Phenomenological Sociology - General Thesis of The Natural Attitude

General Thesis of The Natural Attitude

The general thesis of the natural attitude is the ideational foundation for the fact-world of our straightforward, common sense social experience. It unites the world of individual objects into a unified world of meaning, which we assume is shared by any and all who share our culture (Schütz:1962). It forms the underpinning for our thoughts and actions. It is the projected assumption, or belief, in a naturally occurring social world that is both factually objective in its existential status, and unquestioned in its "natural" appearance; social objects have the same existential "thing" status as objects occurring in nature .

Although it is often referred to as the "General Thesis of the Natural Attitude", it is not a thesis in the formal sense of the term, but a non-thematic assumption, or belief, that underlies our sense of the objectivity and facticity of the world, and the objects appearing in this world. The facticity of this world of common sense is both unquestioned and virtually "unquestionable"; it is sanctionable as to its status as that which "is", and that which "everyone", or, at least, "any reasonable person", agrees to be the case with regard to the factual character of the world.

As far as traditional social science is concerned, this taken-for-granted world of social facts is the starting and end point for any and all investigations of the social world. It provides the raw, observable, taken-for-granted "data" upon which the findings of the social sciences are idealized, conceptualized, and offered up for analysis and discourse. Within traditional social science, this "data" is formulated into a second order world of abstractions and idealizations constituted in accordance with these sciences' pre-determined interpretive schemes (Husserl:1989).

Schutz's phenomenological descriptions are made from within the phenomenoloigcal attitude, after the phenomenological reduction, which serves to suspend this assumption, or belief, and reveal the phenomena occurring within the natural attitude as objects-for-consciousness.