p.3 As a thinker, Schutz was possessed by a single purpose, that of laying the foundations of a phenomenological sociology. [JLJ - Phenomenological sociology (Wikipedia) is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness. The object of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the Lebenswelt, or "Life-world". The task of phenomenological sociology, like that of every other phenomenological investigation, is to account for, or describe, the formal structures of this object of investigation in terms of subjectivity, as an object-constituted-in-and-for-consciousness.]

p.9 No causal laws of human conduct can be established; a sociologist deals at best with "typical chances" that certain factual constellations, accessible to observation, will lead to certain courses of social action.

p.11 the work of Schutz may be considered a synthesis of Husserl and Weber.

p.15 Schutz focused on this life-world from various angles. First, he analyzed the "natural attitude" with the help of which man operates in the life-world... This stance is essentially pragmatic... Second, Schutz dealt with the dominant factors which circumscribe the conduct of any particular individual in the life-world... Third, Schutz dealt with the means by which an individual orients himself in life situations, his "store of experience" and his "stock of knowledge on hand." He cannot interpret his experiences and observations, he cannot define the situation in which he finds himself, and he cannot make any plans for even the next minutes without consulting his own stock of knowledge.

p.24 the world... Its myriads of phenomena, each of them a unique occurrence, are sorted out into a limited number of classes: similar phenomena are considered the same, called by the same name, and considered alike in important characteristics. This is a typified world, said Schutz, and he dealt extensively with its typifications.

p.25-26 Schutz's definition of three key terms is given: conduct, a term reserved for actually or potentially meaningful active experiences in general; action, a term designating conduct which has been "devised in advance"; and working, a term referring to action which has been planned in order to bring about a change in the outer state of affairs with the help of bodily movements.

p.26 An action, as conscious conduct, is distinguished from all other conduct, primarily by the existence of the guideline for it, the "project" of the action, its operational plan. The project, said Schutz with John R. Dewey, is a "dramatic rehearsal of future action"; an imagining or phantasying of the planned action as already finished. Projects, of course, are based on various degrees of knowledge of the factors involved; they may be rather precise and detailed, or they may exist in the form of a relatively vague outline. [JLJ - Dewey reference appears to be from Human Nature and Conduct: an Introduction to Social Psychology, 1922, p.190, "deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action... Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon... The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable."]

p.27 Planning is anticipation of future events. Typifications play a role in all anticipations. Basing himself on Husserl, Schutz explained that they depend on two typical "idealizations"; that of "and so forth and so on": what happened in the past can and will recur in the future; and that of "I can do it again": I can repeat my actions. With these idealizations, men express their confidence in the basic structure of the life world: it remains unchanged, it can be relied on in future conduct. This is so even though any experience has its "horizon of indeterminacy," making absolute certainty impossible.

p.27 Going beyond Husserl, Schutz explained the remaining uncertainty in terms of two factors. First, anticipations are necessarily based on typical expectations in typical contexts. Actual conduct, however, at best approaches these typicalities; it makes for deviation of results from anticipations. Second, during the execution of a project, the actor's system of relevance itself undergoes changes. Consequently, he sees the finished result, in retrospect, in a different light from that in which he saw its imagined result at the outset. Foresight differs from hindsight.

p.33 Subjective understanding is motivational understanding... At a minimum, that is, in the case of purely factual dealings, one merely looks for the typical motives of typical actors, thereby moving out of the sphere of genuine subjective understanding into that of predefined conceptions.

p.40 Man... accepts the social world as a whole, including the large regions forever beyond his grasp and experience; and he accepts ...its extensions into both the past and the future. He often copes with such transcendences by constructing, or accepting, ordered systems of interpretation of the meaning complex in question... These interpretive "systems" are themselves meaning complexes of a transcendental order; they assume the characteristics of "realities" of their own. Reference to such realities demands the use of appresentational signs of a higher order. Schutz reserved the term, symbol, for the designation of such signs.

p.41 a symbol is the sign of a sign.

p.63 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, regardless of whether the attention in question is reflective or reproductive... Only from the point of view of the retrospective glance do there exist discrete experiences. Only the already experienced is meaningful, not that which is being experienced. For meaning is merely an operation of intentionality, which, however, only becomes visible to the reflective glance.

p.73-74 Man finds himself at any moment of his daily life in a biologically determined situation, that is, in a physical and sociocultural environment as defined by him... this definition of the situation... is the sedimentation of all man's previous experiences, organized in the habitual possessions of his stock of knowledge, at hand... This biographically determined situation includes certain possibilities of future practical or theoretical activities which shall be briefly called the "purpose at hand." It is this purpose at hand which defines those elements among all the others contained in such a situation which are relevant for this purpose. This system of relevances in turn determines... what traits of these have to be selected as characteristically typical and what others as unique and individual

p.74 Man in daily life... finds at any given moment a stock of knowledge at hand that serves him as a scheme of interpretation of his past and present experiences, and also determines his anticipations of things to come. This stock of knowledge has its particular history. It has been constituted in and by previous experiencing activities of our consciousness, the outcome of which has now become our habitual possession. Husserl, in describing the constituting process that is here involved, speaks graphically of the "sedimentation" of meaning.

