Alfred Schutz took Husserl's ideas further and developed a theory of the socially phenomenological forms of reality.(123) He argued that the “re-construction" of objects, as transcendental egos and as transcendental objects, is dependent upon the “re-construction" of the “life-world"—the totality of what is taken for granted—in which every individual exists as a social being. For Schutz, as for Dilthey, and Polanyi Being is always Social Being. The life-world is “re-constructed" through actors taking part in the social discourse that constitutes social life.(124) Schutz was concerned with understanding the commonsense world or the everyday interpretation of individual consciousness and social action. From an existential position, Schutz argued for the importance of relevance in the re-construction of life-worlds. With Bergson, he argued that time, i.e., duration, is an important aspect of the phenomenological world and is simultaneously understood in its future and past state when interpreted through the present. The life-world is known through the concept of a life process whereby intentions and actions are deemed relevant according to the typification process in the interpretation of events. Typification is the process whereby the individual, in acting within and upon a life-world, applies learned interpretive schemata so that an appreciation of events can be gained. Because these schemata are learned, they have been formed through social interactions and explained through social discourse. The explanations are also explications, as they allow for schemata to by typified and so for objects to be socially formed as relevancies in acts taking place within life-worlds.
Schutz's theory of the social re-construction of the life-world is dependent upon the recognition of the relevance of learned schemata. These schemata are learned through social interactions and this is how Schutz argues for a fundamentally social view of transcendental reality rather than an individualistically idealist one. In this way, Schutz moves toward a nominalist view of social reality, that the view that through the process objectivation, of naming reality, that reality itself becomes relevant and so can become known.
Although based on Husserlian phenomenology, Schutz manages to avoid the criticisms of idealism by invoking the notion of social re-construction through social discourse. By insisting that language is a social form rather than an individual form, he contends, by implication, that social interaction must occur for language itself to be adopted and that it is only through language adoption that reality can be named as relevant. The argument that reality is individualistically ideal is thus avoided because social life must exist if social discourse is to exit. This is a move away from Husserlian phenomenological interpretation of reality to the social re-construction of reality as an interpretive process. Phenomenological reality theory implies a classical reality by default, but the classical reality cannot be known because of the need to re-construct objects phenomenologically....