Radical reflexivity and hermeneutic pre-normativity

Reflexivity in ethnomethodological perspective

Notoriously, ethnomethodologists oppose a reading of rule-governed conduct that they attribute to Parsons’s theory of action. On this reading, the actors are encountering a situation of action and interaction in which they apply rules they have internalized as ‘need dispositions’. The actors are treated as unreflexive (‘judgmental dopes’) with regard both to the process of norms’ internalization and to the application of norms. Accordingly, action brought into play is conceived of as caused by norms and rules. The action’s intrinsic coordination and functional organization are due to the same identification of the situation by actors who have acquired (internalized) the same rules of action. An autonomous (from the contingencies of the particular situations) normative order provides (through its internalization) the basis for the action’s integrity (and thus, for the coherence of its orderliness). The basic weakness of this reading of rule-governed conduct – so the argument of Garfinkel’s followers goes – is the overlooking of actors’ reflexivity that assures an interpretative leeway of choosing and applying rules in their action. The functionalist theories of social action do not take into account the fact that the actors’ interpretative judgements are necessarily involved in the application of norms and rules. These judgements are also forgotten or ignored by all sorts of de-contextualized reconstructions of social structures. The conventional research programs in the social sciences do not pay attention to the fact that the rationality of each particular social order is always interpretatively organized and assessed by the participants.

The way in which ethnomethodologists try to eliminate this deficiency leads to the conclusion that social norms do not play the role of guiding, determining, regulating, or causing the conduct in predefined scenes of action. Within Garfinkel’s viewpoint, social norms are ‘reflexively constitutive of the activities and unfolding circumstances to which they are applied’ (Heritage, 1984: 109). The reflexive accountability of action is put first. Reflexivity redefines and reconstitutes the situation in a manner that opens a leeway of possible ways of applying rules. Thus considered, reflexivity is bound to the intrinsic accommodativity of situated action. Being embedded in accounts and methods of accounting, reflexivity both effectuates an indeterminacy of action with regard to the particular orderliness of following rules, and provides resources for coping with the contingencies in applying a rule in a given situation. This dual effect of reflexivity gets (discursively) expressed by what ethnomethodologists refer to as indexicality. With regard to this effect Alec McHoul (1994: 110) makes the case that ‘social homogeneity (in practice) is predicated upon discursive heterogeneity (in principle)’.

Seen from the perspective of the internal discussions in the tradition set up by Garfinkel’s work there are at least two essential ambiguities inherent in the very concept of reflexivity. On the one hand, one has to distinguish between the actors’ reflexivity (as part and parcel of situated practical reasoning) and the reflexivity of action as ‘incarnated’ (Garfinkel) procedural order of activity. In other words, reflexivity refers to two different things: the actors’ cognitive ability of reflexive accountability (including the reflexive orientation to norms) and the reflexive properties of action. It is the entangling of these two things (qua reflexive basis of practical everydayness’ rationalities) in the world of human practices that prevents the participants within the world from becoming ‘judgmental dopes’. In scrutinizing this dual sense of reflexivity and arguing that the connotation related to the actors’ cognitive ability serves only an auxiliary function in the description of ordinary (everyday) practices that create local orderliness, Marek Czyzewski (1994: 165) reaches the conclusion that ‘the ethnomethodological concept of “reflexivity” appears to be a radical alternative both to normative sociology and to some of its “neohumanist”, interpretative opponents’. No doubt, Garfinkel’s tradition has significantly transformed this concept by emphasizing the ways in which action’s reflexivity constantly reconstitutes the scenes of social interaction. The actors’ cognitive capabilities of reflexive conduct supervene on the action’s immanent reflexivity. Yet the more advanced this transformation of the concept, the more acute a second ambiguity that comes to the fore. It concerns the double status of reflexivity as an endogenous process in the formation of orderliness and as an intrinsic moment of the logic of ethnomethodological description.

Roughly, what remains ambiguous is the relation between endogenous reflexivity that warrants action’s interpretative flexibility and radical (referential) reflexivity that exerts epistemological self-criticism of the research process. Endogenous reflexivity is precisely that characteristic of action that makes the actors free (undetermined) in choosing norms and following rules. Ethnomethodological study has its own endogenous reflexivity that (when carried out intentionally for the sake of interpretative self-criticism) takes on the form of referential reflexivity with radical consequences for the epistemological design of the very study. Referential reflexivity engenders the modes of analysts’ critical questioning and appreciating the inventory (presuppositions, attitudes, concepts, devices, techniques, theoretical resources, methods, etc.) of inquiry. Referentially reflexive appreciation of the ethnomethodological work is ‘radicalized when the appreciator is included within the scope of reflexivity, i.e. when the formulation of reflexivity – as well as every other feature of analysis – is appreciated as an endogenous achievement’ (Pollner, 1991: 372).

The new ambiguity refers to the unclear (but unavoidable) conjugation of two processes of constitution of social meaning and meaningful objects by situated activities and practices on both sides of the research process – the life-worlds of actors being studied and the working milieu of ethnomethodological inquiry (including its concepts and basic epistemological assumptions). Put differently, there is an ambiguous relation between the endogenous reflexivity of accountable practices that create social order and analysts’ own reflexivity through which analysts (with regard to their situatedness) explicate not only the inquiry’s presuppositions but their prior attitudes to the objects of study as well. Generally speaking, referential reflexivity in the human sciences involves a self-critical re-examination of the research program’s own theoretical understanding. Traditionally, the methodological meaning of this kind of reflexivity amounts to promoting an anti-objectivist view of knowledge in the cultural disciplines. Objectivism gets restricted by addressing the question of what the implications for method are of being inside the constitution of the objects of inquiry (Johnson et al., 2004: 17). On this view, radical reflexivity is a methodological stage of devising that kind of non-objectivist realism (usually associated with a sort of standpoint epistemology) which would be consistent with cultural understanding and sociological insight.

