Jan Strassheim

To clarify the structure of intersubjectivity that underlies any social world, Alfred Schutz developed a “mundane” phenomenology based on constructive criticism of Husserl’s transcendental approach and with reference to Max Weber and Henri Bergson. This chapter addresses Schutz’s understanding of the relation between ego and alter ego as the focal point of intersubjectivity. His analysis hinges on “types” which mediate between lived experience in its fullness (Erleben) and selectively articulated experience (Erfahrung). I argue that Schutz’s analysis, unfinished during his lifetime, can help us identify a problem which also applies to more recent work such as Dieter Lohmar’s. By itself, a tendency of experience to follow types only allows for “passive” ways of being open to another person. To grasp the relation between ego and alter that makes our everyday intersubjectivity possible, we need to assume an additional tendency, an “active” openness which inherently motivates our experience to transcend types.

Two seminal but unconnected relevance theories of communication are compared: one found in Alfred Schutz's philosophy, and one developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in a cognitive-science framework. The comparison is meant to strengthen both sides by integrating their advantages, and to prompt further discussion between these and other relevance accounts. Both theories, it is argued, aim to grasp and explain the fact, unaccounted for by code-like rules (e.g. of language), that people interact in context in a routine yet flexible way. Both investigate a dynamics of selectivity in experience making certain selections ‘relevant’ to an individual, which interactants exploit for coordination. Three differences between the theories are examined, and specific integrations encouraged: (a) The central problematic of inter-individual ascriptions of relevance remains underdeveloped with Sperber/Wilson. Schutz's idea of ongoing ‘typification’ is proposed as an amendment. (b) Schutz lacks a concise notion of relevance. Sperber/Wilson's two-sided concept paves the way for a different concept meeting requirements identified in the article and captures the interlocking of routine and flexibility in interaction. (c) Sperber/Wilson overly restrict the range of experience powering their theory. This is shown for individual goals, whose inclusion via the recommended concepts of typification and relevance is suggested.

Schließt soziale Koordination, zumal in ihren modernen Formen, das leibliche Individuum, seine Fülle und seinen unmittelbaren Bezug zu anderen, einzigartigen Menschen aus? Oder zerfällt sie umgekehrt in eine Vielzahl individueller Perspektiven? Diese Fragen durchziehen die Philosophie und Soziologie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Beide Disziplinen setzen dabei auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen an. Das Zusammenspiel zwischen individuellen Perspektiven, Interaktionen im Hier und Jetzt sowie gemeinsamen Welten, die unser Leben überdauern, wird oft durch Sprache erklärt. Der Gebrauch von Sprache jedoch setzt ein Zusammenspiel der Ebenen voraus, statt es zu begründen. Dieses Buch geht darum anders vor: Individuum, Interaktion und gemeinsame Welt, so die These, sind drei Dimensionen ein und desselben Zusammenhangs. In einer kritischen Weiterentwicklung von Alfred Schütz’ Sozialtheorie wird mit Hilfe des Begriffspaars „Sinn“ und „Relevanz“ gezeigt, wie die drei Dimensionen sich gegenseitig hervorbringen, strukturieren und in offenen Prozessen verändern. Damit wird eine innere Verbindung zwischen Philosophie und Soziologie sichtbar.

Jürgen Habermas seminally criticized Alfred Schutz. This paper traces the disagreement back to a different role of idealization. Schutz’s social theory is based on “types” as idealizations with an inherent dynamics, while Habermas’s social theory is based on ideally stable “rules”. First, a rule model of linguistic communication is assessed against analyses from linguistics and the philosophy and sociology of language. A rule model, it is found, fails to meet its theoretical goal of explaining linguistic communication. Hypothetical rules of language would not explain our intuitive understanding of the minimal propositional contents expressed by utterances. The rules would be both insufficient and unreliable in every single instance of language use. Against this background, the relation between language and “lifeworld” is then re-evaluated. A lifeworld cannot build on a rule model of language as its foundation. Nor can it supplement such a model in order to save it. Unlike a rule model, Schutz’s claim that language and lifeworld are interconnected and structured by “types” can accommodate the flexibility and precision of linguistic communication. While further research is needed, this conclusion indicates that phenomenology has been unduly neglected in social philosophy and should receive as much attention as it has in sociology.

