Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences

Front Cover
Graham Button
Cambridge University Press, Aug 30, 1991 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 278 pages
Traditionally, when the human sciences consider foundational issues such as epistemology and method, they do so by theorising them. Ethnomethodology, however, attempts to make such foundational matters a focus of attention, and directly enquires into them. This book reappraises the significance of ethnomethodology in sociology in particular, and in the human sciences in general. It demonstrates how, through its empirical enquiries into the ordered properties of social action, ethnomethodology provides a radical respecification of the foundations of the human sciences, an achievement that has often been misunderstood. The chapters, by leading scholars, take up the specification of action and order in theorising, logic, epistemology, measurement, evidence, the social actor, cognition, language and culture, and moral judgement, and underscore the ramifications for the human sciences of the ethnomethodologist's approach. This is a systematic and coherent collection which explicitly addresses fundamental conceptual issues. The clear exposition of the central tenets of ethnomethodology is especially welcome.
 

Contents

Introduction ethnomethodology and the foundational respecification of the human sciences
1
Respecification evidence for locally produced naturally accountable phenomena of order logic reason meaning method etc in and as of the essential ...
10
Logic ethnomethodology and the logic of language
20
Epistemology professional scepticism
51
Method measurement ordinary and scientific measurement as ethnomethodological phenomena
77
Method evidence and inferenceevidence and inference for ethnomethodology
109
The social actor social action in real time
137
Cognition cognition in an ethnomethodological mode
176
Language and culture the linguistic analysis of culture
196
Values and moral judgement communicative praxis as a moral order
227
References
252
Index
271
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