Melvin Pollner (1991: 370), who was the most astute explorer of this ambiguity, argued that the tendency of increasing radical reflexivity leads to growing ‘insecurity regarding the basic assumptions, discourse and practices that ground and constitute his/her endeavors in order to explore the very work of grounding and constituting’. It is a critical self-reconstruction that opens the door to a deconstruction of the presuppositions settled down in one’s position of doing research. In the early 1990s Pollner was pessimistic about the future of the radical (referential) reflexivity’s dimension of ethnomethodology. He diagnosed that the standards for empirical adequacy have gradually ruled out inquirers’ critical self-interpretations. In addition, he forecasted a progressive eliding of reflexivity’s dimension and, accordingly, a de-radicalization of the whole tradition. Pollner was right in asserting that in the course of the maturing of ethnomethodology as a study that has been gradually approximating empirical programs of the social sciences a steady tempering of referential reflexivity has occurred. On his prediction, this kind of reflexivity will be no longer a central initiative for those who are working in Garfinkel’s tradition. For several reasons they will be motivated to abstain from assaying the presuppositions of their interpretations. A constant exploration in the constitution of the ethnomethodological work (and calling into question what is taken for granted by it) would be destructive for the very work.

No doubt, by eliding the dimension of radical reflexivity (the ‘reflexivity of reflexivity’) and becoming a more conventional academic enterprise, ethnomethodology will get much better chances for a successful further institutionalization and professionalization at the expense of losing the original critical potential. ¹ This price, however, is too high since a radically reflexive inquiry within Garfinkel’s tradition is entitled to reveal the accountable constitution of such ethnomethodological conceptual tools as ‘indexicality’, ‘practices’, or ‘normative orderliness’. Without pondering over its epistemological presuppositions by means of its own contextualizing inquiry, ethnomethodology is doomed to be transformed sooner or later into a conventional micro-sociological inquiry. In Pollner’s view, if it manages to retain (or, better, regain) the dimension of radical reflexivity, ethnomethodological work will become allied with those philosophical (post-metaphysical and anti-foundational) discourses which make problematic the basic framework of modern epistemology (including its conceptions of mind, subject, representation, foundation, object, reality and world). Thus, this work will become part of the movement that suggests devices for disturbing the ‘normal-scientific’ epistemological identities of the traditional research programs. More specifically, ethnomethodology has the potential to become an abnormal discourse within sociology, thereby disturbing (or even disrupting) the epistemological complacency of leading (structuralist, neo-functionalist, constructivist, etc.) research programs. ² In drawing on Jayyusi’s (1991) analysis, one is to state that choices between ‘normalizing’ further ethnomethodology as a variety of empirical study and amplifying (or revitalizing) the still existing tendencies to make it a deconstructive enterprise are themselves moral choices, neither of which can be justified by appeals to an epistemological rationale.

Pollner’s pessimism was (at least partially) vindicated by subsequent developments not only in ethnomethodology but also in several human sciences where reflexivity plays a prominent role. Though not radically effaced from the methodological repertoire of these sciences, radical reflexivity was confined to ‘the best intermediate station between skeptical deconstructionism and positivism’ (McLennan, 2006: 159). The conviction that referential reflexivity is parasitic upon objectifying theorization has grown up over the years. The hope that radical reflexivity will provide a methodological platform for critical theorizing in the cultural disciplines has become gradually abandoned. In several of these disciplines the call for radical reflexivity (and the kind of anti-objectivism it implies) was replaced by a plea for reflexive explanations that impose constraints on objectivist epistemology but also prevent one from committing a sheer subjectivism. On this reading, referential reflexivity allows one to match the reflection upon the situatedness of one’s research process with the explanatory task of theorizing. Thus considered, reflexive investigation of socio-cultural phenomena was devised to be a corrective both to rational-choice theories’ individualism and to the theories launching strong forms of cultural determinism (Archer, 2010: 6). Reflexivity within the constitution of the objects of inquiry is the epistemologically reflexive way to thematizing the endogenous reflexivity of those who are studied.

In a final reckoning, what is left of radical reflexivity is solely an endeavor to cultivate preliminary methodological pluralism in the cultural disciplines. It is only a preliminary attempt since its further scrutinizing supposedly would have had to help one to find the way to a complex unitary theorizing. To stress again, the only critical function of radical reflexivity that still enjoys popularity consists in proffering a sui generis methodological corrective to the objectivist bias. The characteristic will to ‘subversive knowledge’ captured in the original forms of radical reflexivity is radically withdrawn in the conception of reflexivity as a call for (preliminary and tentative) methodological pluralism. ³ This is why the appeal to something like Pollner’s radical reflexivity in the contemporary human sciences signals nothing more and nothing less than an appeal to reflection itself (McLennan, 2006: 165). In the present article, I will plead for a rehabilitation of radical reflexivity in the cultural disciplines by recasting it in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology. My point is that hermeneutic phenomenology can equip radically reflexive inquiries with a discourse that will help one to articulate an appropriate methodology for reconciling the critical self-examination of the inquiry’s hermeneutic situation with various forms of empirically oriented theorizing. Thus, the critical-deconstructive function of ethnomethodology’s original program will be preserved within the design of research which allows one to study empirically the endogenous reflexivity in the practical constitution of cultural life-worlds.

Beyond the scope of ethnomethodological description

By engaging itself in the initiative of radical reflexivity the ethnomethodological study gets rid of the traditional epistemological discourse of empirical research, not having, however, the capacity to replace it with an alternative discourse. The dilemma ‘either doing empirical research within a stable framework of concepts or deconstructing the established theoretical foundations and epistemological assumptions of empirical inquiry’ implies a precarious situation in studying the endogenous constitution of local life-worlds through ordinary activities and practices. In what follows, I am going to advocate the view that getting rid of the depressing dilemma requires integrating an additional hermeneutic component in the ethnomethodological work. Yet the integration implies a thorough reformulation of the ways in which this work delineates its phenomenal area of study. I am not speaking of a (partial) rehabilitation of the model of constructing theoretically laden empirical phenomena within an explanatory conceptual framework. Such a step would restore the view that the social orders created by ordinary activities are something present at hand in the theoretically captured empirical phenomena. In ethnomethodologists’ view, nothing in the social world can be taken for granted as an empirical (decontextualized) presence-at-hand that is not contextually accomplished. The social facts are not hypostatized (by means of theoretical procedures) entities, but consist of lived, immediate, unmediated, congregational practices in their display. There is no residue in the social facts that escapes this immediacy. (This is the paramount message of Garfinkel’s [2007] final work where he detailed the suggestion of working out Durkheim’s aphorism about the objective reality of social facts ethnomethodologically.) The reformulation I am speaking about does preserve this view by placing it, however, in a new ontological discourse.

