XVII Seminário Internacional de
FILOSOFIA E HISTÓRIA DA CIÊNCIA
Mini-Course on
Etnomethodology, Phenomenology
and Social Studies
Prof. Dr. Kenneth Liberman
(University of Oregon – EUA)
From 03 to 28, May 2010
Week One – 03 to 09, May - Two key ethnomethodological notions
An introduction to Ethnomethodology by means of its two most widely adopted notions – accountability and reflexivity.
Wednesday – 5th, May
A. Accountability in intersubjective meaning-production
“Accountability” refers to the practical work of a cohort of actors concerned to find a way to organize themselves so that their practical tasks can be performed in an orderly manner and so that all participants can recognize what that local orderliness is. Parties offer each other ‘accounts’ of what they are doing; once offered, these accounts can be accepted, amended, or rejected. Local activities then proceed under the authority of the account. These accounts compose the means for the institutionalization of affairs in a local setting. In every social setting persons undertake activities not only for the sake of completing the work at hand but also with an abiding orientation to the task of producing and maintaining a social orderliness that will facilitate the cooperative accomplishing of the work at hand. This concern for the local orderliness of affairs is each person’s preoccupation, even compelling obligation, with no time-outs, and comprises the accountability of every local occasion.
In addition to a theoretical introduction to the problem, case illustrations will be presented of a cohort of actors organizing an interpretation of the local rules for their affairs, using video clips of people learning to play a board game for the first time.
Bibliography
Michael Lynch, “Accounts,” in Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993, pp. 14-15 & 286-87.
John Heritage, “Accounts and Accountability,” in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Polity Press,1984, p. 135-41 and 147-50
Kenneth Liberman, “Objectivation” in Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 92-106 & 107-20
Friday – 7th, May
B. The reflexivity of understanding
“Reflexivity” is the most important notion in ethnomethodology, and it differs somewhat from the talk of reflexivity found in anthropology and philosophy. The capacity to observe one’s own presuppositions in the creation of ethnographic description is not what is meant here. Rather, the reflexive ways that ordinary people understand their world in everyday settings is the target for research. While phenomenological insights into the projection of meaning-structures onto experience (mostly the bequests of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty) inform these inquiries, ethnomethodology exceeds the constitutional idealism and the individualism of phenomenology by observing just how events organize themselves in ways that outstrip rational and deliberate controls.
Active interpretations or interests collect their force and significance, which in turn reinforce the coherency and intelligibility of the interpretations that are so employed. As Wittgenstein has observed, the meaning of a word is its use; ethnomethodology investigates how these uses are incorporated by collaborating parties into a structure of understanding and how that structure is then made available to all.
Specific illustrations will be offered of the social uses of glosses, accounts, and articulations, with special attention paid to how they collect their specificity of sense and reference by how they are put to use in local affairs. Some illustrations will be presented drawn from video tapes of professional coffee tasters sorting out the perceived tastes of a cup of coffee.
Bibliography
Michael Lynch, “Reflexivity,” in Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action, pp. 15-22 & 34-38.
Eric Livingston, “Naturally Organized Ordinary Activities,” Making Sense of Ethnomethodology, Routledge, 1986 (one page).
Kenneth Liberman, “Thinking With Categorial Forms,” in Husserl’s Criticism of Reason, Lexington Books, 2007, p. 32-4.
Kenneth Liberman, “Heidegger’s Notion of Befindlichkeit and the Meaning of ‘Situated’ in Social Inquiries,” Quaderni del Dipartimento, No. 46, Facoltà di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, Università di Trento (Italy), p. 14-20.
Week Two – 10 to 16, May – Practical reasoning
The role of structure in practical reasoning will be examined, a topic that includes a review of the benefits provided by a competent formal organization of thinking and a consideration of how reflection can be limited by a necessarily rote adherence to the formal structures that aid its progress.
