Circumstances of Reasoning in the Natural Sciences

Abstract

Why begin a chapter, directed primarily to ethnomethodologists, with the detailed consideration of a problem in first-year chemistry? The chemistry problem has nothing exceptional about it: in the context of first-year chemistry, its solution is relatively simple. This is not the stuff of history, philosophy, or sociology of science nor, for that matter, is it of obvious interest to ethnomethodologists. The solution takes me to the limits of my understanding of chemistry; it may discourage many of the chapter's intended readers. At present, I am interested in the ways in which reasoning is peculiar to specific domains of practice. Rather than imagining reasoning as a general type of thing with general properties that are applied and adapted to different circumstances, the idea is to return to the actual phenomena of reasoning, therein to examine how those phenomena are distinctive of, and belong to, the practices of a collectivity. I have come, in this way, to envision an anthropology of reasoning.