Crucial for my further considerations will be a dual meaning of interpretation associated with a kind of double hermeneutics. In reformulating important aspects of the ethnomethodological problematic in terms of existential analytic, one extends indispensably the meaning of interpretation – from a cognitive procedure to an existential phenomenon. Yet the cognitive connotation (as related to the actors’ interpretative judgements) keeps a restricted validity. It is this extension that has interesting consequences for overcoming the aforementioned dilemma. Roughly, radical reflexivity would not have had destructive effects (for the ethnomethodological mode of research) if it would be able to rationalize the research’s own hermeneutic situation in the constitution of the objects of inquiry. The ‘unsettling’ (of the presuppositions of inquiry) which prima facie is inherent to radical reflexivity is to be surmounted but not at the expense of removing that kind of ‘unsettling’ which makes ethnomethodology an ally to the post-metaphysical philosophical discourses. Being embedded in the ethnomethodological work, this reflexivity can achieve the rationalization in question only via revealing the hermeneutic situation of the constitution of each particular kind of normative orderliness under study. In other words, radical reflexivity has to reveal the hermeneutic situation that effectuates the normativity of action’s endogenous reflexivity. Norms, rules, conventions, standards, taboos, instructions and other prescriptive elements of social life are something that ethnomethodology addresses constantly without getting engaged, however, in a search for how these elements become engendered. Let me pause on this point.

Ethnomethodologists are not tired of stressing that the formal specification of a rule does not assure the orderliness of social action. They are quite inventive in demonstrating that nobody is able to take into consideration all contingencies that are surrounding or accompanying the application of a rule. In criticizing the theories of action in conventional sociology, ethnomethodologists stress the indeterminacy of rules already brought into the world. Strangely enough, however, they are not interested in studying the formation of rules and norms. They take the latter for granted which is not consonant with their plea for uncompromising anti-essentialism. Regardless of how radical the particular version is, ethnomethodology does not address, in my knowledge, the genesis of normativity that is responsible for having orderliness of reflexive action. Of course, one might object to this claim by arguing that carrying out such a genealogical study would contradict the ethos of ethnomethodological work. A kind of genealogical explanation of rules that appeals to explanatory constellations of social factors would lead first to a kind of ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (giving account of normativity by describing empirical states of affairs), and second would incorporate a sort of theorizing that is irreconcilable with the description of actors’ endogenous methods for creating social order. Even if it is not regarded as an explanatory enterprise the study of norms’ and rules’ production would require taking an epistemic distance from the local settings of everyday action that would destroy the ethnomethodological description. Thus, norms and rules are tacitly presumed to be a requisite (and not constructed artifacts) for having an ongoing creation of action’s orderliness. In the world of the ethnomethodological study normativity is something primordial that has no genesis.

There is an intimate relationship between the inability to address the formation of social normativity and the inclination to elide radical reflexivity. In both cases one refuses to reflect upon what one tacitly presumes to be primordial, thereby ascribing to it a presence-at-hand without genesis. Calling into question this ascription would entail (1) a methodological predicament in treating normativity (instantiated by the problem of how the order in which normativity gets engendered is normatively constrained as well as by several other irresolvable problems related to the so-called Fries trilemma) ⁴ and (2) a destructive regress in the search for primitive terms that ground the descriptions of ordinary activities. In fact, radical reflexivity becomes destructive (for the ethnomethodological work) because of the hermeneutic deficiency of that work consisting in its failure to rationalize what it presumes without committing (1) and (2). To overcome this deficiency requires working out a unitary discourse in which the way of coping with both the methodological predicament and the destructive regress will reveal (transcendentally and ontologically) the possibility for radical reflexivity.

To begin with, the actors are not only making interpretative judgements in order to manage the contingencies in the application of rules. They are always already acting within a projected horizon of possibilities, or within a world that transcends their situated activities. (In another, more Heideggerian formulation, the actors project the outcomes of their situated activities upon possibilities whose appropriation and actualization transcend the present situation.) The world that transcends is at once the horizon of understanding what can be appropriated within the situated activities and the totality of that readiness-to-hand which can be articulated by the same activities. The very formation of rules takes place in actors’ interpretative articulation of what is ready to hand within the world. This claim should not be trivialized as an assertion that the formation of rules demands cognitive efforts of interpreting the settings of action. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate that the formation of rules in interpretation is an ontological phenomenon. For this purpose, I will draw on some concepts of existential analytic. Though hermeneutic phenomenology carries within it an intrinsically conservative moment – so my argument goes – it promises a completely new scenario for making sense of radical reflexivity that is pertinent to the critical ethos of ethnomethodology’s original project.

From a (more) Wittgensteinian to a (more) Heideggerian approach to normativity

Notoriously, ethnomethodology is essentially influenced and inspired by Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophical grammar. The latter states that there is no meaningful reality beyond the use of linguistic units and the rule-following. The reality of linguistic interaction and inter-subjectivity is generated meaningfully by the instrumental normativity of following rules. Grammatical rules are only depending on their capacity to produce language games that generate meaning. There is nothing extrinsic to these rules that can determine them. In this sense, grammar is arbitrary. In Philosophical Investigations the idea of the grammar’s arbitrariness is closely related to the insistence on the primacy of the normative. Baker and Hacker’s (2009) cogent reading of Wittgenstein’s concepts of rule-formulation and rule-following (and the very concept of rule as a family-resemblance concept) makes it clear that the internal relations between rules and their applications are distinguished by reflexivity demonstrated by several familiar features of rule-governed practices. Reflexivity is incorporated in practices like teaching, explaining, justifying, criticizing, evaluating, defining and correcting the ways of following rules. The philosophical theory of grammar (as the ‘account book of language’ whose rules determine the limits of sense) is concerned with various aspects of how rules operate in the aforementioned normative-reflexive practices. Baker and Hacker stress that because of the reflexive character of rule-following, there are no ‘hidden rules’. Thus (pace some trivializing readings), the Wittgensteinian approach to normativity does not consist in an ad hoc substantiation of contextually valid rules but in the integration of rules in the totality of discursive practices.

