Page 248 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 241

other collective and individual subjects, so we can value your willing, you
can will our valuing, etc., etc. Figure 1 also reflects the awareness/positio-
nality distinction. The sub-specific types with Arabic numbers should help
to make the specific types clearer. But let me add that "representational
awareness" is awareness in which, on the basis of awareness of an
indication, depiction, or linguistic expression, one becomes aware of
something else.
I should add that each of the three types of positionality have positive,
negative, and neutral modaUties, so that beUeving, disbelieving, and
suspending judgment are parallel to liking, disliking, and being apathetic,
and also to willing for, willing against, and remaining neutral in one's
action. Then again, **willing'' here has a very broad signification, whereby
it emphasizes deeply habitual reactions and thus far more than merely
the deUberate making and executing of decisions. As for awareness, one
might begin with how some people typically remember how others sang
and the sounds of their voices while other people might typically
remember how others wrote and the cogency of their arguments. Hence
different people have, as a matter of deep cultural learning, different
aspects of objects that they routinely attend to recoUectively.
Let me also add that "reflection" connotes in part the analyzing
behind the descriptions but more importantly that it connotes, in a broad
way, observation, which is to say that one reflectively looks and ponders
and avoids empty or blind as well as unreflective thinking. The point, of
course, is only to make distinctions where there are observable differen-
ces. In this respect. Phenomenology grows out of the classical English
philosophical tradition called Empiricism that includes Locke, Berkeley,
Hume, the Mills, and even William James. And thus, concerning the
phenomenological slogan of "Back to the matters themselves!" we can ask
what we are to go back from and answer that it is a preoccupation with
propositions and their forms apart from the matters they are about. What
it goes back to is how objects are related to and how they correlatively
present themselves.
This Reflective Descriptivism does not preclude hypothesis formation
and testing; what it does is emphasize the observing, seeing, or evidencing
of matters that is fundamental to testing as well as concept and theory
formation. It also does not preclude explanation, which can take
teleological as well as aetiological and other forms, but, again, the
emphasis is on the description in general terms, the eidetic description,
that explanation presupposes. / suppose that this does make clearer what
phenomenology in general is and, if terminology does not get in the way,
how much social scientific work that does not know it is phenomenological
actually is. Also, I can see how clarifying these basic terms can be usefiil