Michael Lynch

• Cornell University

In lectures and writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” of the phenomenological writings of Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Garfinkel’s “misreading” included a selective and creative treatment...

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenol...

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology and subsequent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA). I argue that a point of continuity in ethnomethodology and CA, which marks both as radically different from long-standing traditions in Western philosophy and social science, is th...

This essay takes up a series of questions about the connection between ‘symmetry’ in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ‘post-truth’ in contemporary politics. A recent editorial in this journal by Sergio Sismondo argues that current discussions of ‘post-truth’ have little to do with conceptions of ‘symmetry’ or with concerns about ‘epistemic...

The expression ‘Oh’ in natural conversation is a signal topic in the development of the Epistemic Program (EP). This article attempts to bring into view a sense of place for this simple expression in the early literature, beginning with ‘Oh’ as a ‘change-of-state token’ and through its subsequent treatments in the production of assessments. It revi...

This article critically examines the relations between epistemics in conversation analysis (CA) and linguistic and cognitivist conceptions of communicative interaction that emphasize information and information transfer. The epistemic program (EP) adheres to the focus on recorded instances of talk-in-interaction that is characteristic of CA, explic...

Berger and Luckmann’s concept of “social construction” has been widely adopted in many fields of the humanities and social sciences in the half-century since they wrote The Social Construction of Reality. One field in which constructivism was especially provocative was in Science and Technology Studies (STS), where it was expanded beyond the social...

This article presents a case study of a recent controversy over the use of computed tomography (CT) as a diagnostic technology in South Korean hospitals. The controversy occurred in the wake of a series of conflicts in the late twentieth century over the legitimate placement of healing practices, medicinal substances, and medical technologies withi...

My remarks in this brief commentary focus on Chris Calvert-Minor’s (2014) article on Karen Barad’s philosophical writings, and are only indirectly relevant to an assessment of Barad’s work. I have limited acquaintance with Barad’s writings, and even less with Nils Bohr’s. Barad explicitly borrows from Bohr’s theoretical writings when developing her...

This introductory chapter sets out the theme of representation in scientific practice, and addresses why it remains such a vibrant topic for research in and beyond science and technology studies. The chapter draws particular attention to shifts in the content, context and concepts of inquiry that have occurred since the first volume to bear the nam...

Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, the long-awaited sequel to the influential volume, Representation in Scientific Practice, unites original editors Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar with colleagues Catelijne Coopmans and Janet Vertesi to present a new series of essays that sets the bar for the study of representation in science in the...

Michael Polanyi and H. M. Collins contrast tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge. For Collins, secrets and other forms of "relational tacit knowledge" are tacit, but only in relation to specific circumstances and relationships. Collins treats such relational knowledge as less interesting theoretically than collective knowledge that is essentially...

In this postscript to the special issue of Social Studies of Science on the 'turn to ontology' in science and technology studies, I discuss a tension that runs through many of the articles in the issue. This is a tension between adopting a general philosophical ontology and pursuing empirical studies of particular historical and contemporary practi...

Many epistemological terms, such as investigation, inquiry, argument, evidence, and fact were established in law well before being associated with science. However, while legal proof remained qualified by standards of 'moral certainty', scientific proof attained a reputation for objectivity. Although most forms of legal evidence (including expert e...

Throughout the brief history of nanoscience and nanotechnology, the prominence of digital images and animations is noteworthy. Many appear in online image galleries that provide an important public interface for presenting and promoting scientific research. In this essay, the authors examine a selection of images from image galleries, identify some...

This essay focuses on the “cultural dope,” an ironic reference in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology to the rule-following actor in conventional sociological theories. In the nearly half-century since the publication of that book, the “cultural dope” has been incorporated into numerous criticisms of “models of man” in the human sciences...

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane re...

This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel's contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of the production and coordination of 'methods' in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyda...

As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and...

DNA profiling—commonly known as DNA fingerprinting—is often heralded as unassailable criminal evidence, a veritable “truth machine” that can overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony, confessions, and other forms of forensic evidence. But DNA evidence is far from infallible. It is subject to the same possibilities for error—in sa...

A colleague who was participating in one of the many Darwin bicentennial events on university campuses this year recently asked me, “What was Fuller thinking?” In reply, I sent him a copy of Steve Fuller’s (2009) opinion piece, which had just come out in this journal. In it, Fuller attempts to explain why he decided to perform as an expert witness...

Many scientific and nonscientific activities involve practices of counting. Counting is, perhaps, the most elementary of numerical practices: an ability to count is presupposed in arithmetic and other branches of mathematics, and counting also is part of innumerable everyday and specialized activities. Though it is a simple practice when considered...

This paper gives serious consideration to a negative answer to the thematic question for this meeting of whether STS "means business" - can be translated, applied, or otherwise made useful. It is easy enough to affirm that "STS" can be translated, or as I would prefer to say accommodated, to various local organizational environments, but this begs...

DNA profiling and searchable databases enhance the ability of policing organizations to search for criminal suspects. In many respects, these technologies are incorporated within traditions of police work, supplementing familiar "subjective" methods of constructing suspects. In other ways, however, the construction of DNA databases in Britain, the...

En este documento se aborda el tema de la representación desde la perspectiva etnometodológica y desde la sociología del conocimiento científico. En un primer punto, se discute la imagen estándar de la representación y la propuesta constructivista de dicha imagen. Después se presenta un estudio de caso en el que se sugiere cómo las prácticas de rec...

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (ethno/CA) investigate many of the activities that are featured in the cognitive sciences. These include memory, learning, perception, and calculative activities. However, for ethno/CA such activities are not necessarily ‘cognitive’, and their investigation as activities does not necessarily require observ...

