How phenomenology redefines the notion of “reasoning” in sociology

A critique of sociological practice theory

In a previous note, I outlined the Schutzian contribution to a sociological egology that can construct analytical ego-models that can account for patterns of behavior of social actors. I used the term “reasoning” to describe the thematic, interpretive, and motivational activity actors engage as a means to describe a key element of the ego-model. Upon greater thought, and some inspiration from Don Ihde’s excellent Experimental Phenomenology, I thought it important to more clearly define the term “reasoning” as outlined from a phenomenological perspective given the many risks that this term carries in social scientific use.

There are at least three ways that the term “reasoning” can be understood from a sociological perspective. (1) The term could be understood in a rationalistic way to mean some logical process of means-ends or cost-benefit analysis carried out by the actor in a manner that is consequential for patterns of action. (2) The term could alternatively be understood in a culturalist way to suggest an underlying “cultural script” that informs the actor’s mental process. Finally, reasoning could be understood as meaning the actor’s mode of behavior in the pragmatic mode, in which she (or they, for a collective actor) is/are engaged in either (1) or (2), but within some definitive limits of cultural understanding or sets of structural constraints. In the former variant, one can speak of good ol’ “bounded rationality,” which presumes that the actor is rational but operates with limited information or under sets of external constraints. In the latter we are dealing with of some form of what goes under the brand of “practice theory.” In this subtype, cultural scripts (or “toolkits,” habitus, or what have you) still govern the mental process but within some degree of pragmatic and/or situational agency. The actor is hence more like Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur than Garfinkel’s “cultural dupe.”

A phenomenological approach would define as problematic each of these interpretations. I cannot here rehearse all the criticisms for each approach. I will instead stick to Schutz’s sociological egology and the proposed concept of ego-models and define “reasoning” from the phenomenological point of view. Any criticisms I offer will be mainly directed (for reasons that will become obvious) against practice theory.

To turn to Husserl himself, the problem of perception and cognition is a problem of a peculiar kind, one that is not of the domain of formal but of transcendental logic. “Transcendental” here simply means “the conditions under which” – in this case, logical reasoning – is possible. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons why Husserl’s project was more philosophically radical than commonly understood.)

In more concrete terms, what Husserl argues is that perception and cognition is always a creative act. What I perceive is not a copy of a pre-existing world, it is instead a creation of a world that may or may not be taken for the world in the sense of physical reality. As Husserl writes, “the world I perceive, and my idea of it, are the product of intentional acts, and through these acts I confer a sense of reality” (Husserl, 1980: 126). Husserl captures this process in his concept of intentionality.

As Ihde further explains, intentionality is, in an analytical sense, a correspondence theory of perception – the perceiver (experiencer) interprets the world based on directionality towards a set of objects that have been selected out of a possible field of perception. The experience of the world, and certainty of its objects, is not an experience that is given haphazardly to an experiencer, or an image that presents itself mentally to the experiencer as an internal representation of externally received stimuli. Instead, certainty of objects of the world is co-determined by the experiencer’s intentionality that directs (and thus pre-forms or anticipates) what the object is, as well as by the experiencer’s mode of experience that determines how (the light in which) the object appears.

The phenomenological interpretation of "reasoning" is thus distinct from both the rationalistic and the practice-theoretic approach. Reasoning denotes the mode of experience in which experience is actively constructed, with intentionality as the overarching structure that allows for the production of a meaningful world. Reasoning is, from a phenomenological point of view, the process of actively constructing experience by selecting certain modes of interpretation out of a possible field of interpretations and then directing them towards certain objects in the world.

The ego model, then, is not principally about identifying logical and/or cultural schemas that govern how actors rationalize their actions and situations in terms of propositional statements, but describing (1) the principles of discrimination that lead or predispose actors towards a select a set of object-themes out of the possibilities given in a field, and (2) the principles of judgment that predispose actors (given facts of their own situatedness or mode of experience) to particular attitudes towards or interpretations of those object-themes (which, subsequently, have motivational relevances). The facts of reasoning in the logical mode – whether of a pragmatic, “cultural,” or habituated sort – come only after these “presuppositions of reasoning” have been identified. Put differently, the phenomenological insight is that prior to the carrying out of any logical procedures, there exist in all social actors presuppositions about and attitudes towards the objects of such calculus (including “cultural” notions about what objects may or may not be made subject to such calculus), most of which remain unthematized in the process of perception and cognition. The phenomenologist tends to these pre-cognitive building blocks of cognition, including facts pertaining to the experiencer herself, that constitute an experiencer’s sense of reality.

The social scientist ignores these building blocks at their great peril. The practice turn, with its tendency to describe processes of habituation and habituated action, or alternatively the “pragmatism of toolkits/cultural scripts,” risks overlooking actors’ contextualized sensibilities – what the phenomenologist might call the “affordances” of the situation – that ultimately drive actors’ course of action. In addition, the practice turn tends to overlook the fact that actors are often acutely aware of the central themes of their practices, and temporally bracket their experiences so that they can reflect and perhaps even anticipate their likely courses of action.

The ego model thus promises to provide a useful corrective to practice theory and rational actor models, with its emphasis on the dynamic interactions between the situatedness of actors and the presuppositions underlying the objects of the socio-material world that the phenomenologist emphasizes. The egological approach, in privileging actors’ situated understanding of the world, can help account for the flexibility of social life and provides a fuller account of situated action.