levels. On the thematic level, it is constituted by the correlation of attitude and horizon, both stemming from Husserl's theory of intentionality. On the methodic level, the natural attitude is constituted by three factors: naturalness, naivety and normality. I shall conclude by sketching out a possible motivation for leaving the natural attitude and thus for entering the sphere of phenomenology.

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.

Husserl's Fifth Meditation and the Phenomenological Sociology of Alfred Schutz

In his Fifth Meditation, Husserl appears to confront the problem of solipsism. As a number of commentators have suggested, however, since it arises from within phenomenology itself and the existence of the other is never in doubt, it is not a solipsism in the traditional Cartesian sense. Alfred Schutz, however, appears to understand Husserl's inquiry in precisely these terms. As such, his critical discussions of the Fifth Meditation, as well as his subsequent rejection of transcendental philosophy, might not be well-founded. Yet in spite of this misconstrual, Schutz's criticisms do highlight the problematic relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Husserl's late phenomenology, and albeit misplaced, ironically, his rejection of the Fifth Meditation forms a coherent response to Husserl's call for a “science of the life-world.” Intersubjectivity, Schutz concludes, must be assumed as a basis for phenomenological investigation rather than derived as a result of philosophical inquiry. “Negatively,” this is clearly a departure from Husserl's project since Schutz inevitably negates the “radical” motif under which phenomenological inquiry ostensibly proceeds. “Positively,” however, the project to which this criticism leads—a “phenomenology of the natural attitude”—represents a legitimate direction for phenomenological study as well as a radical turn within the theory and practice of social science.

Merleau-Ponty's Account of the Perception of Speech and Luria's Description of Semantic Aphasia

AbstractOur objective is to corroborate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of speech perception and intersubjectivity through an analysis of A. R. Luria's account of semantic aphasia. By emulating Merleau-Ponty's style of analysis in dealing with the work of a contemporary leader in the field of aphasiology, we are able to take up Merleau-Ponty's thought and test whether his conclusions are inevitable or whether they are based on outmoded problems of the psychology and psychopathology of his day. These reflections also enable us to present arguments against both the assumptions of the natural attitude, as well as those of transcendental phenomenology, and so enable us to cast some light on the relation between existential phenomenology and empirical research. By contrasting aphasic and normal perception, we intend to show that ultimately even the aphasiologist is able to characterize aphasic perception only in terms of the aphasic's loss of an "openness" to meanings present in the uttered sounds. We argue that this notion of openness, like that of Merleau-Ponty's notion of "perceptual faith, " requires the reduction but also points to the impossibility of a complete reduction.