Interpretive Theories of Communication

1. Interpretive Theories
A. Husserl's Classical Phenomenology
B. Schutz' Social Phenomenology
C. Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics
Feminism: Muted Group (Critical
Theory)
Jonell Segador Gregorio
MCM 502

2. Key Ideas
• Phenomenology is the way in which we
come to understand the world through
direct experience
• actual lived experience = basic data of
reality
• all you know is what you experience
• "what is love?"= to define it, tap into your
own experience of love

3. Types of Experience
• Perception
• Thought
• Memory
• Imagination
• Emotion
• Desire
• Social Activity/ Linguistic Activity

4. Three Basic Principles of Phenomenology
(Stanley Deetz)
• 1. knowledge is found directly in conscious
experience; we know the world as we
experience it
• 2. Meaning of a thing consists of the
potential of that thing in your life; how you
relate to an object determines its meaning
for you
• 3. Language is the vehicle of meaning; we
experience the world through the
language used to define and express the
world

5. Key Ideas
• Interpretation -- active process of
assigning meaning to an experience
• It is an active process of the mind; a
creative act of clarifying personal
experience
• Hermeneutic circle - going back and forth
between experiencing and interpreting,
from the specific to the general to specific

6. How do we arrive at truth through conscious
attention?
• We must "bracket" our biases; suspend
our categories of thinking and habits of
seeing to experience what a thing really is
• Through this, objects of the world present
themselves to our consciousness
• Being objective: experiencing the world
without biases affecting it

7. Classical Phenomenology
• associated with Edmund Husserl, founder
of modern phenomenology
• truth can only be ascertained through
focused consciousness
• we know truth through direct experience,
but there's discipline involved in
experiencing things
• only through "conscious attention" can we
know truth

8. Phenomenological Reduction
• the means by which a phenomenologist
frees himself from his biases (bracketing)
to gain a standpoint from which to view
real and irreal objects
• Reduction: to restore or return something
to a more primordial mode

9. • Intentionality: directedness of experience
toward things in the world
• "I see that fishing boat off the coast as
dusk descends over Manila Bay."
• experience is directed toward things only
through particular concepts, thoughts,
ideas, images; these make up the
meaning or content of the experience
• subject-act-content-object

10. Intentionality
• the propery of human consciousness of being
directed toward or being about something
• Meaning is act, an intentional experience
• While the object may stay the same, acts may
change.
• characterized in the first person
• I HATE you, I LOVE you, I LIKE you, I WILL
KILL you.
• This ability to engage in such acts makes us
meaning-making indivuals
• This ability allows communication to take place

11. Intersubjectivity
• recognizing others as similar to myself;
they subjects like myself
• the world I live in is a world of commonly
recognizable people, places and things
• experience of one's self is inseparable
from that of others

12. Husserl's Questions
• What is real?
• What actually exists in the world?
• How do we know what exists?
• humans only know the world through
experience
• external world is mediated by senses,
known only through mental consciousness
• existence of other people, values &
physical objects is mediated through
senses; known only through conscious
mental awareness

13. Social Phenomenology
• by Alfred Schutz (born in Vienna Austria,
1899-1959, banker by day, philosopher by
night)
• relates the Husserl's thoughts to social
world and social sciences
• he wrote The Phenomenology of the
Social World (1932)
• concerned with the way in which people
grasp the consciousness
• attempts to understand the world from the
perspective of ordinary person

14. Social Phenomenology believes that..
• how humans classified and attached meaning to
the outside world was not a purely individual
process.
• Human action consists of establishing or
interpreting meanings
• reality is socially constructed by knowledge
• social reality is not a social fact in its own right; it
is produced and communicated; its meaning
derived through systems of communication

15. Social Phenomenology
• Everyday life is interpreted through a stock
of knowledge ( meanings, categories,
constructs)
• objects of the world are accessible to
people but they mean differently to one
another

16. Intersubjectivity
 How do we know other's mind? Other selves?
How is reciprocity of perspectives possible? How
is mutual understanding and communication
possible?
 an intersubjective world is not a private world, it
is common to all.
It exists “because we live in it as men among
other men, bound to them through common
influence and work, understanding others and
being understood by them”
it exists in the vivid present (same time, same
place with others)

17. Why does meaning differ from one person to
another?
• They can't perceive things I can
• We have different biographically
determined situations & purposes to
overcome these
• Interchangeability of standpoints; If you
were where I am, you should see what I
see
• The congruency of system of relevances:
our unique biographical situations are
irrelevant for the purposes at hand

18. Social Phenomenology: Questions
• What does social world mean for each
person, as an actor/observer?
• What does social world mean for observed
actor?
• What does his actions mean?
• How experience is socially constructed &
classified?

