Schütz’s essay develops a phenomenological account of signs and symbols as ways of apprehending what exceeds immediate experience. Moving from disputes over symbolic reference to appresentation, communication, multiple realities, and society, it connects the structure of individual experience with the foundations of social understanding.
Present day discussion of the problem of symbolic reference shows several bewildering features.
The opening diagnosis concerns more than unstable terminology. Theories differ over whether symbols derive from individual consciousness or social convention, and over how symbolic reference differs from other relations of signification. Schütz approaches these disagreements through Husserl’s concept of appresentation: something directly apprehended evokes something not immediately given. The visible side of an object appresents its unseen side; another person’s bodily expression appresents experiences unavailable to direct inspection. Such relations need not involve conscious inference.
Calling smoke the sign and the indicated fire the signatum, as some of our authors do, we may say that both form a pair.
Pairing provides a common structure without making every reference a symbol. Schütz distinguishes the object considered in itself, its functioning as a vehicle, the realm of what it evokes, and the interpretive context joining them. Meaning depends on these relations rather than on the vehicle’s physical properties alone. Apparent arbitrariness or disorder may arise when something is judged within an inappropriate interpretive scheme. Substitution, identification through different references, and figurative transference further explain how appresentational meanings change.
The distinctions among marks, indications, and signs track different limits of experience. Marks are deliberately established reminders that help an individual recover earlier orientations. Indications support expectations concerning inaccessible events through connections whose grounds may remain obscure. Neither necessarily entails communication. Signs appresent another person’s thoughts, feelings, or intentions, although their interpretation need not depend on an intention to communicate.
Communication bridges the distance between persons without eliminating the privacy of their experience. Understanding rests on practical idealizations: participants assume that standpoints are interchangeable and that their systems of relevance sufficiently coincide for the purpose at hand. Language supplies shared typifications, while biographical differences limit their congruence. Speech also coordinates streams of inner time through events in the external world. Everyday reality is therefore already intersubjective and culturally organized.
Symbols address a further transcendence by relating everyday experience to other finite provinces of meaning. Following and reformulating William James, Schütz locates the difference between realities in the meaning and cognitive style of experience, rather than in separate classes of objects. Dreams, art, religion, and scientific contemplation organize attention differently; movement between them requires a change of attitude. Everyday life remains paramount as the realm of bodily action, resistance, and communication. A symbol’s vehicle belongs to this realm, while what it appresents belongs to another province. Symbolic references can incorporate already established marks, indications, and signs, acquiring layered and ambiguous meanings.
Then, is it the symbol which creates society and community, or is the symbol a creation of society imposed upon the individual?
The later social analysis develops the reciprocity contained in this question. Individuals inherit a world already articulated through appresentational references. Language transmits socially approved knowledge, while occupations, roles, and memberships distribute knowledge unevenly. For sociological description, the decisive issue is not whether accepted beliefs are true, but how they define situations and orient conduct. Socially established relevances shape what becomes problematic, which inquiries seem appropriate, and when an answer counts as sufficient.
Yet symbolism also makes society itself apprehensible. Persons are encountered in everyday reality, whereas institutions, collectivities, and enduring social relationships require representations that exceed immediately experienced individuals. These representations can motivate practical action. Schütz distinguishes such participants’ understandings from the explanatory constructs of social science, opening inquiries into political representation, conflicting group interpretations, and propaganda. The essay thus explains symbolic reference both as socially conditioned and as constitutive of the experience of a shared social world.
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