[George Walsh writes the introduction to this work]

xv Alfred Schutz is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the present century.

xxiii Schutz agrees with Weber that action is defined through meaning

xxiv looking-forward into the future is essential to the concept of action.

xxiv The project is thus a complex of meaning or context of meaning... within which any one phase of the ongoing action finds its significance.

xxvi The meaning-content of a cultural product is independent of its creator. It can be regarded as something that can be created or enacted repeatedly by anyone or everyone. This is what Schutz, following Husserl, calls "the ideality of the 'I-can-do-it-again.' "

xxvi-xxvii As Weber had showed, the social world is properly understood in terms of the concept "social action," which Schutz now defines as an action whose in-order-to motive contains some reference to another's stream of consciousness. The motive of the action... may be to affect the other... If the situation is such that there exists an objective probability of a reciprocal intentional transaction or "cross reference," then a social relationship exists.

xxviii-xxix The fundamental tool of social science is, Weber claimed, the ideal type.

p.9 Sociology's task is to make a scientific study of social phenomenon.

p.10 Human behavior is thus already meaningful when it takes place, and it is already intelligible at the level of daily life, although, to be sure, in a vague and confused way.

p.12 Whoever, then, wishes to analyze the basic concepts of the social sciences must be willing to embark on a laborious philosophical journey, for the meaning-structure of the social world can only be deduced from the most primitive and general characteristics of consciousness.

p.13 Only after we have a firm grasp of the concept of meaning as such will we be able to analyze step by step the meaning-structure of the social world.

p.15 social action... is action based on the behavior of others.

p.16 Weber... requires that the person who is engaged in social action... be aware of and interpret the meaning of the other's behavior.

p.17 social action must be oriented to the behavior of others.

p.19 the meaning of an action is one thing, and the degree of clarity with which we grasp that meaning is quite another.

p.35 What in a cursory glance we see as meaningful has already been constituted as such by a previous intentional operation of our consciousness.

p.38 if we have any doubts about the objective meaning of a person's conduct, we ask ourselves, "What is the fellow up to?" and so on. To this extent we can say of every meaning-interpretation of the social world that it is "pragmatically determined."

p.38 [Weber] The actor attaches a meaning to his action.

p.39 An act is therefore something always enacted... and can be considered independently of the acting subject and of his experiences.

p.51 as Husserl says, I live in my Acts, whose living intentionality carries me over from one Now to the next.

p.51 when, by my act of reflection, I turn my attention to my living experience, I am no longer taking up my position within the stream of pure duration, I am no longer simply living within that flow. The experiences are apprehended, distinguished, brought into relief, marked out from one another; the experiences which were constituted as phases within the flow of duration now become objects of attention as constituted experiences. What had been constituted as a phase now stands out as a full-blown experience, no matter whether the Act of attention is one of reflection or of reproduction... For the Act of attention - and this is of major importance for the study of meaning - presupposes an elapsed passed-away experience - in short, one that is already in the past

p.57 every action is a spontaneous activity oriented toward the future. This orientation towards the future is... a property of all primary constituting processes... Each such process contains within itself intentionalities of lived experience that are directed toward the future.

p.57 "Reflection" in the broader sense is not confined to retention and reproduction, according to Husserl. Protentions into the future are a part of every memory, and in the natural standpoint they are merged with retentions. "Every primordially constitutive process is animated by protentions, which... constitute and intercept what is coming, as such, in order to bring it to fulfillment" [JLJ - from wikipedia, retention and protention are key aspects of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of temporality. Retention is the process whereby a phase of a perceptual act is retained in our consciousness. Protention is our anticipation of the next moment. The moment that has yet to be perceived.]

p.59 The analysis of action shows that it is always carried out in accordance with a plan more or less implicitly preconceived. Or, to use a term of Heidegger's, an action always has "the nature of a project". But the projection of an action is in principle carried out independently of all real action. Every projection of action is rather a phantasying of action, that is, a phantasying of spontaneous activity, but not the activity itself. It is an intuitive advance picturing which may or may not include belief, and if it does, can believe positively or negatively or with any degree of certainty.

p.60 what is visible to the mind is the completed act, not the ongoing process that constitutes it. It is the act, therefore, that is projected, not the action.

p.61 what distinguishes action from behavior is that action is the execution of a projected act... the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act... An action, we submit, is oriented toward its corresponding projected act.

p.61 the actor projects his action as if it were already over and done with and lying in the past. It is a full-blown, actualized event, which the actor pictures and assigns to its place in the order of experience given to him at the moment of projection. Strangely enough, therefore, because it is pictured as completed, the planned act bears the temporal character of pastness... The fact that is it thus pictured as if it were simultaneously past and future can be taken care of by saying that it is thought of in the future perfect tense.

p.62 The unity of the action is constituted by the fact that the act already exists "in the project," which will be realized step by step through the action. The unity of the act is a function of the span or breadth of the project.

p.63 An action is conscious in the sense that, before we carry it out, we have a picture in our mind of what we are going to do. This is the "projected act."

