Some Problems in Locating `Practices'

Abstract

The paper seeks to criticize the account of language and meaning implied by and underlying the metatheory of ethnomethodology in the work of Garfinkel. In doing so it focuses on the notions of `indexicality' and the `practices' by which its repair is achieved. The notion of `indexicality', in at least some of its statements, is shown to depend on a familiar, but probably erroneous, account of `meaning', which holds that `meaning' is deeply connected to `experience'. Other theoretical approaches which share this assumption about meaning are shown, by the example of the empiricist approach to language, to lead to similar specifications of `members' problems' and the necessary repair of indexicality. It is suggested that in involving the knowledge gained in `experience' in accounting for how members understand language, Garfinkel renders the meaning of terms indefinitely problematic through scepticism about that knowledge. This illuminates several issues. First, it suggests that far from being an approach to sociology strikingly consistent with the philosophy of language of the later Wittgenstein, as has been frequently claimed, Garfinkel's version of ethnomethodology is in fact very like the theories of language and meaning that Wittgenstein rejected. Secondly, it suggests that instead of having uncovered a new area of empirical investigation, Garfinkel's `Ethnomethodology' remains obstinately theoretical and metaphysical: where, as is obvious, some new things have been learned about the social world by those working in the perspective, the connection to the metatheory is incidental, and those results may be seen best as belonging to other perspectives, e.g. sociolinguistic structuralism. Thirdly, it confirms the now familiar argument that the notion of `indexicality' cannot be used as a basis for a criticize of `orthodox' sociology.