pages 26-31

Students filled out the left side of the sheet quickly and easily, but found the right side incomparably more difficult. When the assignment was made, many asked how much I wanted them to write. As I progressively imposed accuracy, clarity, and distinctness, the task became increasingly laborious. Finally, when I required that they assume I would know what they had actually talked about only from reading literally what they wrote literally, they gave up with the complaint that the task was impossible.

Although their complaints were concerned with the laboriousness of having to write "more," the frustrating "more" was not made up of the large labor of having to reduce a mountain with buckets. It was not their complaint that what was talked about consisted of bounded contents made so vast by pedantry that they lacked sufficient time, stamina, paper, drive, or good reason to write "all of it." Instead, the complaint and its circumstances seemed to consist of this: if, for whatever a student wrote, I was able to persuade him that it was not yet accurate, distinct, or clear enough, and if he remained willing to repair the ambiguity, then he returned to the task with the complaint that the writing itself developed the conversation as a branching texture of relevant matters. The very way of accomplishing the task multiplied its features.

What task had I set them such that it required that they write "more"; such that the progressive imposition of accuracy, clarity, and literalness made it increasingly difficult and finally impossible; [27] and such that the way of accomplishing the task multiplied its features? If a common understanding consisted of shared agreement on substantive matters their task would have been identical with one that professional sociologists supposedly address. The task would have been solved as professional sociologists are apt to propose its solution, as follows:

Students would first distinguish what was said from what was talked about, and set the two contents into a correspondence of sign and referent. What the parties said would be treated as a sketchy,, partial, incomplete, masked, elliptical, concealed, ambig- or misleading version of what the parties talked about. The task would consist of filling out the sketchiness of what was said. What was talked about would consist of elaborated and corresponding contents of what the parties said. Thus the format of left and right hand columns would accord with the "fact" that the contents of what was said were recordable by writing what a tape recorder would pick up. The right hand column would require that something "more" be "added." Because the sketchiness of what was said was its defect, it would be necessary for students to look elsewhere than to what was said in order (a) to find the corresponding contents, and (b) to find the grounds to argue—because they would need to argue—for the correctness of the correspondence. Because they were reporting the actual conversation of particular persons, they would look for these further contents in what the conversationalists had "in mind," or what they were "thinking," or what they "believed," or what they "intended." Furthermore, they, would need to be assured that they had detected what the conversationalists actually, and not supposedly, hypothetically, imaginably, or possibly had in mind. That is to say, they would need to cite observed actions—observed ways that the parties conducted themselves—in order to furnish grounds for the claim of "actually." This assurance would be obtained by seeking to establish the presence, in the conversationalists' relationship, of warranting virtues such as their having spoken honestly, openly, candidly, sincerely, and the like. All of which is to say that students would invoke their knowledge of the community of understandings, and their knowledge of shared agreements to recommend the adequacy of their accounts of what the parties had been talking about, i.e., hat the parties understood in common. Then, for anything the [28] students wrote, they could assume that I, as a competent co-member of the same community (the conversations were after ttll commonplace) should be able to see the correspondence and its grounds. If I did not see the correspondence or if I made out the contents differently than they did, then as long as they could continue to assume my competence—i.e., as long as my alternate interpretations did not undermine my right to claim that such alternatives needed to be taken seriously by them and by me—I could be made out by the students as insisting that they furnish me with finer detailing than practical considerations required. In such a case, they should have charged me with blind pedantry and should have complained that because "anyone can see" when, for all practical purposes, enough is enough, none are so blind as those will not see.

This version of their task accounts for their complaints of having to write "more." It also accounts for the task's increasing laboriousness when clarity and the like were progressively imposed. But it does not account very well for the final impossibility, for it explains one facet of the task's "impossibility" as students' unwillingness to go any further, but it does not explain an accompanying sense, namely, that students somehow saw that the task was, in principle, unaccomplishable. Finally, this version of their task does not explain at all their complaint that the way of accomplishing the task multiplied its features.

An alternative conception of the task may do better. Although it may at first appear strange to do so, suppose we drop the assumption that in order to describe a usage as a feature of a community of understandings we must at the outset know what the substantive common understandings consist of. With it, drop the assumption's accompanying theory of signs, according to which a "sign" and "referent" are respectively properties of something said and something talked about, and which in this fashion proposes sign and referent to be related as corresponding contents. By dropping such a theory of signs we drop as well, thereby, the possibility that an invoked shared agreement on substantive matters explains a usage

If these notions are dropped, then what the parties talked about could not be distinguished from how the parties were speaking. An explanation of what the parties were talking about would then consist entirely of describing how the parties had been speaking; of[29] furnishing a method for saying whatever is to be said, like talking synonimously, talking ironically, talking metaphorically, talking cryptically, talking narratively, talking in a questioning or answering way, lying, glossing, double-talking, and the rest.