19. Key Concept: Typification
• “Typification” (first order constructs) in the social world, the
concepts attached to classes of things that are experienced
(Haralambos, 1998).
• a “Bank Manager”, a “Football Match”, a “Tree”, etc. are
typifications not unique to each person, but are shared by members
of a society.
• They are passed on to children through learning a language,
reading books or speaking to other people.
• Typification ignores individual’s unique features and focuses only
on generic and homogenous characteristics.
• to engage in self-typification is possible

20. Key Concept: Recipes
• techniques for understanding or at least
controlling aspects of experience
• Recipes deal with situations, while
typifications refer more to people.
• These are used to handle the myriad
routine situations we encounter
• Recipe action: “How are you?” ; Recipe
response:“Fine, and you?”.
• when we encounter unusual or
problematic situation, we first try to use
our recipes;

21. Realms of Reality
• Umwelt, the realm of directly experienced social
reality;
• Mitwelt, the realm of indirectly experienced
social reality;
• Folgewelt, the realm of successors;
• Vorwelt, the realm of peripheral interest
• According to Schutz, it is difficult to know the
interpretations of predecessors and impossible
to understand those of successors.
• It is possible to understand contemporaries
(Mitwelt) and the interpretations of those with
whom we are in immediate face-to-face contact
(Umwelt).

22. Realms of Reality
• Mitwelt is that aspect of the social world in which people
deal only with actual actors.
• People do feel these types and these structures, but in
this world of “contemporaries”, these people are not
experienced directly. Because actors are dealing with
types rather than with actual people, their knowledge of
people is not subject to constant revision on the basis of
face-to-face interaction.
• Umwelt people co-exist in the name in the same time
and space
• People who were once in our Umwelt may draw away
from us and ultimately, because of spatial distances,
become part of the Mitwelt. Thus, there is a gradual
transition from Umwelt to Mitwelt as people grow apart
from one another.

23. Key Concept: The Lifeworld
• the world in which inter-subjectivity and
the use of typifications and recipes take
place
• people operate in the “natural attitude”;
they take the world for granted and do not
doubt its reality or existence until a
problematic situation arises

24. Textual Hermeneutics by Paul Ricoeur
• Hermeneutics - careful and deliberate
interpretation of texts
• from Hermes, the messenger who interprets
Zeus' message to other gods/goddess
• Interpretation is possible because of gap
between author's intentions and what the
statements mean
• Interpretation fills the gap between what a
speaker means in saying something and what
the statements mean outside of her intentions

25. Central Question:
• Through what means is textual
understanding possible?

26. Autonomization
• Verbal speech is different from written
speech
• Author's meaning takes on a life of its own
when inscribed in text
• Autonomization takes place when speech
is inscribed as text
• Text is now independent of the author

27. Key Concepts
• Distanciation - the separation of text from
situation; time and space distance
between author and audience
• Explanation-empirical and analytical
accounts of events in terms of observed
patterns among parts
• Understanding - synthetic accounting for
events in terms of overall interpretation
• Appropriation - making something one’s
own

29. Feminism: Muted Group
• Introduced by British Anthropologist Edwin
Ardener
• first developed in cultural anthropology
• Ardener proposed that women are muted
group
• critical theory that explores power
domination of one group over the other
• usually apparent in language

30. Key Ideas
• Language is man-made construction
(Kramarae)
• Women's words and thoughts are
discounted in society
• When women try to overcome this
inequity, the masculine control of
communication places them at a
disadvantage
• Women are muted group; man-made
language aids in defining, depreciating
and excluding them

31. Key Ideas
• Mutedness is caused by lack of power,
esp. among groups of low status
• Women perceive the world differently from
men owing to different experiences and
activities
• Women have not been given their rightful
place in history (Virginia Woolf)

32. Gettysburg Address Interpretation by
Barbara Warnick
• Expressions of agent: our fathers, those
who have given their lives, we
• Place: upon this continent, battlefield
• Time: past (four score and seven years
ago), frozen present, possible future
• The text tells a story of birth, adversity,
recognition, values, rebirth and
perpetuation of values
• Therefore, the text is relevant from
generation to generation