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Ethnomethodology as an Experimentation with the Natural Attitude: George Psathas on Phenomenological Sociology Carlos Belvedere1,2

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract My aim is to depict Psathas’s position on ethnomethodology as a way of doing phenomenological sociology. On this, he contested with others who argued that ethnomethodology is not a phenomenological sociology at all. His claim was that ethnomethodology is a part of the phenomenological movement. In this dispute, he offered two kinds of arguments. On the one hand, he documented the strong phenomenological background of Garfinkel’s ideas. On the other hand, he found in Garfinkel’s own words expressions of gratitude to Husserl, Gurwitsch, and Schutz, among other phenomenologists. However, having proved that there was a close relation of Garfinkel with ethnomethodology, Psathas went on to show that Garfinkel turned phenomenological ideas into something new; in particular, he turned phenomenology into an experimental science dealing with the natural attitude. This is a groundbreaking contribution that Psathas appreciated and comprehended as no one else. Keywords  Natural attitude · Experimentation · Phenomenological sociology · Garfinkel · Schutz

Introduction For some decades now, there has been much ado about phenomenological sociology. Something odd happens. Supporters as well as detractors of applied phenomenology in the social sciences mostly agree that there is not such a thing as a phenomenological sociology. Some believe that, as a philosophy, phenomenology does not belong to the field of the sciences, as sociology does. Some others believe that sociologists work with different methods and deal with different objects than phenomenologists,

* Carlos Belvedere [email protected] 1

Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

2

Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina



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so they perform quite different activities (see Eberle 2012a; see also Dreher 2012: 153–158). Incredibly, everybody is enthusiastically willing to discuss something that they think does not exists… Fortunately, we have George Psathas who wisely put this debate on quite a different basis. Psathas provided two main arguments in favor of phenomenological sociology; one descriptive, another programmatic. Initially, he was the first to realize that, in fact, there was a large group of people doing sociology in the name of phenomenology. He described it as “an intellectual movement”.1 Then he had this wonderful idea of getting those people together, organize a conference, and talk about what they were doing.2 That meeting was so inspiring that a volume was edited (Psathas 1973), a society was started (the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences), and a few years later this journal was founded. All this proves that—just as Psathas envisioned—phenomenological sociology does exist. However, describing the actual existence of the phenomenological sociology as an intellectual movement—i.e., its fact