Abstract
“Neither common sense nor science can proceed without departing from the strict consideration of what is actual in experience.” This statement by A. N. Whitehead is at the foundation of his analysis of the Organization of Thought.1 Even the thing perceived in everyday life is more than a simple sense presentation.2 It is a thought object, a construct of a highly complicated nature, involving not only particular forms of time-successions in order to constitute it as an object of one single sense, say of sight,3 and of space relations in order to constitute it as a sense-object of several senses, say of sight and touch,4 but also a contribution of imagination of hypothetical sense presentations in order to complete it.5 According to Whitehead, it is precisely the last-named factor, the imagination of hypothetical sense presentation, “which is the rock upon which the whole structure of common-sense thought is erected” 6 and it is the effort of reflective criticism “to construe our sense presentation as actual realization of the hypothetical thought object of perceptions.” 7 In other words, the so-called concrete facts of common-sense perception are not so concrete as it seems.
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Notes
Alfred North Whitehead: The Organization of Thought, London, 1917, now partially republished in The Aims of Education, New York, 1929, also as “Mentor-Book,” New York, 1949. The quotations refer to this edition. For the first quotation see p. 110.
Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World, New York, 1925, reprinted as “Mentor-Book,” New York, 1948, p. 52 ff.
John Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, New York, 1938, especially Chs. III, IV, VII, VIII, XII; See also the essay, “The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy” (1941) now in the collection Problems of Men, New York, 1946, p. 316f.
Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, Sees. 18–21 and 82-85; cf. also “Language, Language Disturbances and the Texture of Consciousness,” esp. pp. 277–283.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, 1945, p. 158.
William Graham Sumner, Folkways, A Study of the Sociological Importance of Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals, New York, 1906.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York, 1947, pp. 115ff; see also Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York, 1937, Ch. XVI.
Robert S. Lynd, Middletown in Transition, New York, 1937, Ch. XII, and Knowledge for What?, Princeton, 1939, pp. 38–63.
Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Problems einer Soziologie des Wissens, Leipzig, 1926, pp. 58ft. Cf. Howard Becker and Helmut Dahlke, “Max Scheler’s Sociology of Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. II, 1942, pp. 310–22, esp. 315.
Alfred Schutz, “The Well-Informed Citizen, an Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” Social Research, Vol. 13, 1946, pp. 463–472.
Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau dersozialen Welt, Vienna, 1932, 2nd edition 1960. See also Alfred Stonier and Karl Bode, “A New Approach to the Methodology of the Social Sciences,” Economica, Vol. V, November, 1937, pp. 406–424, esp. pp. 416ff.
George H. Mead: Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago, 1934, pp. 152–163.
George H. Mead, op. cit., PP. 173–175, 196–198, 203; “The Genesis of the Self,” Reprinted in The Philosophy Of The Present, Chicago, 1932, pp. 176–195; “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. X, 1913, pp. 374–380.
Edmund Husserl, Formate und transzendentale Logik, Halle, 1929, Sec. 74, p. 167; Erfahrung und Urteil, Sec. 24, Sec. 51b.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, Modern Library edition, p. 190.
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Schutz, A. (1962). Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action. In: Natanson, M. (eds) Collected Papers I. Phaenomenologica, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2851-6_1
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