Rawls2011

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Rawls2011
BibType ARTICLE
Key Rawls2011
Author(s) Anne Warfield Rawls
Title Wittgenstein, Durkheim, Garfinkel and Winch: Constitutive Orders of Sensemaking
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Garfinkel, Winch, Wittgenstein, Durkheim, social objects, constitutive rules, constitutive practices, mutual attention, rules, rule following
Publisher
Year 2011
Language
City
Month
Journal Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
Volume 41
Number 4
Pages 396–418
URL Link
DOI 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2011.00471.x
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
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Edition
Series
Howpublished
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Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to the question of meaning and understanding based on the idea of constitutive rules and their relationship to the social objects they are used to create. This approach implicates mutual attention as an essential aspect of the social processes constitutive of social objects and mutual intelligibility. Social objects as such include the meaning, perception and coherence of things, identities and talk, etc. There is a relatively unexplored but important line of argument in sociology that has, from the beginning, explained the coherence and mutual intelligibility of social objects and associations in terms of constitutive practices and social facts. This line of argument begins with Emile Durkheim (1893) and carries through the work of Harold Garfinkel to current studies of work and interaction, human computer interaction and talk. The argument is that we use constitutive practices (Constitutive rules or constitutive background expectancies) to create social objects and make coherent and shared meanings. To act is in this sense for Garfinkel ([1948]2006) to “mean”. Explaining the consistency of social objects and orders in terms of constitutive orders, rules, or practices is an approach that meets the challenges posed to social science and philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Peter Winch (1958) and Paul Grice (1989).

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