Guided by this ‘grammatical’ approach, the ethnomethodological studies of ‘situated accomplishments’ adopt a Wittgensteinian perspective that puts first the rule-following and not the rules as isolable entities. Ethnomethodology rejects any attempt at isolating the formulation of a rule from the practice it formulates (Lynch, 1992: 226–8). From this perspective Garfinkel’s followers transform the conception of language games into a non-explanatory approach to the creation of local social orders within assemblages of concerted practices. Had one committed the isolation of rules and norms from the internal relation of them with their applications one would have been compelled to appeal to extrinsic sources of influence (like cultural patterns, social conventions, or communal consensus) to explain the ways in which rules and norms operate. Transforming Wittgenstein’s grammar of language games into a grammar of social practices offers the alternative to the explanatory scenarios about how practices get caused and determined by norms and rules. According to ethnomethodologists, all entities taking place in social life are already embedded in practices. The articulation of meaning comes into being through the placement of these entities in accordance with the practices’ grammar. Rules and norms are inextricable elements of this grammar.

Descriptions of various kinds of rule-following that constitute social orders do not presuppose – so the argument of Wittgenstein-inspired ethnomethodology goes – a dualism between the non-normative ‘natural’ and the normative for the sake of devising explanatory scenarios. Accordingly, the need for explanatory foundations gets ruled out. By making everyday practices and established schemes of reasoning of a particular social group (or, in an alternative formulation, the group’s everydayness qua an inherently indexical ‘occasioned corpus’) available to study, ethnomethodological description does not need to explain or substantiate normative entities. The shift from looking upon pre-reflective resources of practices’ situated accomplishment to describing both the reflexivity incorporated in practices and the practitioners’ reflexivity suffices for explicating the kinds of rule-following. Like objectivity, normativity sustained within an ‘occasioned corpus’ (qua normality of everyday life) is practitioners’ own achievement (Arminen, 2008). More specifically, normativity is neither prior nor secondary to the ‘non-normative-causal world’ since it belongs to the ways whereby practitioners make sense of their everyday settings. The question of priority (that implies the need of explanation) can be posed on the condition that normativity is isolable from the ways of constructing social orders. Here is also another aspect of the answer (adumbrated by several ethnomethodologists) to the question of why the treatment of an alleged formation of normativity is to be avoided. Because of the inherence of normativity in activities and practices, this formation is not an issue that has to be addressed separately. In the same manner in which rules and norms are not to be treated as isolable from practices, the formation of normativity is not to be addressed as a separable issue. Normativity is always already there in the concerted practices. By implication, ethnomethodological description suffices in treating all aspects of normativity. No ethnomethodologist would deny, however, that precisely the entanglement of normativity with endogenous reflexivity poses a challenge to the epistemological assumptions of the (purely) empirical-descriptive study.

My critical point is that the approach to the nexus of reflexivity and normativity requires more than description (and the attitude of ‘indifference’). Reflexivity always involves self-interpretation that comes to pass within its own hermeneutic circularity. I would not like to say that the moment of self-interpretation is neglected in the ethnomethodological studies in which the interpretative judgements are conceived of as the mediating factor between reflexivity of action and actors’ reflexivity. On these studies, the actors’ interpretative judgements become integrated in the inter-subjective reflexivity of action. Yet is it possible by a purely descriptive approach to capture the hermeneutic process of this integration? Czyzewsky is absolutely right when holding that only a kind of interpretative reconstruction can attain this goal. To be sure, interpretative reconstruction is a much more sophisticated epistemic procedure than ethnomethodological description. There is a lack of resources – so my argument goes – in the ethnomethodological description for approaching the interpretative link between reflexivity and accountability.

In many cases ethnomethodologists conceive of interpretation as ‘practical reasoning’. The latter coordinates activities in particular circumstances. Put differently, practical reasoning creates coordinated assemblies of agents, activities and circumstances (Lynch, 2001). Again, in this reasoning reflexivity of actors and reflexivity of accounts get conflated. It is this conflation that makes the coordinated assemblies reflexively accountable. Practical reasoning is always already in a horizon of possibilities for creating a coordinated assembly. The actualization of contextually intertwined possibilities expresses itself as an indexicality (in the production of order) that serves the function of linking practical reasoning with the ongoing constitution of actors’ collective identity in a life-world of routine practices. In this regard, indexicality is a particular unit of meaning (of what practical reasoning regards as ready-to-hand) within the meaningful whole informed by the horizon of possibilities. (Indexicality refers to a configuration of particularities as an actual state of affairs in the actors’ life-world.) The horizon of possibilities cannot be disentangled from the ongoing constitution of indexical meaning (as expressing actualized possibilities). Both the horizon and the particular units of meaning are involved in a mutual dependence that takes on the form of hermeneutic circularity. Since this mutual dependence is predicated on practical reasoning, one should draw the conclusion that practical reasoning (in ethnomethodological perspective) is always already involved in interpretative articulation (the progressive unfolding of hermeneutic circularity). One reaches this conclusion necessarily when one strictly follows the internal logic of the ethnomethodological studies. At the same time, the practitioners of these studies tell us that the ethnomethodological description is the only way to overcome the explanatory essentialism of the traditional social sciences. Thus, they insist on a descriptive approach to the interpretative nature of practical reasoning. Facing the methodological absurdity of ‘describing interpretation’, one has to choose between two options: either to ignore the complexity of the practical reasoning’s interpretative nature and to reduce it to repeatable sequels of procedures in a routine of practices, or to admit that ethnomethodology is in need of a ‘hermeneutic supplement’.

To stress again, the description of reflexive interpretation is an impossible procedure, or better a non-sense. Ethnomethodologists correctly insist that the agents’ reflexive orientation to norms involves an indispensable interpretative moment that makes possible the critical distance to the rule-following (including the possibility to transgress it). Otherwise, the agents are to be treated as (to use again Garfinkel’s expression) ‘cultural dopes’. The creation of critical distance by means of agents’ reflexive interpretation remains, however, beyond the scope of ethnomethodological description. Consequently, the Wittgenstein-inspired approach fails to address in a proper manner the open horizon of following rules. Though rejecting the assumption of an ‘ultimate reality’ (beyond or beneath the orders created by ordinary practices) the adherents to this approach attribute tacitly an actual presence of the routinely created social orders. Along with the potentiality-for-being of the ongoing local orders’ constitution, ethnomethodologists ignore the interpretative openness of what practices constitute meaningfully. One can make interpretation that constitutes meaning (and indispensably involves a moment of self-interpretation) intelligible by reflecting upon that circularity. This reflection is at once an interpretative and a transcendental one. In developing a transcendental-interpretative analytic of the constitution of meaning within-the-world of ‘concernful dealings’ (practices), hermeneutic phenomenology suggests a perspective on the formation of normativity that avoids the self-defeating accounts epitomized by the Fries trilemma. At the same time, this branch of phenomenology recasts in terms of existential analytic important aspects of radical reflexivity.

