With this issue the Editorial Board of Sartre Studies International undergoes many changes. Michael Scriven has resigned his position of Executive editor in order to take up the position of Director of Academic Programmes at the European Business School, Regent’s College in London, England. It was Michael who laid the foundations of SSI and his hard work and attention to the practical workings of the journal will be sorely missed. He will be replaced by Andrew Leak, who teaches French at (...) University College London. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Reflexivity is a well-established theoretical and methodological concept in the human sciences, and yet it is used in a confusing variety of ways. The meaning of `reflexivity' and the virtues ascribed to the concept are relative to particular theoretical and methodological commitments. This article examines several versions of the concept, and critically focuses on treatments of reflexivity as a mark of distinction or source of methodological advantage. Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings (...) often speak of reflexivity as a methodological tool, substantive property of social systems, or source of individual enlightenment. Radical and conventional social scientists alike tend to stress the importance of being reflexive, as opposed to being unreflexive, but they do not share a coherent conception of what `being reflexive' means or entails. As an alternative to reflexive self-privileging, I recommend an ethnomethodological conception of reflexivity as an ordinary, unremarkable and unavoidable feature of action. The ethnomethodological conception does not support a particular theoretical or methodological standpoint by contrasting it to an `unreflexive' counterpart. It has little value as a critical weapon or source of epistemological advantage, which, in the present context, can have advantages of its own for promoting peace and epistemic democracy. (shrink)

In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization. Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements of the critique: my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal psychological analysis (...) for the classic conversation analytic focus on the normative accountability of social action, my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of conflict and hostility into CA thinking, various concepts that I have introduced involve the invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field and that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and reasoning that inhabit these papers. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology has been torn between scientific and "radical" aspirations insofar as it moves discoursive practices from resources to the topic of the study. Scientific ethnomethodology, such as conversation analysis, studies discoursive praxis as its topic and resource. Standard scientific criteria are accepted to assess the merits of its findings. "Radical" ethnomethodology addresses mundane reasoning exclusively as its topic without recourse to standardized science. I will show that insofar as "radical" ethnomethodology succeeds in bracketing everyday resources, it loses its phenomenon with (...) the very technical skills it uses for this task. This reconsideration enables the development of ethnomethodological social science. Key Words: conversation analysis • discoursive praxis • ethnomethodology • radical ethnomethodology • social studies of science. (shrink)