Working Out What Garfinkel Could Possibly be Doing with “Durkheim’s Aphorism”

Harold Garfinkel draws strong and explicit linkage between ethnomethodology's program and what he calls Durkheim's aphorism: 'the objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental principle'. As social facts they involve collectivities of persons, and they must be discerned at the collective level, because individual persons caught up in particular circumstances of their lives are not equipped to observe them. Durkheim recognized that social facts are produced through social actions, but he stressed their collective existence and transcendence from the subjective pre-notions that obscure the vision of everyday actors. Method was the disciplinary means for getting access and correctly elucidating this transcendent order of facts. This view of sociology and of social facts is, of course, anathema to the non-positivistic and anti-positivistic sociologies that shadowed the development of scientistic sociology throughout the 20th century. Garfinkel is often linked to the anti-positivistic counter-sociologies, and he sometimes acts the part

Aphorism · Epistemology · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Representations and Identity

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