Before addressing the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to radical reflexivity and the constitution of normativity, let me briefly comment on the so-called ‘Heideggerian dimension of ethnomethodology’ spelled out by various authors on different occasions. My purpose is to focus on a symptomatic distortion of the concept of interpretative articulation in the way in which Heidegger gets appropriated in Garfinkel’s tradition. Needless to say, ethnomethodology advances a rather quasi-Heideggerian attitude to reflexivity, accountability and other issues without taking into consideration the ontico-ontological difference. ⁵ The ethnomethodological approach to practices draws more on a Wittgensteinian translation of Heidegger than on the version of phenomenology suggested in the existential analytic. In alluding to the commensurability between the hermeneutic nexus of Dasein’s self-understanding and the world’s interpretative articulation, on the one hand, and the ethnomethodological idea of practices’ self-accounting properties, on the other, McHoul makes it clear that Garfinkel had been attributing a Heideggerian sense to the ethnomethodological work by relating the procedures for ‘revealing achieved coherence’ to various aspects of the existential-analytical problematic. McHoul (1998: 18) lays down the even stronger claim that a Heideggerian concept of self-understanding is essentially akin to ‘reflexivity in Garfinkel’s equally counter-mentalistic sense’. Indeed, the self-accounting properties of practical actions that create and sustain normative orders depend crucially on how one understands oneself in one’s situatedness in the world. This claim is shared by ethnomethodology and hermeneutic phenomenology. The further construal of it, however, prompts an irreversible divergence between the two programs.

The question of ‘who’ articulates the world meaningfully, thereby creating accountable social orders, receives two completely different answers in, accordingly, the ethnomethodological grammar of practices and the hermeneutic analytic of meaning constitution. On the former answer, this is the practitioners’ inter-subjectivity integrated in an ‘occasioned corpus’ of orchestrated practices. Yet in this identification ethnomethodologists by implementing the ‘documentary method of descriptive interpretation’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 77–82) simply follow the traditional (essentialist) view of the interactional inter-subjectivity’s autonomy. (The outcome of applying this method in a case study is a normative pattern of inter-subjectivity encoded in a variety of different contextual-practical realization of meaning. The constitution of the very pattern is not at issue in this method.) It goes without saying that ethnomethodologists do the job of revealing patterns of inter-subjectivity not by borrowing theoretical constructions of conventional sociology. Their insistence on the primacy of inter-subjectivity (and inter-subjective normativity) is rather an ineluctable corollary of the doctrine of ‘Heidegger’s pragmatism’ (as fostered by Richard Rorty, Mark Okrent and Robert Brandom among others) which Garfinkel’s adherents are prone to accept. Though always manifested – so their argument goes – as existential structure (or, better, structure of existentiales) of the individual (inauthentic or authentic) being towards death, Dasein (as implying the being-with-one-another) is that kind of inter-subjectivity which does not need a further level of interpretation. I will return to the issues of Dasein, discussing it as the source of hermeneutic pre-normativity, in the next section.

The view that practical-normative inter-subjectivity is in no need of interpretation gets vindicated also by Garfinkel’s claim that ethnomethodology is not an interpretative enterprise. The claim itself, however, presupposes an epistemological doctrine of interpretation. It takes for granted that interpretation is a cognitive procedure of unraveling symbolized meaning incorporated in texts already constituted. On this account, interpretation can take place when there is an established signifier–signified relation. Yet Heidegger’s hermeneutic analytic of the interpretative articulation has nothing to do with such an (essentialist) epistemological doctrine of interpretation. The way of entering into the hermeneutic circle of this articulation proceeds without epistemological objectification of symbolized meaning and signifier–signified relation. Like the doctrine of ‘Heidegger’s pragmatism’, the ethnomethodological depiction of the existential analytic distorts the ontological view of interpretation as developed in the hermeneutic analytic of the interpretative articulation within-the-world where the world is the open horizon of existential possibilities. To be sure, there is a similarity between Heidegger’s (1962[1927]: 189) view of Auslegung as ‘the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding’ and Garfinkel’s insistence on the mutual constitutivity of accounting practices and the local situations they account for. Yet what is missing in the view about this constitutivity is Heidegger’s emphasis upon the ‘being towards possibilities’. In the ethnomethodological perspective, the potentiality-for-being is not taken into account at all when the mutual constitutivity of practices and situations gets addressed. The hidden ‘achieved coherence’ as a research topic of ethnomethodological description is tacitly characterized by an actual presence [Vorhandenheit] which again is not in agreement with the phenomenological view of the world’s interpretative articulation.

As already indicated, the non-explanatory explication of normativity suggested by hermeneutic phenomenology takes the form of double hermeneutics – an interpretative explication of the interpretative articulation which is intrinsic in the modes of being-in-the-world. The double hermeneutics involved in the existential analytic is a radical alternative to the anti-interpretative description as a particular epistemic strategy. The kernel of the aforementioned explication consists in the appropriate way of interpretative entering in the hermeneutic circle of constituting meaningful facts/entities through the articulation of what is ready-to-hand in practices. The iterative unfolding of this circle (between the whole of a projected horizon and the particular, contextually constituted, meaningful entities) generates practices’ anticipatory-orientational force of ‘deliberative-reflexive circumspection within-the-world’ that the interpretative entering is entitled to explicate. Yet this force is not something that can be attributed to an independent realm of the normative. It is rather the circularity of projecting and appropriating possibilities by practices which brings into being the practices’ pre-normative force. This force is to be ascribed to the ongoing fore-structuring of what becomes constituted/articulated within-the-world.