In the cognitive sciences, activities like seeing, remembering, recognizing, learning, problem solving and decision making tend to be treated as individual processes for recording, retrieving and configuring information. Everyday actions are regarded as surface behaviours which are caused by underlying mental and neurological processes; processes t...

This paper discusses materials from a legal case. People v. Hyatt (2001). This was a criminal case in which one of the authors (Simon Cole) agreed to appear as an expert witness for the defense. Cole's expertise derived from his research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and so his appearance in the case exemplified STS research...

Cet article porte sur une affaire britannique, Regina v. Adams , au centre de laquelle se trouvait la question de la différence entre « raison scientifique » et « sens commun » à propos de la preuve ADN. Dans sa décision, la Cour d’appel rétablit la frontière entre la preuve « scienti­fique » et la preuve de « sens commun », arguant du fait que cet...

In the mid-1980s, when the first DNA profiling techniques were developed, the name DNA 'fingerprinting' was widely used. At the time, fingerprinting was a well-established forensic method, and it was rarely questioned in the courts. Fingerprint examiners were permitted to describe matching prints as evidence of individual identity, and they were no...

Law courts are important institutional settings in which public understanding of science is problematic. Courts have struggled with the question of how to handle scientific evidence in a system of justice in which lay jurors are responsible for deciding the facts of the case. Judicial conceptions of science and of jurors' capacities to understand s...

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Protocols are one of the main organizational resources in molecular biology. They are written instructions that specify ingredients, equipment, and sequences of steps for making technical preparations. Some protocols are published in widely used manuals, while others are hand-written variants used by particular laboratories and individual technicia...

Readers familiar with Latour's work may be inclined to disregard this book. The most substantial (and excellent) chapter in it (Chapter 2: Circulating Reference: Sampling Soil in the Amazon Forest) was published under a different title a few years earlier (Latour 1995), and the earlier version has the advantage of including (and thus 'circulating')...

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 crit...

Scientific representations include a diverse and confusing array of maps, descriptions, diagrams, and protocols. This study examines and compares the practical and communicative uses of such artifacts. The main source of material is the authors' ethnographic research on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a laboratory routine that has numerous sci...

Conversation analysis (CA) developed from ethnomethodology, but has become an independent research program that seems to have left behind the ethnomethodology's phenomenological orientation. This article examines a gradual transition between an explicative style of conversation analysis exemplified by many of Harvey Sacks's lectures in which he exp...

Ethnomethodologists (or at least many of them) have been reticent about their theoretical sources and methodological principles. It frequently falls to others to make such matters explicit. In this paper I discuss this silence about theory, but rather than entering the breach by specifying a set of implicit assumptions and principles, I suggest tha...

The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles...

Dans la perspective de la sociologie de la connaissance, l'A. defend la possibilite d'une approche relativement desinteressee des querelles juridiques qui surviennent dans les salles d'audience. Des lors, le systeme de la confrontation adverse interesse a la fois l'ethnomethodologie et les etudes technologiques concernant la construction et la deco...

Article compares three field guides of bird watching, and discusses differences of using these texts in the field. One is schematic and points to particular features of birds. One uses photographs, which provide more richness but don't lead the user to differentiating points. One is a hybrid with more naturalistic drawings. All guides serve a parti...

The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a molecular biological technique for `amplifying' selected DNA sequences. In the decade after its invention, PCR has worked its way into numerous fields of practice. It was one of the DNA-profiling techniques which were subjected to detailed, critical scrutiny during the OJ Simpson trial. In this paper we `fol...

DNA `fingerprinting' and other methods of genetic profiling have been used in connection with hundreds of criminal trials in the UK, USA and other nations. These molecular biological techniques are employed by the prosecution (and less often by the defense) to produce forensic evidence. By means of these techniques, selected DNA fragments extracted...

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has challenged many of the ''core'' conceptions of theory and method that remain entrenched in sociology textbooks. In conjunction with recent developments in history and philosophy of science, sociologists of science speak of the disunity of science and describe the local-historical origins of particular...

A recurrent theme in ethnomethodological research is that of instructed actions. Contrary to the classic traditions in the social and cognitive sciences, which attribute logical priority or causal primacy to instructions, rules, and structures of action, ethnomethodologists investigate the situated production of actions which enable such formulatio...

En 1991, dans le procès criminel « New Jersey contre Williams », de nouvelles méthodes d'identification du sang du suspect furent utilisées. Selon la législation en vigueur aux Etats-Unis à l'époque, une audience préliminaire fut organisée afin de déterminer l'admissibilité des preuves issues des procédés d'identification par l'ADN. L'accusation "f...

This Comment fakes its point of departure from Myles Jackson's historical study of Goethe's attempt to incite a 'protestant reformation' in colour theory. According to Jackson, Goethe tried to unseat the remote authority of Newton's science in favour of a science grounded in non-specialized personal knowledge. Goethe's natural-philosophical texts,...

Configurations 2.1 (1994) 137-149 The title of this paper is parasitic upon a line in Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening, where he attacks the centrality of the concept of observation in the positivist heritage by saying that "observation is overrated." Experimental observation is often said to provide an independent test of theoretical pro...

For a writing to be a writing it must continue to "act" and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intentio...

Two consecutive issues (Numbers 2 and 3) of Volume 15 of Qualitative Sociology have been devoted to recent work in ethnomethodology. Although ethnomethodological research has been published in past issues of this journal, we thought it would be worthwhile to put together a collection of papers that represents the range of approaches to social inter...

The Argument There can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapi...

This paper considers a recent proposal by Alec McHoul that ‘Wittgenstein-inspired ethnomethodology’ might be put to use in the service of critical studies of discourse. Although agreeing substantially with ethno,ethodological and conversation analytic approaches to discourse and practical reasoning, McHoul argues against their descriptivist aims. D...