Can there be “languages of food” in Nelson Goodman’s sense of “languages of art”? Food appears like a borderline case because of its strong dependence on context and on the individuals involved. We seem to have difficulty either comparing food with language or seeing it as art. This is at odds with the fact that food has been recognized as an art form for decades by art institutions. The paper approaches this problem on a level often neglected in the discussion: pragmatics, the application of language in context. Cognitive scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber have shown that the use of language is ultimately based not on rules, but on relevance. Relevance in turn depends on contexts and individuals. Such dependence, therefore, does not make food a borderline case. Rather, it is something that food and language have in common. But can we use a concept of relevance to analyze food? Following the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, relevance has two sides, termed here “typicality” and “spontaneity”. Both sides of relevance are found to shape our experience of food in striking ways. Food is a particularly clear example of a more general, relevance-driven context dependence of both language and the arts.

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.

This paper relates the concept of relevance to its biological foundations by combining Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology and Helmuth Plessner’s theory of organic life and philosophical anthropology. Relevance interlinks human sign use with the human “lifeworld” (Husserl) as a whole. The biological foundations of relevance, in turn, interlink that lifeworld with the “world of life” that includes us among other lifeforms. I analyze human relevance as an interplay of two tendencies, termed “closedness” and “openness,” that underlies our production of “meaning” (Schutz). Relevance in this general sense involves not only the mind, but also the body of homo sapiens. To provide a unified theoretical framework, I reconstruct Plessner’s “philosophical biology.” According to Plessner, organic life consists in a tension between closedness and openness. This tension unfolds through the “levels” of plants, animals, and humans. Plessner’s analysis of humans as “excentric” animals helps explain the two tendencies that drive human relevance and distinguish our experience from that of our closest animal relatives. At the same time, Plessner traces a robust continuity between us and other lifeforms. The human “level” merely makes “explicit” certain elements (including the Cartesian distinction between “mind” and “body”) that all organisms implicitly possess.

Alfred Schutz’s theory of the social world, often neglected in philosophy, has the potential to capture the interplay of identity and difference which shapes our action, interaction, and experience in everyday life. Compared to still dominant identity-based models such as that of Jürgen Habermas, who assumes a coordination of meaning built on the idealisation of stable rules, Schutz’s theory is an important step forward. However, his central notion of a “type” runs into a difficulty which requires constructive criticism. Against the background of Schutz’s theory of meaning inspired by Bergson and Husserl, his idea of types “taken for granted until further notice” is shown to express a primacy of identity which, in the final analysis, leads into the implausible scenario of ‘ubiquitous tunnel vision’. This makes it necessary to go beyond Schutz and assume an inherently motivated tendency towards difference in meaning termed ‘spontaneity’. Where spontaneity and the opposed tendency towards identity of meaning work together in the application of types, they enable embodied subjects to interact with the world and with each other in the routine yet flexible and sometimes innovative ways which we all know.

Alfred Schutz made a point which is crucial for understanding communi­cation and social coordination. Through symbols, signs or indications we experience that which transcends our experience. However, Schutz never solved the conceptual problems his claim implied. A solution is proposed through constructive criticism of Schutz. Symbols, signs and indications are based on typical expectations. In contrast, ‘experiences of transcendence’ are analyzed as experiences which deviate from typical expectations due to a tendency inherent to experience, as opposed to deviations prompted by the frustration of types. Such experiences are shown to be constitutive of our use of symbols, our use of language, and our relation to individual others. Experiences of transcendence do not passively reflect the situation, but they are motivated in their selectivity by ‘anxiety.’ Anxiety is phenomenologically under­stood as the expectation of atypical experiences. While anxiety motivates deviations from types, it is itself motivated by previous frustrations of types. Through this dynamics of motivation, experiences of transcendence and typical experiences refer to each other. Even so, the two categories are logically distinct. The possibility of communication and social coordination can only be explained by assuming, in addition to shared types, anxiety as a shared readiness to transcend types.