There are constantly operating in the unfolding of the interpretative articulation’s circle a fore-sight, a fore-having and a fore-conception of what gets interpretatively articulated. The triad of the hermeneutic fore-structuring of a domain’s interrelated practices expresses the ‘heuristically operating force’ of anticipations, expectations and orientations guiding the participants’ situated mode of being within this domain. For this force cannot be disentangled from the hermeneutic fore-structuring, it has not a being in itself. ⁶ The orientation toward entity’s meaning as an outcome of configured practices is a fore-having. The expectation of visualizing that meaning (within practices’ spaces of representation) is a fore-sight. ⁷ Accordingly, the visualizability refers to the ways of making all entities items of (what Heidegger calls) ‘circumspective deliberations’ [umsichtige Überlegungen] or, the ways of making them things that are immediately ready-to-hand. The fore-sight accomplishes the primary specification of what has been taken into one’s fore-having. Finally, the anticipation of possible further contextualization of entity’s meaning is a fore-conception. Whenever something is interpreted as something in a context of practices, the triad of fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception characterizes the meaningful constitution of entities that are ready-to-hand in the performance of practices (Heidegger, 1962[1927]: 191).

To sum up, on the level on which ethnomethodologists manage to unfold practices’ intrinsic grammatical relations, the champions of hermeneutics disclose various kinds of practices’ intrinsic interpretative circularity. The phenomenon of rule-following is also to be addressed by having recourse to this circularity. Rule-following behavior from the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics is a process of interpretative articulation within a trans-subjective horizon. Yet this horizon does not exist as independent mental reality. It has rather a reality only by means of those acts, actions and procedures that bring the anticipations, expectations and orientations into play. This is (an additional rationale for) why between the horizon projected by (and upon) practices and the particular acts and actions of these practices there is a circularity that takes on the form of hermeneutic circle. On this account, the anticipations, expectations and orientations (as attached to possibilities) play the role of an open interpretative horizon that gets continuously articulated in meanings constituted by the performance of the particular acts and actions. The whole hermeneutic circle (in which the anticipatory-orientational force of fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception operates) is internal to the concerted practices, but it is not designed by practitioners’ mentality.

A hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective on practices’ normativity

Heidegger’s existential analytic offers a scenario for the formation of norms and rules that (1) discloses a primary being-in-the-world that is neither the world of normative regulation nor that of anormative causality, and (2) rules out the need of derivability and/or reducibility of the normative from/to the ‘natural’ or vice versa. This scenario is sketched out within the way in which the ‘dealings within-the-world’ (the existential-analytical name for practices) are approached from the perspective of the ‘interpretative articulation of the world’.

What is of crucial importance for the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to practices I am going to present is the duality on which Dasein is predicated. My aim is to show that Dasein is the source of hermeneutic pre-normativity. Notoriously, Heidegger opposes any reduction of Dasein either to individuality or to a kind of sociality. Yet Dasein as portrayed in Being and Time is by no means a hybrid between individuality and sociality. Dasein is the unity of subjective and trans-subjective – subjective-individual (inauthentic or authentic) choices and appropriation of possibilities that are projected as a world-horizon. Phrased differently, it is a subjective self-constitution through ongoing appropriation of existential possibilities projected as a trans-subjective horizon. Dasein is not to be disentangled from the practices which at once project the horizon of possibilities and enable both the individual and the collective appropriation of these possibilities. (With regard to the trans-subjectivity’s inherence to Dasein Heidegger draws the conclusion that being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, a mode that continues to be involved in trans-subjective practices. In fact, being-with perpetuates in all of Dasein’s activities regardless of how strongly these activities are individualized and how remote from settings of social life their performance is. Outside trans-subjective practices Dasein has no world and no existence. Exempt from being-thrown in such practices Dasein ceases to be that ontically distinguished being [das Seiende] whose analysis discloses the meaning of Being [das Sein].)

On a more precise definition, Dasein is the ecstatic unity (in the sense of Being and Time) of subjectivity (it ‘is in each case I myself’) and trans-subjectivity (of linguistic medium, cultural milieu, traditions, institutions, communities, etc.) that transcends the ‘self’ in a way that makes it a ‘situated self’ (or ‘culturally embodied self’). It is this unity that (with regard to the projection and appropriation of possibilities) takes on the form of hermeneutic circularity. Only by treating Dasein as such ecstatic unity, one avoids its degradation to a presence-at-hand. This is the point of departure of the Dasein’s characterization which is pertinent to the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to practices. The circularity being mentioned engenders anticipations, expectations and orientations in choosing and appropriating possibilities. To take up the central motif of the preceding section, hermeneutic pre-normativity is the ‘heuristically operating power’ of these anticipations, expectations and orientations. The way in which the latter are engendered precludes one from postulating an ontologically initial split between the individual and the social since both of them are ‘always already’ transcended by the world as an open horizon of possibilities.

The being-with-one-another is – so the argument of Being and Time goes – inherent in the individual being-in-the-world. Heidegger (1962[1927]: 152) states that ‘the Others’ are already there with Dasein in its being-in-the-world. On another formulation, within the readiness-to-hand constituted by Dasein’s practices ‘the Others’ with whom the practices are shared are to be encountered too. The existential analytic of Being and Time differentiates between several types of sociality in accordance with the modes of being-with-one-another. Thus, Heidegger (1962[1927]: 158–67) handles, though not in a systematic fashion, the existential roots of solidarity, dominance, sociality that give to the Other her care authentically, and the type of sociality that is most interesting for the existential analytic – the average sociality of the ‘They’ (das Man). To each of these types one can ascribe a type of hermeneutic pre-normativity engendered by the respective arrangement of the mode of being-with-one-another. Hermeneutic pre-normativity is not to be construed as a kind of proto-normativity (as this is discussed by certain schools of constructivism in the social sciences) or a kind of ‘minimal normativity’ or a ‘preliminary draft’ for norms and rules (Ginev, 2006: 189–224). I am coining the expression of pre-normativity to connote the horizonal fore-structuring of normativity that regulates the routine construction and reproducibility of social orders.

Following the thread of previous considerations, the unity of the individual and the social is not to be confused with Dasein’s ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity. ⁸ Roughly, the uniting relationship between the individual and the social is always designed by a type of normativity (conventions, standards, regulations, prescriptions, instructions, codices, orders, sanctions, duties, obligations, and so on), whereas the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity is distinguished by the hermeneutic pre-normativity. The normative design of the individual–social relationship is to be explicated on an ontic level by means of a purely empirical (in particular, ethnomethodological) study of the ordinary constitution of local life-worlds, whereas the pre-normative, trans-subjective, constitution of norms and rules (as they subsequently get applied subjectively) has to be revealed in terms of the existential analytic. (Trans-subjectivity is also not to be confused with inter-subjectivity. That the pre-normative anticipations, expectations and orientations engendered in a routine of practices are fore-structuring the ways of instituting social rules and norms is a corollary to the claim that each normatively regulated inter-subjectivity is always already in a trans-subjective horizon of possibilities.)

