This paper investigates how are things on the street methodically displayed to exchibit an aspect of extra-legal ‘ownership'. Harvey Sacks proposed two categories of ownerships, those that one wants and can have and those that one wants but cannot have. Building on this Sacks’ categorizations and on his method of simple observation and on photographic documentation this paper develops an additional typology of informal ownership displayed on the street. Typology is based on the layperson’s unmediated inference of the in situ (...) and in vivo account of the exhibited properties of a thing’s methodic display. Taking from Harold Garfinkel that social order resides in the ordinary practice the author’s layperson’s description of an observed thing accounts for the method of its display as the recognized generality of the ownership type. Such analysis escapes the sociological method of complex analysis of large collections of quantitative data as the only and privileged account of social order. In this regard, Sacks envisioned social analysis as natural science based on simple observations, reporting, and replications that could be done by anybody. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 (Leçon D) testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s (Outline of a project entitled “Phenomenology of Perception”) contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

In lectures and writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” of the phenomenological writings of Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Garfinkel’s “misreading” included a selective and creative treatment of themes that Gurwitsch drew from Gestalt psychology, such as figure-ground, Gestalt contexture, and the phenomenal field. Rather than identifying these themes with visual perception demonstrated with picture-puzzles (for example, of animals hidden in foliage) (...) and line drawings of reversible figures, Garfinkel used them to demonstrate praxeological and interactional phenomena: organizations of embodied activity that constitute fields of collective action. Phenomenal fields, for Garfinkel, are formed through embodied work performed in concert with the actions of others. Although Harvey Sacks, the founder of Conversation Analysis, did not explicitly mention Gurwitsch, phenomenology or Gestalt psychology in his writings and transcribed lectures, some of his writings on the sequential organization of conversation seem informed, if only indirectly through his relationship with Garfinkel, by Gurwitsch’s treatment of visual and auditory phenomena. Both Garfinkel and Sacks devised innovative ways to transpose Gestalt phenomena from perceptual psychology to social formations. (shrink)

1 Context The idea for the current issue of Philosophia Scientiæ emerged from discussions which took place in the Manchester Ethnomethodology Reading Group. This reading group has its origins in Wes Sharrock’s weekly discussion groups, which have taken place in Manchester (UK) since the early 1970s. As the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the reading group moved online, facilitated by Phil Hutchinson and Alex Holder. Being an online reading group opened up participation to people b...

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

Members in society make ubiquitous use of examples as a resource to engage in their everyday and specialized activities. This paper takes the resourcefulness of exemplification as a topic of inquiry by focusing on the formulative phrase “for example,” investigating its interactional work within the analytic framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The data used consists of 11 h of video-recordings of English as a Foreign Language classroom lessons over a semester. We conceptualize exemplification as a holistic configuration (_gestalt_) where (...) its work consists in the production and recognition of a pair, namely the _exemplifying component_ and the _exemplified component_. We demonstrate how the teacher and students position the formulative phrase as a recognizable practice for the organization of two distinct actions: _accounting for one’s opinion_ and _confirming an understanding_. Our findings also present the different forms of exemplification, including elaborate narrative constructions, single terms or phrases, and specimen performances. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the interactional organization of an instructed object exploration among sighted and visually impaired people (VIPs) in order to contribute to studies of instructional activities and the observable accomplishment of haptic perception. We do this by showing the situated, interactional, and co-operative organization of achieving object understanding. We focus on the dynamics of haptic perception as being reliant on instructions, while at the same time being an observable production that furnishes further instructions. We show the organization (...) of visual and verbal instructions versus the touching of objects for haptic perception. Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis of video data, we study a VIP’s haptic actions in interaction with a professional, sighted ICT consultant who provides instructions on what an object is and what it can do. We show how the instructions are sequentially adjusted to make them relevant for a simultaneous, emerging exploration in which the VIP uses their hands and fingers to perceive very specific details of the object. We argue that achieving object understanding is accomplished in and through the fine-tuned coordination of haptic exploration, both as a response to verbal instructions and also as a means of conveying perception-related actions, which the ICT uses to build new actions. The paper thus makes a case for instructed and distributed haptic perception as observable in social interaction and as a resource for building object understanding within phenomenal fields. (shrink)