In the place of and in contrast to a concern for a difference between what was said and what was talked about, the appropriate difference is between a language-community member's recognition that a person is saying something, i.e., that he was speaking, on the hand, and how he was speaking on the other. Then the recognized sense of what a person said consists only and entirely in recognizing the method of his speaking, of seeing how he spoke.

I suggest that one not read the right hand column as corresponding contents of the left, and that the students' task of explaining what the conversationalists talked about did not involve them in elaborating the contents of what the conversationalists said. I suggest, instead, that their written explanations consisted of their attempts to instruct me in how to use what the parties said as a method for seeing what the conversationalists said. I suggest that I had asked the students to furnish me with instructions for recognizing what the parties were actually and certainly saying. By persuading them of alternative "interpretations," by insisting that ambiguity still remained, I had persuaded them that they had demonstrated to me only what the parties were supposedly, or probably, or imaginably, or hypothetically saying. They took this to mean that their instructions were incomplete; that their demonstrations failed by the extent to which their instructions were incomplete; and that the difference between claims of "actually" and "supposedly" depended on the completeness of the instructions.

We now see what the task was that required them to write more," that they found increasingly difficult and finally impossible, and that became elaborated in its features by the very procedures for doing it. I had set them the task of formulating these instructions so as to make them "increasingly" accurate, clear, distinct, and finally literal where the meanings of "increasingly" and of clarity, accuracy, distinctness, and literalness were supposedly explained in terms of the properties of the instructions themselves and the instructions alone. I had required them to take on the impossible task of "repairing" the essential incompleteness of any set of instructions no matter how carefully or elaborately written they [30] might be. I had required them to formulate the method that the parties had used in speaking as rules of procedure to follow in order to say what the parties said, rules that would withstand every exigency of situation, imagination, and development. I had asked them to describe the parties' methods of speaking as if these methods were isomorphic with actions in strict compliance with a rule of procedure that formulated the method as an instructable matter. To recognize what is said means to recognize how a person is speaking, e.g., to recognize that the wife in saying "your shoes need heels badly" was speaking narratively, or metaphorically, or euphemistically, or double-talking. They stumbled over the fact that the question of how a person is speaking, the task of describing a person's method of speaking,. is not satisfied by, and is not the same as showing that what he said accords with a rule for demonstrating consistency, compatibility, and coherence of meanings.

For the conduct of their everyday affairs, persons take for granted that what is said will be made out according to methods that the parties use to make out what they are saying for its clear, consistent, coherent, understandable, or planful character, i.e., as subject to some rule's jurisdiction—in a word, as rational. To see the "sense" of what is said is to accord to what was said its character "as a rule." "Shared agreement" refers to various social methods for accomplishing the member's recognition that something was said-according-to-a-rule and not the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. The appropriate image of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than a common intersection overlapping sets.

A person doing sociology, be it lay or professional sociology, can treat a common understanding as a shared agreement on substantive matters by taking for granted that what is said will be made out in accordance with methods that need not be specified, which is to say that need only be specified on "special" occasions.

Given the discovering character of what the husband and wife were talking about, its recognizable character for both entailed the use by each and the attribution by each to the other of work whereby what was said is or will have been understood to have accorded with their relationship of interaction as an invokable rule of their agreement, as an intersubjectively used grammatical [31] scheme for analyzing each other's talk whose use provided that they would understand each other in ways that they would be understood. It provides that neither one was entitled to call upon the other to specify how it was being done; neither one was entitled to claim that the other needed to "explain" himself.

In short, a common understanding, entailing as it does an "inner" temporal course of interpretive work, necessarily has an operational structure. For the analyst to disregard its operational structure, is to use common sense knowledge of the society in exactly the ways that members use it when they must decide what persons are really doing or really "talking about," i.e., to use common sense knowledge of social structures as both a topic and a resource of inquiry. An alternative would be to assign exclusive priority to the study of the methods of concerted actions and methods of mon understanding. Not a method of understanding, but immensely various methods of understanding are the professional sociologist's proper and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena. Their multitude is indicated in the endless list of ways that persons speak. Some indication of their character and their differences occurs in the socially available glosses of a multitude of sign functions as when we take note of marking, labeling, symbolizing, emblemizing, cryptograms, analogies, anagrams, indicating, miniaturizing, imitating, mocking-up, simulating—in short, in recognizing, using, and producing the orderly ways of cultural settings from "within" those settings.9

Policies

That practical actions are problematic in ways not so far seen; how they are problematical; how to make them- accessible to study; what we might learn about them—these are proposed tasks. I use the term "ethnomethodology" to refer to the study of practical actions according to policies such as the following, and to the

9 This note was touched off by Monroe Beardsley's remark in "The Metaphorical Twist," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March, 1962, to the effect that we do not decide that a word is used metaphorically because we know what a person is thinking; rather we know what he is thinking because we see that a word is used metaphorically. Taking poetry for his case, Beardsley points out that "the clues of this fact must somehow be in the poem itself, or we should seldom be able to read poetry."