Garfinkel2019

Garfinkel2019
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Garfinkel2019
Author(s)	Harold Garfinkel
Title	Notes on language games as a source of methods for studying the formal properties of linguistic events
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, constitutive rules/expectancies, culture, ethnomethodology, ethnoscience, game theory, Garfinkel, language, Parsons, social theory, trust conditions, Wittgenstein
Publisher
Year	2019
Language	English
City
Month
Journal	European Journal of Social Theory
Volume	22
Number	2
Pages	148–174
URL	Link
DOI	10.1177/1368431018824733
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

One of three distinct approaches to his famous ‘Trust’ argument, this paper written by Garfinkel in 1960, and never before published, proposed a rethinking of rules, games and linguistic classifications in interactional terms consistent with Wittgenstein’s language games. Garfinkel had been working in collaboration with Parsons since 1958 to craft an approach to culture that would replace conceptual classification with the constitutive expectancies of interaction and systems of interaction. The argument challenged the work of cultural anthropologists influenced by zoology and biology, who called themselves ‘ethnoscientists’ and studied culture in terms of linguistic classification systems. Garfinkel had proposed an alternative sociological ‘ethnoscience’ of culture and language that would focus on how culture was made, on how linguistic events are achieved, and on the rules of their making. This ‘Language Games’ approach followed Wittgenstein in seeking what Garfinkel called a literal description of cultural/linguistic events: meaning by ‘literal’, a step-by-step account of the constitutive and preferred rules participants use to create a recognizable event-in-a-language. Made famous three years later in version associated with Schutz, Garfinkel’s Trust argument also appears in a 1962 text (Parsons’ Primer, published in 2019) in a version built on Parsons.

Notes