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Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between moral judgments, fallibility, and imaginative insight. It will draw heavily from the canon of classical American philosophy, the members of which (from Ralph Waldo Emerson, to C.S. Peirce, E.L. Cabot, to Jane Addams, to John Dewey) took up this relationship as pivotally important in moral theorizing. It argues that the process of hypothesis formation—characterized as “insight” by Emerson and extended by Peirce in his notion of “abduction”—is a necessary condition of moral progress for it ...
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Phenomenology and experimental psychology have been largely interested in the same thing when it comes to attention. By building on the work of Aron Gurwitsch, especially his ideas of attention and restructuration, this paper attempts to articulate common ground in psychology and phenomenology of attention through discussion of a new way to think about multistability in some phenomena. What psychology views as an attentionality-intentionality phenomenon, phenomenology views as an intentionality-attentionality phenomenon. The proposal is that an awareness of this restructuring of ...
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In this article I intend to explore the conception of science as it emerges from the work of Husserl, Schutz, and Garfinkel. By concentrating specifically on the issue of science, I attempt to show that Garfinkel’s views on the relationship between science and the everyday world are much closer to Husserl’s stance than to the Schutzian perspective. To this end, I explore Husserl’s notion of science especially as it emerges in the Crisis of European Sciences, where he describes the failure ...
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A communities of practice framework views learning in terms of identity (trans)formation within and through participation, utilizing a set of shared resources, in a community organized around a joint endeavor, or practice. From an ethnomethodological perspective, however, the theoretical notions of community, shared resources, and identity constitute not explanatory resources, but rather topics requiring data-grounded exploration. In other words, the following empirical questions arise: If and how the participants (a) organize their group as community, (b) co-constitute a shared repertoire of ...
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This paper seeks to provide a noetic analysis of emotional trauma. It highlights three essential features of trauma, as well as one non-essential feature, and attempts to make sense of them phenomenologically. The first essential feature of trauma that the paper considers is the disbelief that pervades traumatic experience. When traumatized, we cannot believe that the traumatic event has taken place. This is because we will, not for the event not to have happened—we cannot will something that is in the ...
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This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture’s surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply ‘transcending the norm’. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to ...
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Increasing attention to existentialist thought by criminologists and other social scientists in recent decades has created an opportunity to envision new possibilities in critical theoretic inquiry that extend well beyond the classical formulations of this tradition. In this essay, I draw on existentialist ideas to outline a critical perspective rooted in recent developments associated with Ulrich Beck’s notion of “risk society” and the related theory of reflexive modernization. I argue that, though the detraditionalization consequences of reflexive modernization give greater scope ...
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Harold Garfinkel wrote a series of highly detailed and lengthy ‘memos’ during his time (1951-53) at Princeton, where remarkable developments in information theory were taking place. These very substantial manuscripts have been edited by Anne Warfield Rawls in Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (Garfinkel 2008 ). This paper explores some of the implications of these memos, which we suggest are still relevant for the study of ‘information’ and information theory. Definitional privilege of ‘information’ as a technical term has been ...
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From an ethnomethodological perspective, this article describes social actors’ everyday and virtual stances in terms of their practices of provisional doubt and belief for the purpose of fact-establishment. Facts are iterated, reinforced, elaborated, and transformed via phenomenal practices configuring relations of equipment, interpretation, and method organized as “other” than, but relevant to, the everyday. Such practices in scientific research involve forms of suspended belief; in other areas they can instead involve forms of suspended doubt. As an illuminating example of this ...
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As a domain of philosophical enquiry that examines what it means to be, existentialism is a moral project that is centered on the self. While a few have applied the precepts of existentialism to the philosophical implications of homicide offenders, one question that has been overlooked in previous literature is ‘what is the offspring attempting to do by killing his/her parent(s)’? Using historical work on nineteenth century parricides in America, this paper examines parricide as an identity project. ...
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Garfinkel’s dissertation, “The Perception of the Other,” was completed and defended 15 years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel’s thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an ‘incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate’ ...
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The form of life which has the desire for or will to control over emergence at its core is, if not the dominant, then at least one of the more significant ones in late modern culture. To be in control over emergence requires a considerable degree of sovereignty. In this contribution I have made an attempt to outline and contrast three rather basic images or models of what might be called radical sovereignty, i.e., the vital-reflexive-transgressive one (which is referred to ...
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In the late 1980s, I wrote up some notes on the play of pick-up basketball and sent them to Harold Garfinkel, who incorporated them into an un-published monograph in 1988. They were motivated by an interest in exhibiting the sense of “detail” for ethnomethodological studies. An edited version is presented below. They follow a front piece of recollection and discussion about Garfinkel’s distinctive interests in matters of “detail,” their tie to structure and structure’s circumstantiality, and their place in EM studies. ...
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The ultramodern condition represents the “third wave” in postmodernist-inspired philosophy and cultural practice. Two of ultramodernism’s critical theoretical components are the human/social forces, flows, and assemblages that sustain transgression; and the human/social intensities, fluctuations, and thresholds that make transcendence possible as both will and way. In the ultramodern age, then, transcendence is about overcoming and transforming the conditions (i.e., forces, flows, and assemblages) that co-produce harm-generating (i.e., transgressive) tendencies. This manuscript problematizes transgression by way of ultramodern theory. This critical investigation ...