Wednesday – 12th, May
A. The ‘documentary method’ of interpretation and scientific inquiry
The “documentary method” is a technical term that ethnomethodology uses to describe the mundane ways that persons organize their reasoning in local settings. A course of analysis achieves its cogency by reference to a wider, generalized scheme of affairs that is suggested by the local analysis. This generalized schema is presumed to pre-exist the local analysis and to be non-contextual, even though its sense and purport are derived from that locally contingent finding or course of reflection. Once the local analysis gains purchase on a more generalized reasoning, that formal order or metaphysics is invoked to ennoble the local course of reasoning. The seminar will read Garfinkel’s seminal chapter on the problem, which will be supplemented in class with additional illustrations drawn from social scientific studies.
Bibliography
Harold Garfinkel, “The Documentary Method of Interpretation in Lay and Professional Fact Finding,” Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 76-103
Friday – 14th, May
B. The organization of formal reasoning among Tibetan debaters
An extended case study of formal philosophical reasoning will be presented by means of videotapes of Tibetan philosopher-monks debating epistemological issues. Several ten minute-long formal, public debates will be analyzed turn-by-turn with an interest for identifying and describing which practices of formal reasoning facilitate original inquiry and which practices are merely sophistries. While original thinking and sophistry normally accompany each other and are not easily separated, the skillful use of negative dialectics can help keep thinking fresh for what is yet to be discovered. There will be no reading for this seminar; however, an additional workshop presenting additional data analysis from the Tibetan case studies can be organized if there is sufficient interest.
Week Three – 17 to 23, May – Ethnomethodological studies of scientific praxis
Both of the meetings for this week will focus upon detailed studies by Garfinkel et. al. of the local practices of laboratory scientists.
Wednesday – 19th, May
A. Research laboratories 1
We will review the study of an astronomy laboratory that discovered an optical pulsar.
Bibliography
Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch & Eric Livingston, “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar,” Philosophy of Social Sciences, 11, p. 131-58, 1981.
Friday – 21st, May
B. Research laboratories 2
We will review the work of a chemical laboratory studying axon sprouting. By this (third) week, it is anticipated that both the seminar attendees and I will better recognize each other’s inquiries, and these two case studies can serve as the opportunity for a collaboration regarding mutual interests, offering the occasion for more dialectical seminar discussion.
Bibliography
Michael Lynch, Chapter 4 of Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: a study of shop work in a research laboratory, Routledge, 1985.
Michael Lynch, “The Crisis of Relativist and Constructivist Studies,” in Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action, pp. 102-7
Week Four – 24 to 31, May – Ethnomethodology and phenomenology
A broad review of the methodological and epistemological relations between these two related traditions.
Wednesday – 26th, May
A. Ethnomethodology’s respecification of constitutional phenomenology
The radical character of ethnomethodology consists of its abiding refusal to believe and accept its own propaganda. We will review Garfinkel’s strategies for exposing and undermining the unseen presuppositions that are at work in various ethnomethodological inquiries. Some illustrations will be drawn from a book-in-progress, A Course in Ethnomethodology, which recounts the self-criticisms of Garfinkel over the course of his investigating the local orderliness of queues. Seminar participants will be invited to offer their own illustrations, either from their own research or from the research of others they have studied. The assigned chapter from my recent book, Husserl’s Criticism of Reason, emphasizes the ways that ethnomethodology is more radical than other phenomenological strategies.
Bibliography
Kenneth Liberman, “Garfinkel’s Uncompromising Intellectual Rigor,” Husserl’s Criticism of Reason, pp. 85-118.
Friday – 28th, May
B. Phenomenological studies of science
This reading is a brief presentation of ethnomethodology’s praise for and criticism of Husserl’s project of investigating the lebenswelt or life-world, as evidenced in his study of the life-world of scientific practitioners in his Crisis of the European Sciences.
Bibliography
Harold Garfinkel and Kenneth Liberman, “The Lebenswelt Origins of the Sciences,” Human Studies 30 (2007), pp. 3-7 & 24-29.
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Organização:
Grupo Temático Estudos de Filosofia e História da
Ciência
Apoio Institucional:
USP e Fapesp
