Philosophy on the Ground: An Appreciation of a “Spirit Master”

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated
with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible
presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane reason, and the reciprocal idea
of “reality disjunctures”—momentary divergences between perceptual accounts of the “same” mundane reality—by describing routine
exchanges in traffic court and confrontations between doctors and patients in psychiatric settings. Pollner’s work anticipated
current enthusiasms for developing novel “ontologies” in social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and other subjects.
Although he did attempt to locate metaphysics in the midst of everyday experience, this essay suggests that his “philosophy
on the ground” radically transformed philosophical ontology into an original and imaginative way to investigate constitutive
activities.