🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 11 Jan 1993, JA Potter wrote:

> First, the so called fake therapist experiment worked by having
> participants record their reactions to what they thought was a
> trainee therapist giving yes/no responses to questions posed on
> an intercom.  The point was to illustrate a number of methodical
> ways in which people made sense of these (actually randomised)
> responses.  For example, people constantly used their interpretations
> of earlier responses to make sense of latter ones, and their
> interpretations of latter responses to reconstruct the sense of
> earlier ones.  The participants were constantly remaking what went on.
>
> I think it is perhaps misleading to consider this to be about dealing
> with error.  Rather than see error as being a simple or neutral fact
> that people have to fashion some way of dealing with, Garfinkely I am
> sure (almost sure!) would consider error itself to be a method that
> people use: the error is not simply there it is done.

Jonathon, while I agree that the H.G. article was not strictly "about" how
people work with error, I think it can inform our concept of error. After
all, what is error?  I believe that an important aspect of error is
that a message or scenario...or even "dramaturgy"... does not make sense
to a competent member of the community. (Defending some "objective"
sociological definition of "error" isn't my point, but rather
"getting at" or unpacking "error" is what I'm after here.) This lack of
knowing...of making sense... is what took place in the
H.G. experiment. Subjects went on to try to make sense of the situation.
In this way, error was a method...and certainly "error is not simply there
it is done."  I think that characterizes social production.

RE the reading list, thanks for the suggestions.
RE the following:

> A number of people at Loughborough have recently found it very
> interesting to combine ethnomethodological and rhetorical perspectives
> (in a selective way).

What do you mean by "in a selective way"?  (H.G.'s concept of reflexivity
and his critique on scientific assumptions haunts this type of discourse.)

Thank you for the interesting conversation.

Rick Freeman
P.O. Box 2421
Missoula, MT   59806
jeanbob@selway.umt.edu