p.82 A scheme of our experience is a meaning-context which is a configuration of our past experiences embracing conceptually the experiential objects to be found in the latter but not the process by which they were constituted.
  By defining the schemes of experience as contexts of meaning, we have given them both a formal and a material definition.

p.85 Whenever a phenomenon turns out to be unexplainable, it means that something is wrong with our scheme.

p.85 no lived experience can be exhausted by a single interpretive scheme. Rather, every lived experience is open to numerous interpretations (noeses) without in any way detracting from the identity of its noematic nucleus.

p.87 We saw that every action is carried out according to a project and is oriented to an act phantasied in the future perfect tense as already executed. The unity of action is constituted exclusively by this project, whose span may be very different depending on how explicitly it is planned

p.88 Only a few people out of the millions who use the telephone know anything about the physical processes involved when they "put in a call." The result is all the average caller cares about, and he takes everything else for granted.

p.90 Every in-order-to motivation presupposes such a stock of experience which has been elevated to an "I-can-do-it-again" status.

p.96 Whoever seeks to order a concrete lived experience within the total context of his experience orients his procedure according to an in-order-to motive of interpretation. He does this by choosing from all the interpretive schemes in the store of his past experience the one that is relevant for the solution of his problem.

p.118-119 When we look at a symbol, which is always in a broad sense an external object, we do not look upon it as object but as representative of something else. When we "understand" a sign, our attention is focused not on the sign itself but upon that for which it stands... the interpretation of signs in terms of what they signify is based on previous experience and is therefore itself the function of a scheme.

p.120 The interpreter need only "know the meaning" of the sign. In other words, it is necessary only that a connection be established in his mind between the interpretive scheme proper to the object which is the sign and the interpretive scheme proper to the object which it signifies.

p.120 A sign system is a meaning-context which is a configuration formed by interpretive schemes; the sign-user or the sign-interpreter places the sign within this context of meaning.

p.121 The sign system is present to him who understands it as a meaning-context of a higher order between previously experienced signs.

p.122 the understanding of a sign (to be more precise, the possibility of its interpretation within a given system) points back to a previous decision on our part to accept and use this sign as an expression for a certain content of our consciousness.
  Every sign system is therefore a scheme of our experience. This is true in two different senses. First, it is an expressive scheme; in other words, I have at least once used the sign for that which it designates, used it either in spontaneous activity or in imagination. Second, it is an interpretive scheme; in other words, I have already in the past interpreted the sign as the sign of that which it designates. [JLJ - what is essential is not experience itself, apparently, but rather the human-created scheme of the experience.]

p.122 To master fully a sign system... it is necessary to have a clear knowledge of the meaning of the individual signs within the system. This is possible only if the sign system and its component individual signs are known both as expressive schemes and as interpretive schemes for previous experience of the knower. In both functions... every sign points back to the experiences which preceded its constituting... a sign is only intelligible in terms of those lived experiences constituting it which it designates. Its meaning consists in its translatibility

p.123 A meaning is connected with a sign, insofar as the latter's significance within a given sign system is understood both for the person using the sign and for the person interpreting the sign... he who "masters" the sign system will interpret the sign in its meaning-function to refer to that which it designates, regardless of who is using it or in what connection. The indispensable reference of the sign to previous experience makes it possible for the interpreter to repeat the syntheses that have constituted this interpretive or expressive scheme. Within the sign system, therefore, the sign has the ideality of the "I can do it again."

p.124 Everyone using or interpreting a sign associates with the sign a certain meaning having its origin in the unique quality of the experiences in which he once learned to use the sign.

p.131-132 to say, as we do, that for the user of a sign the sign stands in a meaning-context involves a number of separate facts which must be disentangled.
  First of all, whenever I make use of a sign, those lived experiences signified by that sign stand for me in a meaning-context... In the second place, for me the sign must already be part of a sign system. Otherwise I would not be able to make use of it. A sign must already have been interpreted before it can be used... Third, the Act of selecting and using the sign is a special meaning-context for the sign-user to the extent that each use of a sign is an expressive action... Fourth, the meaning-context "sign-using as act" can serve as the basis for a superimposed meaning-context... Fifth... the communicating act has as its goal... that its message should motivate the person cognizing it to a particular attitude or piece of behavior.

p.133 not all evidences are signs, but all signs are evidences. For an evidence to be a sign, it must be capable of becoming an element in a sign system with the status of coordinating scheme... under "evidences" we mean to include... judgment that has been produced by thought

p.145 only a previously projected piece of behavior can be oriented, since orientation necessarily presupposes a project.

p.205 the ideal type varies with the interests of the person who constructs it.

p.232 a construct is appropriate and to be recommended only if it derives from acts that are not isolated but have a certain probability of repetition or frequency.

p.233 the actor's choice of goals, his in-order-to projects, is determined via ideal-typical construction. Once this is done - that is, once the actor's goal is defined - it is only a matter of selecting those means for him that experience has shown to be appropriate.