Rules and Details

Abstract

This paper first recalls the way the distinction John Rawls introduced between ‘summary’ and ‘practice’ conceptions of rules was presented and taken up in French thought in the 1990s. Then, expanding on Rawls’ characterization of Wittgenstein’s considerations on rule following and discussing several criticisms it aroused, it comes to the conclusion that ‘rule’ is a notion that is inadequate to explain either social action or the way people justify what they have done. It thus argues that to account for the emergence of the mutual intelligibility enabling action in common to emerge and develop, one should dispense with the notion of rule and substitute the notion of detail of ordinary action for it. To support this claim, the paper takes on a question: what does a detail do? The answer it offers suggests that each detail of an ongoing action — when empirically identified in actual circumstances of interaction — should be conceived of as a building block of practical reasoning allowing for a sociological inquiry of a phenomenon: coordination of action, that is, the sequential activity which makes an action the kind of action it is.

Obligation and Impersonality

“…That is why he claims that both Durkheim ([1912Durkheim ([ ] 1965, in the tentative "sociological theory of knowledge" he sketched in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and Weber ([1920] 1978), with his construction of comprehensive sociology, have developed a "misbegotten epistemology." The least one may say is that Winch only retains the positivist side of Durkheim's and Weber's works to vindicate his dismissal of sociology (Ogien 2009). The importance Winch confers on understanding is evident in his famous dictum: "All behaviour which is meaningful (therefore all specifically human behaviour) is ipso facto rule-governed" (Winch [1958(Winch [ ] 1990.…”

Durkheim as a sociologist of knowledge: Rudiments of a reflexive theory of the concept

“…This body of research has shown how for an action in common to start, to unfold, and to end, its participants have to accomplish, sequence by sequence, its coordination (Ogien, 2009a). They have demonstrated in detail that members engrossed in any action in common are nonetheless constantly performing these ordinary epistemic operations which consist in objectivizing, abstracting, generalizing, typifying, categorizing, or anticipating (Ogien, 2009b). These non-reflective (but nevertheless reflexive) operations allow for the identification of the elements of an environment through directly establishing relations between observed facts and objects and their mutual ordering of the action in common that they are involved in according to its changing circumstances.…”

Reproducibility and Instruction Following in the Shop Floor Laboratory Work: The Case of a TMS Experiment

“…Their discussants emphasize similar problems, arguing that, for instance, selective reporting of positive results is not necessarily questionable as it may refer “to completely normal practices that are part and parcel of all empirical research,” such as conducting pilot studies or testing experimental conditions (Fiedler and Schwarz 2016, 46). The reproducibility crisis therefore invokes the old theoretical paradox of rule-following, which rests on the fact that “there are no rules on how to apply rules” (Ogien 2009, 461) and, consequently, rules to define a correct application of the rule.…”