Social objects; assembling activities; reproducible descriptions; abstract & general while not statistical

Survey of the literature

Macro / micro

Non-trivial absences

Needing an “excuse” to study a phenomenon

“What [sociology’s] business is”

‘He doesn’t say [x]’ as “a rhetorical device”

Phenomenon vs. random distribution

Working on “small parts”

Re. is language inconsistent

Foreigner’s task / computers that could gossip

Constraints on human nature

Relationship between professional and Members’ categories

What “the apparatus” should do

“The apparatus”

“Things that God might have overlooked”

“The apparatus” : “a culture”

“The find power of a culture”

“‘Overbuilt’ machinery”

‘Rule detection’ via multiple vs. single cases

Sequential vs. dictionary specification

Showing that an analysis is wrong (via “totally unanalyzed piece” of data)

Re. choosing data

Re. absences

Analyzing vs.. employing Members’ phenomena

Single case vs. sampling

Need for “alternative independent materials”

Correctness vs. relevance; analyzing vs. counting

‘Real machinery’ vs. ‘hypothetical constructs’

A problem for comparative sociology (distribution of currencies)

Proposing that “some possible fact is accepted as correct by Members”

Weakness of counting [x] as “a measure” of [y]

Re. seeing other people’s thoughts

Adequacy of criteria vs. practical efficacy

Re. “A fuller study would show [x]”

Re. Being “conscious” of what one is doing

In-principle inadequacy of ‘correspondence criteria’

Re. ‘possibilities’

Re. language as inconsistent

Re. assembling “complex activities”

Linguistics: program for what’s not to be studied

Re. ‘agreement’

Re. measurement systems

“If [thinking some statements are odd] get[s] us into noticing these statements, [it] need not control where we go with them.”

Social science uses Members’ devices

Problems for observational sociology / anthropology

Asserting a problem vs. digging it out of the data

What makes something an X, rather than is A an X? Is B an X?, etc.

On sampling

On subjectivity

On formulations

Import of a finding

“The kind of data we need” – persons doing something “knowingly” (cf. pp. 566-567)

What sort of order of fact is something?

Cracking into the data via conventional ideas about what matters

Non-exhaustibility of what looks like uninteresting material

Data showing attentiveness by Members to their circumstances

(cf. pp. 533)

Working seriously with notion of ‘category bound activities’ (don’t just use it, show how it’s so).

Making trouble to test a notion (cf. pp. 690, 707)

Re. Erving Goffman

Overview

“Wandering around applying a rule”

A proposed finding should permit us to see things

On ‘theorizing’

Re. asserting that a rule has been violated

Problem in the world vs. problem for sociology

Locating contrast classes as naturally oriented-to phenomena

Making trouble to test a notion (cf. pp. 589, 707)

Dispute with Avram Stroll about paradoxes

Making trouble to test a notion (cf. pp. 589, 707)

Names: predictably wrongly transcribed

For transcribing of any utterance, the surrounding talk is extremely important

“The criteriality of such little items (as the non-equivalence of ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Nov 11, 1967’); “There is that order of redundancy in social organization.”

(Re above) “[these] are matters which you’d never get at a way of focusing on if you were looking for something exceptional as a handle…[T]he sheer appropriateness of such an answer as ‘Tuesday’ beguiles you into figuring that there could be nothing interesting...”

Characterizations of persons...are in principle selections from alternatives…[T]he issue is to see what considerations were involved in a given selection…[T]hat leads me routinely to focus on characterizations of persons...to see if I can make points.

Unreliability of recollected data

Making trouble (here, shifting around story descriptors)

Primacy of the way an argument is made, not the point being argued. “The only thing that’s interesting is the logic.”

Various aspects of the sequential organization of conversation

“...a science of social life should, like all other sciences, be able to handle...the actual details of actual events.”

Social science as “a primitive science in a very literal sense.”

Re. “non-trivial statements about absences” “One criterion for the noticeable status [of an absence] is that people say about it, ‘X is absent.’.”

A rejected explicational procedure: proposing that when X is not talked of it’s known in the way it is when it is talked of.

A “perfectly natural” course of development of an analysis: “parts” → “formal features”

A natural criterion for basicness of a rule

Proving an argument: natural vs. experimental procedures

Is [x] a “signal”?

“The last thing in the world you want to find yourself saying is ‘He says [x] because it’s true.’.” (also, pp. 82)

Reconceiving X’s ‘property’ as ‘a makings of conversation’

Abstract knowledge persons might have of their circumstances

Distribution of ‘Q on Q on Q’ sequences?; some sequencing positions ‘better than others’?

It doesn’t pay to attempt a comprehensive analysis of a single conversation. It nevertheless pays to work elaborately at a single conversation.

Re. the need for additional materials

Re. machine image

“A really deadly problem with contrast class arguments”

What is some remark about something somewhere doing this interaction?

Re. “bland facts”; correctness vs. relevance

Product or byproduct?

Re. “interactional technology”; how people listen to each other; doing provings; systematically characterizable ‘long sequences’ (cf. pp. 354-55)

Starting with observations vs. ‘why did he do that?’

Re. an “altogether informal…characterization of what took place” in a piece of data

Noticing a possible phenomenon vs. laughing it off (poetics)

Re.  posing a problem “because it looked like some answers could be found to it, by virtue of the things that were emerging…”

Possible correctness of a conversational formulation (here, “He was being very rational”)

Q:   Couldn’t that be carried too far?

HS:   The whole problem is that it’s nowhere in the first instance.

          (Re. Poetics)

“The gross aim of the work I’m doing…”

Re. ‘large sequences’ (cf. pp. 250-253)

“When do you have things in such a status as to be able to think about them?”

To what extent is some domain of social organization independently organized?

Re.  a ‘question’ which is a ‘request’, and a ‘command’ which is a ‘close offering’: “Neither have anything like the way in which they could be grammatically characterized, as sufficient information about how they’re dealt with.”

A procedure: from some observations apparently unrelated to each other or to some problem, come to pose the problem

Re. the limitations of hypothetical data

Less obvious data as sometimes “better”

Re. the “inconsistency” of proverbial expressions

Re. abstract models which also handle details

Given some “neat and delicate” occurrence, does one posit unusual personal virtuosity or “a virtuosity that maybe anyone has, or the language gives them.”

How to pose the question ‘why do people listen in conversation?’

The locating of alternatives is an “empirical issue” and not a matter of “obvious semantics…to be gotten by logical considerations.”

Re. characterizing something as ‘an adjacency pair’ vs. learning things about particular cases of an adjacency pair

Making trouble to test a notion (here, saying “Hello” before phone-answerer gets a chance) (cf. pp. 551)

Re. the “unhappy” character of an “ad hoc” rule

Making trouble: call your friends at dinner time (cf. pp. 542)

Re. developing an argument on the “relating power of adjacency”

Re. the independence of prefaces from what they precede

Re. layers of conversational organization

“I want...to inhibit a consideration of actual objects in terms of single types of organization, i.e., saying of something that it’s a ‘question’, and then saying that it’s adjacency-pair orderly in a variety of ways, and that’s that, as though one is finished with it.”

Distributionalizing phenomena: find a systematic “place” they occur

Re. making a “cutting observation”: “There’s no point [announcing an observation] unless it cuts through the material.”