In spelling out the characterization of Dasein as a hermeneutic circularity of subjective-choices-in-a-trans-subjective-horizon, one has to take into account the difference between ‘factuality’ [Tatsächlichkeit] and ‘facticity/existentiality’ [Faktizität/Existenzialität] which underlies the whole scenario of the existential analytic. To a certain extent, this difference reflects the ontic-ontological difference. Factuality is the pure presence of thematically given (present-at-hand) facts of a particular area. Thus, one can speak of the factuality of a regime of discursive practices, the factuality of a professional ethos (like Merton’s ‘ethos of science’), or the factuality of culturally patterned scenarios of interaction. In these cases factuality refers to the presence-at-hand of a thematically (and semantically) closed area (linguistic community’s habitus, professional life, normatively organized mode of communication). It is a presence within-the-world whose (empirical) treatment, however, does not take into consideration the transcendence of the world. For that reason, factuality can be ‘de-worlded’ (deprived of world, ent-weltlicht) and delimited as a closed area. Factuality embraces ontic normative orders (like the order created by the juridical system of a politically governed society) as well as ontic networks of causal relations (like the causal relations within a network of social interactions). ‘Ontic’ in both cases designates the sufficiency of empirical procedures for making the respective orders and networks objects of inquiry.

By contrast, facticity is the totality of meaningful facts/entities constituted by Dasein’s existence within-the-world. Facticity is the place where the hermeneutic pre-normativity operates. Treating facticity in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology requires paying attention to the role the transcendence of the world plays in the constitution of meaning. On this treatment, existentiality is Dasein’s thrownness in the world as a state in which Dasein understands itself with regard to the possibilities it can appropriate. Dasein projects itself upon these possibilities. Due to this projection existentiality can get revealed within the ontological treatment of Dasein as a ‘thrown projection’. From a reverse perspective, reflecting on existentiality reveals the ontological conditions of facticity, i.e. of constituting meaning and having meaningful facts/entities in Dasein’s existence within-the-world. Existentiality stipulates the conditions of having Dasein’s modes of being-in-the-world as facticity whereby existentiality expresses itself. In other words, facticity is the existentiality as the manifold of the modes of being-in-the-world manifested empirically. This is why Heidegger reaches the conclusion that ‘facticity belongs essentially to existentiality’ (1962[1927]: 225). Dasein is a circularity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity in which existentiality makes possible facticity, thereby becoming amenable to ontological exposition. Hermeneutic pre-normativity is a phenomenon that shows itself in Dasein’s facticity, and it is ontologically rooted in Dasein’s existentiality. Paraphrasing Heidegger, one is to state that hermeneutic pre-normativity belongs essentially to facticity whereby the analysis of this pre-normativity (like the analysis of the pre-predicative experience) provides an access to existentiality. All normative states of affairs within-the-world are abided by that pre-normativity.

For the sake of my analysis I admit that facticity is specified existentiality qua endless diversity of characteristic hermeneutic situations of creating normative orders within-the-world. (Of course, this is only a particular kind of looking upon the multiple nexus of facticity and existentiality.) In each of these situations concerted practices’ endogenous reflexivity defines the tendency of interpretative articulation of what is ready-to-hand. This tendency perpetuates in the practices’ contextual configurations as fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception of the articulation. The meaningful constitution of an area of routinely reproducible concerted practices (the area’s facticity) specifies the existential-ontological conditions of that constitution/articulation as a characteristic hermeneutic situation in which the transformation of pre-normativity of anticipation, expectation and orientation into a kind of explicit normativity takes place. In each characteristic hermeneutic situation a concomitant transformation of being-with (as a potentiality projected upon a trans-subjective horizon) into a kind of sociality (normative inter-subjectivity) comes to the fore.

As I mentioned, a characteristic hermeneutic situation takes shape within and by means of practices’ endogenous reflexivity. It is accessible to all kinds of inquiry (ethnomethodology in the first place) for which the objects of inquiry are endogenously constituted. Yet if one is preoccupied with the ongoing transformation of pre-normativity into explicit normativity (and the formation of a kind of normative inter-subjectivity), one ought to address a characteristic hermeneutic situation in a manner that integrates (in the research scenario) the difference between the ontic (the normative factualities of social orders) and the ontological (the way in which facticity specifies existentiality as a hermeneutic situation). At this point, the need of double hermeneutics becomes unavoidable.

The research based on double hermeneutics reverses the order of formation of norms and rules (and normative inter-subjectivity). The first level of hermeneutic analysis focuses on endogenous reflexivity (attributed both to practitioners and to practices) that creates (through the practitioners’ interpretative judgements) the leeway of possibilities in following rules. Scrutinizing endogenous reflexivity allows the researcher to comprehend how what is ready to hand becomes articulated in meaningful entities by following rules embedded in practices. This is the initial step through which the researcher enters in the circularity of interpretative articulation. At stake here is the practitioners’ (cognitive-reflexive) interpretation which supposedly has to cope with the infinite contingencies in applying rules and norms in particular situations and settings. Interpretative judgements intended to help the practitioners in this regard are at the same time instrumental in creating contextual inter-subjectivity. In drawing on the latter the practitioners become involved in an ongoing construction of collective identity that is always projected upon possibilities; it is always a potentiality-for-identity. At this point one is to figure out the shift from reflecting upon interpretation as practitioners’ means for creating normative order to the hermeneutic circularity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity.

The second level of analysis gets open by focusing on the way in which the horizon of constituting meaningful reality gets disclosed for the practitioners – the way in which endogenous reflexivity specifies a characteristic hermeneutic situation of transforming pre-normativity. On this level, interpretation is conceived of as a specification of existentiality by the facticity of an area of concerted practices in which fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception will be steadily translated in a social order’s normativity. Now, where is the place of radical reflexivity in the research process organized by the kind of double hermeneutics discussed so far?

