Chapter 9
The Problem of Meaning and Reality—Alfred Schutz
Chapter Objectives:
After reading and understanding this chapter, a student should be able to
 Explain phenomenology and demonstrate how it is used as a sociological
perspective
 Explain how meaning is formed through intentionality and discuss how
intentionality also creates relationships among ego, objects, and others
 Define the concept of lifeworld and discuss the different elements that
make up the lifeworld
 Discuss how the world is ordered through socially distributed stocks of
knowledge and individual relevance structures
 Describe how the lifeworld connects people together and forms
intersubjectivity
 Discuss the critique of postmodernism that Schutz’s theory gives us
Chapter Outline:
I. Schutz’s Perspective: Social Phenomenology—Seeing Realty from a Human
Viewpoint
Key concepts: meaning; phenomenology; empiricism; rationalism; epoché; bracketing;
lifeworld; natural attitude; intersubjectivity;
A. The problem of meaning
1. Meaning always something other than the thing-in-itself (the natural
world)
2. Problem of meaning: what is the relationship between signs and
symbols and the world they purport to represent? (epistemology)
B. The phenomenological method
1. Comparisons
a. Empiricism: all knowledge comes from sense data
b. Rationalism: reason and logic constitute the path to true
knowledge
2. Phenomenology middle road by focusing on consciousness (more than
sense data, less than reason)
a. Consciousness seen as basic phenomenon
3. Edmund Husserl
a. Suspend belief in human world (lifeworld) and focus only on
pure consciousness (epoché; bracketing)
C. The natural attitude
1. Schutz takes the lifeworld as the basic phenomenon
a. Lifeworld: sets of assumptions, beliefs, and meanings against which the
individual judges and interprets everyday experiences
2. Natural attitude: characterized by being wide awake, suspending doubt,
engaged in work, and assuming intersubjectivity. In the natural attitude we
unthinkingly use categories, typifications, roles, social recipes, and skills
until we experience a problem in our routine.
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D. Creating meaning
1. Schutz’s critique of Weber’s understanding of meaning attribution:
rational behavior; goal directed
2. Schutz: meaning after the fact (intentionality)
II. Being Conscious in the Lifeworld
Key concepts: lived experience; intentionality; noema; I-pole; object-pole; intentional
horizon; reflexive construction
A. Lived experience and intentionality (Figure 9.1)
1. Fundamental experience of life: stream of undifferentiated
experiences—internal time-consciousness
a. Pure experience without meaning
2. Meaning comes from intentionality (a mental perception that involves
intentional objects, intended behaviors, and, thus, relations between the
ego (self) and sets of intentional objects and behaviors)
a. Aimed at an object, experience, or emotion that has already
occurred
b. Can include noema (imaginary or symbolic objects)
c. Includes relationship between the person and object (I-Pole and
Object-Pole of intentionality)
d. Intentionality is subjective quality of individual
i. However, intentionality is always directed by and toward cultural
objects (thus, social)
e. Intentionality implies reflexive construction of social reality
III. Ordering the Lifeworld—Creating Human Reality (Figure 9.2)
Key concepts: social scalpel; stocks of knowledge; typifications; relevance structures; inorder-to; because-of; attitudes
A. Reality as social order
1. Categories/typifications as social scalpel—dividing up internal timeconsciousness
B. Ordering through stocks of knowledge
1. Stocks of knowledge: the cultural information that is available to any
group. They are “what everybody knows” and thus aid in the taken-forgrantedness of cultural reality.
2. Typifications: social types or categories through which we understand
ourselves and others. People appear to us as variations of the average
expectations associated with a social type.
