Abstract
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 of European science and again preaches for a return to the “things themselves”. In this respect I interpret ethnomethodology’s most recent program as an answer to that call originating from a sociological domain. I then argue that the Husserlian turn within ethnomethodology marks the split between Garfinkel and Schutz. In fact I try to show that Schutz’s epistemological work is only partially inspired by phenomenology and that his conception of science retains a rationalist stance that ethnomethodology opposes. In the final section I briefly discuss Garfinkel’s most recent program as a way of closing the gap between theory and experience by linking the topics of science to the radical experiential phenomena.
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Notes
By doing this he indirectly clarifies some of the confusion around his research programme by siding with those commentators who more definitely underlined his distancing from Schutz (for ex., Lynch 1993).
Surely, Garfinkel does not talk about re-founding sociology but presents ethnomethodology as a quite different and incommensurable discipline compared to sociology. See Garfinkel and Wieder (1992).
In this sense, the radicality evoked here is very similar, in my opinion, to the original experience to which Husserl refers and can only be attained in the flow of practical, concretely happening activities.
This stance echoes Wittgenstein’s observation that the meaning of language lies in its use (see Wittgenstein 1953).
In outlining his ethnomethodological programme, Garfinkel had in fact suggested that ethnomethodologists should focus on the missing what of professional practices, including the practice of scientists at work. Later he changed this formulation and argued that ethnomethodology must recover the actual situations in which a certain job is carried out and that this recovery should include all interactional, or more generically situational, details of that episode, that is, its haecceity.
Garfinkel is not interested in establishing the possibility of an absolutely certain knowledge, as Husserl meant to do, in the first place because he is not a philosopher, and furthermore, he belongs to an age in which the very idea of rigorous and absolute rationality is widely debated and questioned.
Of course here I am speaking of ethnomethodology as an outsider (which I probably am), placing it in the disciplinary domain of sociology, as most current sociology manuals do. I am aware that Garfinkel and many other ethnomethodologists would disagree with this characterization and describe ethnomethodology as an alternate attitude.
In Garfinkel’s terms ethnomethodology is described as an alternate form of analysis to that of conventional sociology (2002: 121 ff.).
As Lynch underlines (2004: 2), Schutz’s notion of the scientific attitude makes up a picture of “unified science demarcated from common-sense knowledge (….) consistent with a classic picture of natural science that was extant in Schutz’s day”.
As, I hope, will become clear in the following pages, it is precisely this ideal-typicality that Garfinkel dismisses in his programme of inquiry.
As Giddens (1976: 32 f.) argues, reflecting on the method proposed by Schutz, the Austrian philosopher uses phenomenology in a “rationalist way”.
By “radical phenomenologists” I mean those who, by practicing a phenomenological epoché in a strict sense, get to the level of pure acts of consciousness.
On this point I consider particularly illuminating the definition given by Chojnacki (2004: 170 f.): “socio-phenomenology—starting from Alfred Schutz, through Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and its most recent variations in the versions of Steve Woolgar and Melvin Pollner—reveals (…) the social conditions and circumstances of that process of assuming” (that is, the process of assuming something as real).
The cognitive bias of Schutz’s theorization of the life-world has been remarked by some commentators. For ex., Costelloe (1996) argues that in Schutz the “life world” and the “natural attitude” are conflated so that “the explanatory categories he proposes appear as abstractions rather than as a way of describing lived experience” (Costelloe 1996: 247). This aspect is also openly criticized by some ethnomethodologists, especially Lynch (1993, 2004).
Indeed Schutz’s contribution works towards a unified notion of all sciences that seems ultimately to contradict Weber’s methodological dualism based on the difference between natural and cultural/social sciences.
However, it must be noted that two different attitudes reunite in “the stream of individual consciousness within which they originate” (257 f.). Of course this individuality resides in the scientist as a human being that during a typical day and in her lifetime keeps on shifting from one attitude to the other. The scientist as a person then becomes a bridge between the two provinces of meaning (see McLain 1981). Other bridges between realities are uncovered and described in Sebald (2011).
Like Weber says (1949: 101) they reveal “not the class or average character but rather the unique individual character of cultural phenomena”.
It might be interesting to explore the possibility that Schutz might have changed his mind on this issue, coming to a softer position on the distinction between the two provinces in his later life. When he speaks about the “constructs of thought objects by the social sciences” in his 1953 essay Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action, he recognizes a broader overlapping between the scientist as human being and the scientist as disembodied observer than he did in the 1945 essay On Multiple Realities.
An example of carrying out this task is shown in Fele (2008).
This is what, I argue, Schutz did.
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Ruggerone, L. Science and Life-World: Husserl, Schutz, Garfinkel. Hum Stud 36, 179–197 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9249-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9249-6