p.91 the cultural pattern provides by its recipes typical solutions for typical problems available for typical actors.

p.96 Only a very small part of my knowledge of the world originates within my personal experience. The greater part is socially derived, handed down to me by my friends, my parents, my teachers and the teachers of my teachers. I am not only taught how to define the environment (that is, the typical features of the relative natural aspect of the world prevailing in the in-group as the unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things taken for granted until further notice), but also how typical constructs have to be formed in accordance with the system of relevances accepted from the anonymous unified point of view of the in-group. This includes ways of life, how to come to terms with the environment, efficient recipes for the use of typical means for bringing about typical ends in typical situations.

p.100 Certain facts, objects, and events are known to me as being interrelated in a more or less typical way

p.102 When we look at a symbol, which is always in a broad sense an external object, we do not look at 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... When we understand a sign, we... interpret the latter... through the schemes adequate to whatever it signifies... 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.103 A sign is by its very nature something used by a person to express a subjective experience.

p.104 the applicability of the scheme of that which is signified to the sign is itself an interpretive scheme based on experience... 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.106 Every sign system is therefore a scheme of our experience... To master fully a sign system... it is necessary to have a clear knowledge of the meaning of the individual signs within the system... As expressive scheme and as interpretive scheme a sign is only intelligible in terms of those lived experiences constituting it which it designates. Its meaning consists in its translatability, that is, its ability to lead us back to something known in a different way.

p.111 All our possible questioning for the unknown arises only within such a world of supposedly preknown things, and presupposes its existence. Or to use Dewey's terms, it is the indeterminate situation from which all possible inquiry starts with the goal of transforming it into a determinate one.

p.116 The factual world of our experience... is experienced from the outset as a typical one.

p.117 In other words, what has been experienced in the actual perception of one object is apperceptively transferred to any other similar object, perceived merely as to its type.

p.118 It is always a system of relevance that chooses from the vocabulary of my vernacular (and also from its syntactical structure) the relevant term, and that term is the typical pre-experienced generalization interesting me... in the present situation... As Husserl... has convincingly shown, all forms of recognition and identification, even of real objects of the outer world, are based on a generalized knowledge of the type of these objects or of the typical style in which they manifest themselves.

p.119 typifications of human individuals, of their course-of-action patterns, of their motives and goals...These types were formed in the main by others... as appropriate tools for coming to terms with things and men... The knowledge of these typifications and of their appropriate use is an inseparable element of the sociocultural heritage handed down to the child born into the group... it is, thus, socially derived. The sum-total of these various typifications constitutes a frame of reference in terms of which... the physical world has to be interpreted... in spite of its inconsistencies... is nonetheless sufficiently integrated and transparent to be used for solving most of the practical problems at hand.

p.119-120 the interpretation of the world in terms of types... is not the outcome of a process of... scientific conceptualization. The world... is experienced from the outset in terms of types... Thus, typifications on the commonsense level... emerge in the everyday experience of the world as taken for granted... They belong... to the prepredictive thinking.

p.120-121 A system of relevances and typifications... has various important functions:

 1. It determines which facts or events have to be treated as substantially - that is, typically - equal (homogeneous) for the purpose of solving in a typical manner typical problems that emerge or might emerge in situations typified as being equal (homogeneous).

 2. It transforms unique individual actions of unique human beings into typical functions of typical social roles, originating in typical motives aimed at bringing about typical ends... [JLJ - this is how we can 'evaluate' a unique situation - determine how it typically will turn out.]

 3. It functions as both a scheme of interpretation and as a scheme of orientation for each member of the in-group and constitutes therewith a universe of discourse among them...

 4. ...the establishment of a congruency between the typified scheme used by the actor as a scheme of orientation and by his fellow man as a scheme of interpretation, is enhanced if the scheme of typification is standardized...

 5. The socially approved system of typifications and relevances is the common field within which the private typifications and relevance structures of the individual members of the group originate.

p.125 Conduct which is devised in advance, that is, which is based upon a preconceived project, shall be called action, regardless of whether it is an overt or covert one.

p.130 we are conscious of an action only if we contemplate it as already over and done with, in short, as an act. This is true even of projects, for we project the intended action as an act in the future perfect tense.

p.134 As Professor John Dewey has pointed out, in our daily life we are largely preoccupied with the next step. Men stop and think only when the sequence of doing is interrupted.

p.135 We have seen that clearness and distinctness in the strict meaning of formal logic do not belong to the typical style of every-day thought.

