Abstract
In this chapter I intend to propose a phenomenological approach to the problem of the synthesis of analytical data – of which social indicators are a subset. Phenomenology is a “theoretical practice” (Husserl 1959) that is realized as a rigorous description of experience (which is, as such, subjective and inter-subjective) in its totality, aimed at understanding its fundamental structures (Husserl 1959, 1976; Scheler 1986).
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Notes
- 1.
The connection with the subject gives an essential contribution to the establishment of sense of any given object – just like the connection with the world belongs to the nature of every subject. It is only by assuming the connection which what we call “experience” consists in as original and constitutive that we can avoid both a radical mind-body dualism and the equal and opposite reductions of one of the two poles into the other. These two perspectives would lead respectively to the absolutization or the negation of subjective will, as well as to the corresponding negation or absolutization of objective reality. Both a radical dualism and an absolutization of one of the two poles would give rise to unresolvable theoretical and practical problems.
- 2.
One should on the other hand enquire as to whether even more profoundly than the tendency to oppose theory and practice (the former being abstract and the latter concrete) there may be an even more sketchy paradigm, one that equates the concrete with what is material and the abstract (which in this case tends to be synonymous with “inexistent” and “illusory”) with what is not.
- 3.
As it sometimes presents itself as an intuition of an existing reality (as in the case of “natural” values that are somehow permanent or at least recurring), sometimes as an institution/production of a “new” reality (as in the case of values that present themselves as such based on convention). In actual fact, this subjectification occurs in terms of an interpretation that presents both these characters (descriptive and interpretative), though each time in varying degrees and modalities.
- 4.
We will not go into the issue of the nature of this relation of implication; it can in fact be explained as an institution by the identification of the consciousness of the present, or vice-versa as an opening to the possibility of the identification starting from the consciousness of spatiality as contemporaneity; or again, as co-originality of the two phenomena of consciousness.
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Sacconaghi, R. (2017). Building Knowledge. Between Measure and Meaning: A Phenomenological Approach. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Complexity in Society: From Indicators Construction to their Synthesis. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 70. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60595-1_2
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