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This article will examine the emergence of a distinct bourgeois identity in modernity which differentiated itself from comparable social groups through its desire to exert ‘virtuous’ control through engagement with reform and philanthropy, and through the symbolic construction of a transgressive, socially marginal but redeemable other as subject of this reform. The ontological insecurities of late modernity had a profound impact on the sources of bourgeois identity, and this article will explore the emergence of the cultural omnivore as a new ...
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This paper is an essay about Harold Garfinkel’s heritage. It outlines a response to Eric Livingston’s proposal to say goodbye to ethnomethodology as pertaining to the sociological tradition; and it rejects part of Melvin Pollner’s diagnosis about the changes occurred in ethnomethodological working. If it agrees with Pollner about the idea that something of the initial ethnomethodology’s program has been left aside after the “work studies” turn, it asserts that such a turn has nonetheless made possible authentic discoveries. So the ...
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Early reactions to the publication of Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, which have persisted over the passing decades, was that ethnomethodology could not address what sociology deemed to be socially significant matters such as ‘power’ and ‘the state’. This, however, is not the case. How such matters enter into the practical everyday affairs of members is of equal interest to ethnomethodology when compared to how any matter enters into members’ everyday life, and how they display that. It just does not ...
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Cairns presents a plausible two-part, step by step, approach seemingly developed in Husserl’s “workshop” to transcendental phenomenology that is independent of culture and history, refines a concept of knowledge and its references to worldly things, encounters a difficulty, and resolves it through recognition of a non-worldly apodictic core of consciousness distinct from being in the real temporal, spatial, and causal world. ...
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Foucault is typically seen as having rebelled against the previous generation of French philosophy, which was dominated by existential phenomenology, and by Sartre in particular. However, the relationship between these two generations and between these two philosophers is more complex than one of simple opposition. Through a refracted focus on Foucault’s late work on Greco-Roman philosophy and on the themes of the practice of the care of the self and the freedom associated with that practice, I argue that Foucault—whose philosophy ...
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The lability of the meaning of words has been a longstanding topic in ethnomethodology, and this review provides many specific details while analyzing the drift of the sense of words over the course of naturally occurring conversations. Ethnomethodologists do not see equivocality in the meaning of words merely as a problem for members, but they recognize that it is a resource for parties in their organizing the local interaction. Through the use of many concrete illustrations, an account of this pervasive ...
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Our focus in this article is on some uses of categorial transformations. The discussion is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we begin by outlining our approach, namely membership categorization analysis (MCA), indicating the origins of the term and elaborating the conception of MCA as an ‘occasioned’ members’ apparatus. We then explain what we mean by the concept of categorial transformation, review some of the very few previous studies which have investigated this phenomenon and which are pertinent ...
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In some circumstances, scientists of the same discipline visualize and view differently the same scientific object. The question of representational difference , which has usually been connected to scientific revolutions or controversies, is framed here using the concept of “style,” addressing the plurality of scientific traditions within a well-established scientific field. Using ethnomethodology we will examine the divergences of representational practices that, beyond the apparent consensus of a scientific community, are present throughout the procedure of chromosomes preparation. The ethnographic data ...
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Ernest Becker’s work addresses the implications that arise from being aware of our own mortality. Like Sartre, Becker recognises that human beings have the potential to transcend and look beyond their immediate situation, but his work also confronts the darker aspects of human existence that arise from our self-awareness. The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of Becker’s work and to show the potential of Becker’s theory of evil to inform a number of contemporary debates in the ...
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This paper tries to read some structure into the perplexing diversity of the literature on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity. It argues that many of the interpretations available rely on views that are false and cannot be Heidegger’s. It also shows that the only correct interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity emerges from a synthesis of Dreyfus’ later interpretation and Haugeland’s interpretation of this concept. A synthesis of these interpretations yields an interpretation, according to which Dasein’s being is authentic only if ...
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This study takes an interest in instructions and instructed actions in the context of manual skills. The analysis focuses on a video recorded episode where a teacher demonstrates how to crochet chain stitches, requests a group of students to reproduce her actions, and then repeatedly corrects the attempts of one of the students. The initial request, and the students’ responses to it, could be seen as preliminary to the series of corrective sequences that come next: the request and the following ...
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This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against ...
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Technical mediation shapes our experience of the world, but it also shapes our experience of ourselves. In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the latter aspect of technical mediation, we need to expand on notions of technical mediation that focuses on actual use, and bring in possible use as well. The concept of technical mediation must therefore be grounded in a more general concept of technological presence. This concept indicates that technology harbours both actuality and potentiality, the ...
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In two of the most significant and influential contemporary exponents of German philosophical anthropology, anthropogenetic accounts play a large role. Hans Blumenberg and Peter Sloterdijk have presented their mode of philosophical anthropology as a philosophical anthropogenealogy. To this end both of them have ventured into an alliance with paleoanthropology, incidentally drawing on the same paleoanthropolgist, the forgotten pioneer of philosophical anthropology: Paul Alsberg. Taking this observation as its cue, the article addresses two questions. What are the motives for philosophical anthropology ...
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Taking up the body turn in sociology, this paper discusses scientific practices as embodied action from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of the “Body”. Based on ethnographic data on a biology laboratory it will discuss the importance of the scientist’s Body for the performance of scientific activities. Successful researchers have to be skilled workers using their embodied knowledge for the process of tinkering towards the material transformation of their objects for data production. The researcher’s body then is an instrument ...
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