Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have grown interested in the daily practices of scientists. Recent studies have drawn linkages between scientific innovations and more ordinary procedures, craft skills, and sources of sponsorship. These studies dispute the idea that science is the application of a unified method or the outgrowth of a progressive history of ideas. This book critically reviews arguments and empirical studies in two areas of sociology that have played a significant role in the 'sociological turn' in science (...) studies: ethnomethodology and the sociology of scientific knowledge. In both fields, efforts to study scientific practices have led to intractable difficulties and debates, due in part to scientistic and foundationalist commitments that remain entrenched with social-scientific research policies and descriptive language. The central purpose of this book is to explore the possibility of an empirical approach to the epistemic contents of science that avoids the pitfalls of scientism and foundationalism. (shrink)

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

This paper gives a selective overview of studies in 'medical ethnomethodology'. It starts with the 1967 contributions by Garfinkel and Sudnow, which focus on medical action as accountable Then it discusses the many CA-inspired studies of doctor-patient inter-action published during the 1980s. Finally, it points to scattered studies that suggest several ways in which this latter approach can be deepened and enlarged. In this way, it formulates the contours of a program for ethnomethodological studies in the medical field.

A recurrent theme in ethnomethodological research is that of instructed actions. Contrary to the classic traditions in the social and cognitive sciences, which attribute logical priority or causal primacy to instructions, rules, and structures of action, ethnomethodologists investigate the situated production of actions which enable such formulations to stand as adequate accounts. Consequently, a recitation of formal structures can not count as an adequate sociological description, when no account is given of the local production ofwhat those structures describe. The natural (...) sciences can be described as a domain of practical action in whichthe use of methods enables the intersubjective reproduction of naturalistic observations and experiments. As numerous sociological studies of laboratory practices have shown, the achievement of intersubjective order cannot be reduced to formal methods; instead, it arises from the work of custom-fitting relevant methods to the local circumstances of the research. In this paper we discuss a possible extension of this idea to cover two intertwined aspects of molecular biology: (1) the work of following instructions on how to perform routine laboratory procedures, and (2) the relationship between cellular orders and the encoded instructions contained in the DNA molecule. We suggest that a classic conception of scientific action is implied by the way formal instructions are treated as a primary basis, both for molecular biologists' actions and the cellular functions they study, and we envision an ethnomethodological alternative to those conceptions of social and biological order. (shrink)

With the introduction of the technique of auscultation in nineteenth-century medicine, the auditory became a most important means of producing diagnostic knowledge. The correct classification and interpretation of the sounds revealed by auscultation, however, remained an issue of negotiation and often controversy throughout the mid-nineteenth century. This article examines the codification of lung sounds within two cultural and geographic contexts: first, the original approach as it was developed by Laennec and his followers in Paris that came to be dominant in (...) French medicine, and second, the alternative approach that grew out of Joseph Skoda’s reception of Laennec’s method in Vienna and became widely adopted in the German-speaking world. On one hand, it will be argued that lung sound classifications attempted a standardization of the perception and the interpretation of auscultation sounds. On the other hand, it will be shown that the development of auscultation sounds was shaped by the local context in which it took place. This article seeks to shed light on the way in which auditory experiences were instrumentalized for epistemic purposes in medicine. Furthermore, it discusses the role of standardization both as a mechanism for the universalization of knowledge and as a contextually bounded practice. (shrink)