Scientific and common sense reasoning: A comparison

Abstract

An ethnomethodological approach to human activity focuses on how members accomplish some sense of orderly reality through interpretive creation. Moving from a flexible theoretical base made possible by the radical ?poque and its suspension of a given, fixed reality with attendent features such as subject-object dualism, perceptual processing, and iionreciprocal causal sequences, the ethnomethodologist argues that all reality, rather than being merely perceived, must be constructed by the member via certain standard methods and practices. While not necessarily at odds with other contemporary approaches such as social psychology's attribution theory (Heider, 1958) and recent work in cognitive psychology (e.g., Neisser, 1967), the stress that is placed on the denial of perceived reality as given makes ethnomethodology an information doing model rather than an information processing one. This central concern with reality construction shifts the emphasis to how members accomplish meanings and information rather than what reality is done. Of particular interest are the empirically verifiable ways in which people accomplish meanings through the construction of a reality which organizes and glosses inconsistencies in the observed phenomena of the world. Individuals' accounts of their social environment are viewed as