p.137-138 It is... important... to realize that our actual experiences are not merely by retentions and recollections referred to our past experiences. Any experience refers likewise to the future... In commonsense thinking these anticipations and expectations follow basically the typical structures that have held good so far for our past experiences and are incorporated in our stock of knowledge at hand.
 Husserl handled this problem in investigating the underlying idealizations and formalizations that make anticipations in daily life possible at all... He calls them the idealization of "and so forth and so on" (und so weiter) and - its subjective correlate - the idealization of "I can do it again" (ich kann immer wieder). The former idealization implies the assumption, valid until counter-evidence appears, that what has been proved to be adequate knowledge so far will also in the future stands the test. The latter idealization implies the assumption, valid until counter-evidence appears, that, in similar circumstances, I may bring about my action a state of affairs similar to that I succeeded in producing by a previous similar action. In other words, these idealizations imply the assumption that the basic structure of the world as I know it, and therewith the type and style of my experiencing it and of my acting within it, will remain unchanged - unchanged, that it, until further notice. [JLJ - 'und so weiter' - and so on, 'ich kann immer wieder' - I can 'always again']

p.139 it is the system of relevances that determines the system of types under which our stock of knowledge at hand is organized.

p.142-143 This potentiality, this possibility of executing the project requires, for instance, that only ends and means believed by me to be within my actual or potential reach may be taken into account by my projecting in fancy... it is implied in the notion of such a project that the projected action, its end and its means remain compatible and consistent with these typical elements of the situation which according to our experience at hand at the time of projecting have warranted so far, the practicability, if not the success, of typically similar actions in the past. [JLJ - typical Schutz...]

p.152-153 In deliberation, Dewey says, "each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head. Although overt exhibition is checked by the pressure of contrary propulsive tendencies, this very inhibition gives habit a chance at manifestation in thought... "In thought as well as in overt action the objects experienced in following out a course of action attract, repel, satisfy, annoy, promote, and retard. Thus deliberation proceeds. To say that at last it ceases is to say that choice, decision, takes place. What then is choice? Simply hitting in imagination upon an object which furnishes an adequate stimulus to the recovery of overt action. "Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indifference. It is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences."

p.180 I cannot understand other people's acts without knowing the in-order-to or the because motives of such acts... It suffices, therefore, that I can reduce the other's act to its typical motives, including their reference to typical situations, typical ends, typical means, etc.

p.181 Social things are only understandable if they can be reduced to human activities; and human activities are only made understandable by showing their in-order-to or because motives.

p.194 Whenever I interact with anyone, I take for granted as a constant in that person a set of genuine because- or in-order-to motives. I do this on the ground of my own past experience of that particular person as well as of people generally. My own behavior toward that person is based in the first instance upon this taken-for-granted constellation of motives, regardless of whether they are his real motives or not... I "orient" my action to these motivational contexts of yours, as you "orient" yours to mine... When interacting with you within this realm, I witness how you react to my behavior, how you interpret my meaning, how my in-order-to motives trigger corresponding because-motives of your behavior.

p.248 How is it possible that an object, event, or fact within the reality of our daily life is coupled with an idea which transcends our experience of our everyday life?

p.271 Philosophers as different as James, Bergson, Dewey, Husserl, and Whitehead agree that the common-sense knowledge of everyday life is the unquestioned but always questionable background within which inquiry starts and within which alone it can be carried out.

p.272 A theory which aims at explaining social reality has to develop particular devices foreign to the natural sciences in order to agree with the common-sense experience of the social world. This is indeed what all theoretical sciences of human affairs - economics, sociology, the sciences of law, linguistics, cultural anthropology, etc. - have done. [JLJ - yes, even game theory.]

p.278-279 It is the main problem of the social sciences to develop a method in order to deal in an objective way with the subjective meaning of human action and that the thought of the social sciences have to remain consistent with the thought objects of common sense... The model constructs as described before fulfill these requirements if they are formed in accordance with the following postulates:

 (1) The postulate of logical consistency. The system of typical constructs designed by the scientist has to be established with the highest degree of clarity and distinctness of the conceptual framework implied and must be fully compatible with the principles of formal logic...
 (2) The postulate of subjective interpretation. In order to explain human actions the scientist has to ask what model of an individual mind can be constructed and what typical contents must be attributed to it in order to explain the observed facts as the result of the activity of such a mind in an understandable relation...
 (3) The postulate of adequacy. Each term in a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act performed within the life world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical construct would be understandable for the actor himself as well as for his fellow-men in terms of common-sense interpretation of everyday life.

p.283 Whenever we come upon any ordering of past experience under interpretive schemes, any act of abstraction, generalization, formalization, or idealization, whatever the object involved, there we shall find this process in which a moment of living experience is lifted out of its setting and then, through a synthesis of recognition, frozen into a hard and fast "ideal type."

p.314 in every branch of the social sciences which has arrived at the theoretical stage of its development there is a fundamental hypothesis which both defines the fields of research and gives the regulative principle for building up the system of ideal types... The sense of this postulate is the following: "Build your ideal types as if all actors had oriented their life plan and, therefore, all their activities to the chief end of realising the greatest utility with the minimum of costs; human activity which is oriented in such a way (and only this kind of human activity) is the subject matter of your science."