Essay: What is the Nature of Truth?

Sample Essay

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This is a random excerpt from an essay on the nature of truth. According to Schutz, the ordinary person, acting in the world, is in a biographically firm situation, doing what he or she does according to the system of relevance that enables them to select from the environment and from interactions with others, those elements that make sense for the function at hand.

“All these time perspective can be referred to a vivid present: my own actual or former one… my fellow man. With whom I am connected in turn, I am connected in an originary or derived present and all this in the different modes of potentiality or quasi equality.” (Schutz 262)

According to Schutz, the ordinary person, acting in the world, is in a biographically firm situation, doing what he or she does according to the system of relevance that enables them to select from the environment and from interactions with others, those elements that make sense for the function at hand. The social scientist, on the other hand, is operating based on a scientifically-determined set of bearings, choosing those aspects of the situation that are suitable for the objectives of the research. As a result, the social scientist may focus on aspects of behavior that are taken for granted by the ordinary person. Social types, that is, types of actors, types of actions, types of social personalities, in the case of Schutz, serve the same kind of purpose, but inside the relevance structures and research objectives of the social scientist. They present a means of identifying, classifying and comparing modes of social action and interaction, using distinct criteria for the assignment of phenomena to type.

Knowledge is socially distributed according to this nature and by what is taken for granted by each, and according to what system of relevances. Thus, the ‘man on the street’ operates according to his (or her) set of naive relevances, for which ‘recipe knowledge’ is ample.

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