The word “relevance” seems to have originated in legal practice. Against this background, an attempt is made to clarify A. Schutz’s theory of relevance by referring it to notions found in legal thinking. The main point is to contribute to an understanding of the role of relevance and irrelevance at the level of social order which is often modelled on a legal system. Schutz’s concept of relevance reflects a tension between general patterns and the dynamic of their application which has been discussed, in reference to laws, as the problem of “equity” (Aristotle). Schutz’s reference to types taken for granted “until further notice” expresses this tension in the form of a legal “presumption” (G. W. Leibniz). Through the concept of a legal “state of affairs”, the analysis is referred to the role of “critique” (L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot). Against the suspicion that a relevance theory may describe something like an “order of the visible” (J. Rancière) which would suppress critics by making them “invisible”, it is argued that an analysis of relevance based on Schutz may help account both for the stability of social order and for the fact that social order can, in principle, be changed through criticism.

Contrary to widespread assumptions, post-truth politicians formally adopt a rhetoric of ‘truth’ but turn it against established experts. To explain one central factor behind this destructive strategy and its success with voters, I consider Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, who from 1922 onwards helped develop and popularize a political rhetoric of ‘truth’ in terms of scientific expertise. In Hayek’s influential version, market economics became the crucial expert field. Consequently, the 2008 financial crisis impacted attitudes towards experts more generally. But even sweeping rejection of experts continues to use the rhetoric, by now dominant, of expert truth. Paradoxically, this bipartisan language fuels division as opponents accuse each other of disregarding ‘truth itself’. Against the underlying metaphysics of context-free ‘facts’, John Dewey and Alfred Schutz recommend understanding truth as ‘presumptive’ knowledge produced within human practices, which can be robust but requires a readiness to engage in pluralistic and open-ended processes of (re-)contextualization.

All levels of semiosis, from the materiality of signs to their contents and the contexts of their application, are structured by a selectivity in human experience and action that foregrounds only a fraction of the situation here and now. Before Sperber and Wilson, concepts of “relevance” were proposed in both semiotics and phenomenology to analyze this selectivity. Building critically on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, I suggest that a productive way to capture the fundamental role of relevance in processes of meaning-making is to see relevance as the outcome of an interplay between two antagonistic tendencies. On the one hand, socially stabilized and individually sedimented “types” guide our experience and action along established patterns. On the other hand, we are actively open to new and unexpected aspects; we are ready to deviate from types and to change typical patterns. Only both tendencies taken together account for our semiotic behavior in context. Spatial metaphors such as “ground” illuminate only a part of this interplay. Due to the double movement in what becomes relevant to us, the typical ground on which we produce and interpret signs is constantly being shifted and re-grounded, which keeps driving on an endless process of semiosis.

Alfred Schutz agreed with Husserl that our objective world is based on an interrelation among a plurality of subjects. But to grasp this “intersubjective” dimension, Schutz argued, we need an “anthropology on a phenomenological basis.” A key notion of such an anthropology is that we experience the world and the other subjects as “transcending” us. Human experience is inherently open to an “Other.” However, Schutz’s philosophy of a transcendence immanent to experience remained unfinished. It can be further developed with the help of Kant, to whom Schutz had referred since the 1920s. Kant’s distinction between “appearances” and “things in themselves” can be read as an anthropological account of how human experience propels itself into the unknown without ever crossing its boundaries.

Relevance and irrelevance, it is argued, are constitutive to our access to “information objects” on three interconnected levels: (1) access to the information object itself, (2) the information gained from it, (3) the use of that information. Relevance selectively shapes our experience and action, but the “irrelevance” of what is left out is not simply the opposite or absence of relevance. The complex relation between relevance and irrelevance expresses itself in different shades of knowledge and ignorance, and in a fuzzy border between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. This implies both chances and risks for communication as a process of producing and exchanging information objects. In a second step, previous research on relevance and irrelevance is sketched with respect to different traditions and approaches: (1) Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch; (2) Paul Grice, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson; (3) library and information science; (4) signs and language; and (5) epistemology and logic. Finally, the role of the word “relevance”, which is not found in all languages, is briefly considered after distinguishing the explicit reflection of relevance from the constitutive role of relevance, which often remains implicit.