Aspects of the Flexibilities of Natural Language Use: A Reply to Phillips

Abstract

This paper argues, against Phillips, that the approach to descriptive accounts developed in ethnomethodological studies derives neither from a substantive commitment to the `uniqueness of situations' nor from sceptical considerations about the nature of human experiential, linguistic, or conceptual resources. It is suggested that a concern with the indefiniteness of human descriptive resources is an important point of convergence between the work of Garfinkel and Wittgenstein. It is further argued that, whilst this indefiniteness is not usually a source of practical descriptive difficulty, the supposition of such indefiniteness is a condition for the theoretical treatment of conflicting descriptions, the flexibility of human descriptive resources and their novel applicability together with related problems concerning personal, cultural, and linguistic change, cultural and linguistic relativism etc. which would be unintelligible from the standpoint of a finite rule-based semantic and interactional theory. This position is distinguished from `rule scepticism' and is suggested to enable the consideration of co-determinative and interactive rule operations. The claim that knowledge of language should be considered in abstraction from knowledge of the world is contested throughout.

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