On the first level of analysis one is dealing with the hermeneutic circularity of following rules as it is set up by endogenous reflexivity. On the second level one is engaged with a transcendental reflection upon the existential-ontological conditions of having a process of interpretative articulation through endogenous reflexivity. Here again at stake is a circularity that specifies a characteristic hermeneutic situation. Hence, on each level one analyses a sort of interplay between a horizon and particular units articulated in it. Yet the two hermeneutic circles are to be separated only for the sake of analysis. In fact, there is an integral circle in whose unfolding the ontological difference (as discussed so far) gets constantly relativized and contextualized. The task of radical reflexivity is to enter in and reconstitute this integral hermeneutic circle. This reflexivity illuminates the inquirer’s ‘situated transcendence’ (i.e. the characteristic hermeneutic situation of inquiry) in a manner that elucidates the hermeneutic situation of the creation of a life-world’s normative order. There is in this formulation a kind of dovetailing of ‘etic’ and ‘emic’ hermeneutic situations, enabled by the integral hermeneutic circle. ⁹ Yet because of the complexity of that problematic, I will skip its discussion.

The logic of radical reflexivity is informed by the methodology of double hermeneutics. The inquirer necessarily examines and assays her or his hermeneutic situation of inquiry in order to enter in the endogenous interpretative circularity which constitutes meaning and rules for the actors under study. She or he is able to specify the pre-normative fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception taking place in the life-world being investigated only by means of coming to grips with her or his own hermeneutic situation of delineating a relevant domain of inquiry and constituting objects of research. In this case, radical reflexivity calls into question tacit epistemological presuppositions, and undoes concepts that are laden with objectivism, foundationalism, essentialism, or dogmatic naturalism. Radical reflexivity is the only way to set up the methodology of double hermeneutics, thereby integrating the ontological difference in studying the formation of normativity and normative inter-subjectivity.

Conclusion

Let me summarize the theses discussed in this article. In the unfolding of the interpretative articulation’s circle the triad of fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception constantly releases the heuristic force of anticipations, expectations and orientations guiding the constitution of pertinent normativity. ¹⁰ For this force cannot be disentangled from the hermeneutic fore-structuring, it has not a being in itself. Rule-following is always fore-structured within the continuity of meaningful constitution through actualization of projected possibilities. Because of this continuity the rule-following is not semantically closed, but interpretatively open for a potentially infinite recontextualization. With regard to the way in which the fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception are specified in the production of social order the leeway of choosing, applying and following rules is in a characteristic hermeneutic situation.

Rule-following and transgressing the following of rules are palpable only in the appropriation of possibilities. Hermeneutic pre-normativity qua a fore-structuring of rule-following is inherent in the constitution of meaning and the interpretative articulation of the world as a ceaseless appropriation of contextualized possibilities. Furthermore, hermeneutic pre-normativity is what (as ongoing fore-structuring) unites the rules and their applications. For Wittgenstein, the description of the acting in accordance with a rule and the formulation of this rule are grammatically related. Yet is the grammar an ‘ultimate reality’ that is present-at-hand? And does the grammar possess an essence that determines the practices in which the following-a-rule takes place? ¹¹ I doubt that a Wittgensteinian approach can answer such questions. By putting interpretative circularity first, and stressing that the grammar is also contextually fore-structured, hermeneutic phenomenology opens a new avenue for treating the normativity problem. On the level on which ethnomethodologists manage to unfold practices’ intrinsic grammatical relations, the champions of hermeneutics disclose characteristic hermeneutic situations of transforming interpretative pre-normativity into normativity of social orders.

In a nutshell, the points of divergence I tried to spell out are as follows. In contrast to ethnomethodologists, the exponents of philosophical hermeneutics are not denying the possibility to take an epistemic distance from the rule-following-behavior-within-practices as a specific object of inquiry. Moreover, the hermeneutic approach to practices does not disavow transcendental reflection and analysis. Ethnomethodologists believe that making room for a transcendental analysis would restore essentialism about practices and the local worlds they create. Practitioners’ normative commitments (as informed by their interpretative judgements) are not to be thematically identified by specifying conditions for their possibility. These commitments are to be diagnosed only in describing the following of rules. For those who adhere to the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology, explicit normative structures are always characteristic hermeneutic situations of the constitution of meaningful objects. Reflection upon such a situation is a transcendental reflection (more specifically, a reflection that makes use of contextual transcendental arguments).

I laid down the claim that in order to overcome the hermeneutic deficiency of ethnomethodology one ought to work out a unitary discourse for coping with both the methodological predicament (related to Fries’ trilemma) and the destructive regress (in defining the primitive concepts of analysis). This claim can be advocated only by having recourse to that kind of double hermeneutics which manages to incorporate the ontological difference in the reflexive study of the constitution of normativity within the life-worlds’ ordinary practices. With regard to this kind of double hermeneutics, the concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity is a primitive term, but not, of course, in a deductive-nomological-explanatory sense. The hermeneutic fore-structuring is not a metaphysically hypostatized ‘ultimate reality’ that lies behind the empirical realities of social orders. In its capacity to temporalize (in the Heideggerian sense) the modes of being-in-the-world, the circularity of projecting and appropriating possibilities within practices lays bare the hermeneutic fore-structuring as conveying the deepest (ontological) meaning of reflexivity. The hermeneutic fore-structuring of normativity is not something that determines the normative structures of social action and interaction. It is not to be detached from the ongoing constitution of such structures. Because of this fore-structuring each normative structure (regardless of how strongly it is codified) remains always open to further restructuring, i.e. remains within an open horizon of possibilities. Put differently, the normative structures of action and interaction are constantly in a state of situated transcendence.

The hermeneutic fore-structuring (whose analytic necessarily involves the ontological difference) brings into being the point at which endogenous reflexivity and radical (referential) reflexivity (in Pollner’s sense) become united. The concepts (like trans-subjectivity, horizon of possibilities, projection, thrownness, articulation, hermeneutic pre-normativity, and so on) by means of which the moments of hermeneutic fore-structuring get specified can be no longer exposed to a destructive regress. The reflection (guided by the ontological difference) upon the ways in which the circularity of projection and appropriation of possibilities are fore-structuring the structures of action and interaction cannot derive or reduce this fore-structuring from/to something that lies outside the circularity. By contrast, all types of epistemological presuppositions (including those of ethnomethodology) fail to resist such a derivability/reducibility. This is why for these presuppositions radical reflexivity is destructive. In operating in the diversity of studies devoted to the interpretative articulation of life-worlds, the reflection (as attributed to radical reflexivity) upon hermeneutic fore-structuring and pre-normativity makes sense of the ontological difference in a contextually relevant fashion.