a. Typifications are reciprocally held
b. Stocks of knowledge not necessarily ordered and logical—the
interest is pragmatic (we experience our self as working at
something)
i. Any changes to typifications are minimal and only
pragmatically motivated
C. The social distribution of stocks of knowledge
1. Stocks of knowledge differentially distributed by social position
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2. Example: class—Bourdieu’s theory
a. Level of education (scholasticism v. classicism)
b. Distance from necessity
D. Individual ordering through relevance structures: hierarchically arranged
structure of contexts and situations that is important for the individual; ordered
through
1. “In-order-to” motivations: ordering through personal projects
2. “Because-of” motivations: linked to attitudes
IV. Connecting With Others
Key concepts: solipsism; intersubjectivity; reciprocity of perspectives; taken-forgrantedness; anonymization; Thou-orientation; We-orientation; They-orientation
A. The problem of solipsism
1. Descartes and hyperbolic doubt
2. Solipsism: everything is reduced to the individual—the self can know
nothing but its own state
a. Ideas, motivations, perceptions, and the like are all abstractions
from individual’s own inner experience
B. Subjectivity is basically objective and intersubjective
1. Solipsism’s false premise: assumes that the individual experiences the
world primitively or independently, that human experience works from the
inside out
 But the experience of the individual self is of the lifeworld,
which is made up from stocks of knowledge and typifications
2. Lifeworld is a world of relationships—I-pole and object-pole of
intentionality includes both objects and other people
a. Lifeworld is arranged into associates, contemporaries,
predecessors, and successors—subjective awareness then is of one
living in the midst of multiple others
3. Lifeworld experienced through reciprocity of perspectives—two
assumptions
a. Standpoints are interchangeable
b. Any differences are irrelevant for the purposes at hand
4. Results in taken-for-grantedness of lifeworld
C. Making others anonymous
1. Because people are experienced through typifications, all others are
subject of varying degrees of anonymization
2. Anonymization varies by orientation toward other—two basic spheres
a. The field of “I-Thou-We”
b. The field of “They-orientation”
V. Thinking About Postmodernity
Key concepts:
A. The postmodern problem: increasing importance of yet decreasing
meaningfulness of culture and, thus, identity
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1. Based on assumption of correlation among culture, meaning, and
identity
B. The micro-foundations of meaning—Schutz’s theory provides a critique of
postmodern idea of fractured meanings and selves
1. Meaning is created subjectively— while the individual uses stocks of
knowledge, this use is driven by the individual’s subjective awareness of
the world and pragmatic valences
2. Three levels of coherence produced by individual
a. Durée: pure experience in unmarked time (unity exists below the
level of conscious awareness, but they form a basic sense of unity
in life and self for the individual)
b. Intentionality is pragmatically motivated (heterogeneous and
incoherent worlds are thus not an issue)
c. Production of meaningful wholes out of separate experiences,
which in turn become an object for intentionality
Chapter Summary:
 To think like Schutz is to focus on the problem of meaning. Meaning always implies
a difference between objects and experiences on one hand, and the meaning attributed
to them on the other. In order to understand how people cope with the problem of
meaning, Schutz concentrates his work on the natural attitude in the lifeworld.
 Meaning is specifically created through intentionality. Intentionality implies that
meaning is subjective and is created through a backward accounting. But
intentionality involves more than simply paying attention to a thing. Intentional
objects are perceived in fields of actions and relationships. Because intentionality
places the individual in an action mode toward the object, meaningful objects end up
being reflexively constructed. In addition to physical objects, experiences, and other
people, symbolic worlds can be the object of intentionality.
 The world toward which we become intentional is an already existing ordered
lifeworld. Stocks of knowledge are socially produced and impose an order on the
universe and human experience within it. These stocks of knowledge are available to
every one of us and are minimally modified as individuals encounter problems or
differences that their stocks of knowledge do not cover. Pragmatically sufficing
generates a taken-for-grantedness about and continuity for social meaning, thus
making it appear real and objective. Stocks of knowledge are further ordered through
social differentiation and individual structures of relevance.
 The production of meaning may imply the problem of solipsism—reduction of all
meaning and reality to individual experience. However, posing this problem
overlooks the fact that collective stocks of knowledge, in particular, language, are the
primary data that individuals must master. That being the case, meaning and reality
are intrinsically objective and intersubjective. In other words, meaning is always
formed in, around, and through relations with others. We understand the meaning of
self and other through stocks of knowledge and, specifically, typifications. This
implies that varying degrees of anonymity are associated with meaning production.
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
Quite a bit of postmodern theory focuses on the relationships among capitalism, mass
media, and meaning. The argument is basically a structural one wherein problems
created at the macro level produce almost automatic effects for people. Thus,
because capitalism and mass media have trivialized and fragmented culture, the
individual’s experience of meaning, reality, and self are fragmented and flat as well.
However, Schutz’s theory is a micro level theory of meaning production. Because
people are pragmatically motivated to create meaning, and because meaning is
produced through intentionality (a reflexive glance that synthesizes discrete and
diverse experiences into a whole narrative), then the postmodern concerns about
culture at the macro level may be misplaced.
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