1. Agency and Interpretation: Alfred Schutz and the Problem of Choice.
- Author
-
Williams, Jerry
- Subjects
CHOICE (Psychology) ,SOCIAL sciences ,AUSTRIANS ,ECONOMICS - Abstract
In this essay it is argued that Schutz's thoughts about choice represent a significant tension in his work, specifically a tension between his desire to reground and rehumanize positivist social science in the bedrock of human experience, and his observations that human experience is dominated by taken-for-grantedness, habit, and half awareness - not at the human world most of us envision. It is argued that this tension arises from Schutz's intellectual foundations in Austrian economics where choice and rationality play key roles in economic theory and his connections to the Post Enlightenment, the antipositivist intellectual backlash of Bergsonian metaphysics, and Husserl's phenomenology. As a result of this tension, Schutz emphasizes that choice is indeed part of the human experience but that it is made more complicated by three factors: the time dimension in which a choice is made or attributed to a past action, the intentional stance of the social actor making the choice, and the taken-for-granted mindset in which potential courses of action are conceived. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007