Hutchinson2025
| Hutchinson2025 | |
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| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Hutchinson2025 |
| Author(s) | Phil Hutchinson, Wes Sharrock |
| Title | Wittgenstein and Winch |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 161–171 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-16 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 14 |
Abstract
There has been fruitful cross-fertilisation and complementary work undertaken by ethnomethodologists and Wittgensteinians. In this chapter, we give an overview of the reasons for this integration and complementarity. In § 241 and those which follow it of his Philosophical Investigations, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein draws a distinction between the kind of agreement that serves as “scaffolding from which our language operates” and what human beings “say” or do in that language. Wittgenstein then follows up by remarking that this scaffold-agreement is not the kind of agreement people might have in opinions but is rather agreement in a form of life. It is this form of life that provides the conditions for and intelligibility to our social practices. While Wittgenstein wrote little that was explicitly responsive to work in social studies, the Wittgensteinian philosopher, Peter Winch, did write on such issues beginning with his 1958 work The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. The interests of Wittgenstein and Winch overlap with those of Garfinkel, Sacks and the ethnomethodologists that followed them in a number of ways, but perhaps most fundamentally one might see Wittgenstein’s talk of the ‘scaffold of agreement from which our language operates’ as overlapping with Garfinkel’s suggestion that the conditions for and intelligibility of social action are endogenously produced in situ by members of the social order. From this shared insight, we might then progress to explore the overlap between Garfinkel’s employment of indexicality and post-Wittgensteinian radical contextualist philosophy of language.
Notes
