Interpretive Phenomenology

Background

Interpretive phenomenology is at once philosophical and methodological. It seeks to overcome Cartesian epistemology that holds to a representational view of the mind and a mind–body dualism. An interpretive phenomenological understanding of the human is distinct from the Cartesian private subject standing over against or apart from an objective separate world. The [Page 462]human is embodied, situated, finite, and thrown into a particular culture, time, and place. This situated, social, and sentient person dwells in a world of common meanings, habits, practices, meanings, and skills that are socially prior to the individual and are socially disclosed or encountered. These socially situated meanings, habits, practices, and skills are the foci of interpretive phenomenology. Interpretive phenomenology relies on disclosive practices that allow social practices, embodied intentionality, common taken-for-granted background meanings, habits, rituals, practices, and everyday life to show up (i.e., become visible and intelligible). The mind–body–world problem will not be solved so long as we have only the two grids: theories of the disembodied mind and theories about the physiological mechanistic body. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insight was to dissolve the mind–body problem by studying the situated, sentient, and social body. The distance between the Cartesian theoretical grids of mind with explicit beliefs and thoughts and the bottom-level physiological theories of cells, tissues, and organ systems is too great. Intermediate middle terms such as those experienced by the situated, sentient, embodied, and socially constituted person are needed to understand the connections within the embodied mind and world. Such middle terms include habits, practices, skills, rituals, and so on. But more important than dissolving the mind–body dualism handed down from René Descartes is the human's commonsense self-understandings in everyday life, when the body in the world is working well, and when it breaks down as in illness.

Merleau-Ponty, drawing on both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, understood the centrality of the body for any access to the world. Charles Taylor, in his book The Explanation of Behavior, used Merleau-Ponty's nonmechanistic, holistic understanding of the body to dismantle the grip of behaviorism on psychology. Likewise, in his philosophical papers, Taylor worked on constitutive and expressive theories of meaning using Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried von Herder, German Romantic thinkers, to demonstrate how we dwell in language. These thinkers expand the theory of meaning beyond correspondence and truth condition theories of meaning to theories of the constitutive and expressive functions of meaning.

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