Ethnomethodology, culture, and implicature

as accounting practice Garfinkel writes: "When I speak of accountable my interests are directed to such matters as the following.I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e., available to members as situated practices of looking-and-tellin g" (1967: 1).The elucidation of these practices is a central objective of ethnomethodology.Certain of our practices might be called "unspecifying practices."Garfinkel (3) mentions three: "et cetera," "let it pass," and "unless."The et cetera move, for example, allows us to add initially unenvisioned and unspecified instances to some inventory, without being seen to have violated the rules or instructions for constituting that inventory.tGrice, with his notion of conversational implicature (1975), has proposed what we might call "specifying practices."This might appear to be exactly the sort of contribution that would be appreciated in ethnomethodology, and yet Grice, and conversational implicature in general, has received little attention from ethnomethodologists. Perhaps the reason for this is to be found in one of Garfinkel's dictums: "A leading policy is to refuse serious consideration to the prevailing proposal that ... rational properties of practical activities be assessed, recognized, categorized, described by using a rule or standard obtained outside actual settings within which such properties are recognized, used, produced, and talked about by settings' members" (33).It is not clear to me, though, whether this objection is properly applied to Grice's maxims.At any rate, implicature does seem to take place, members do on occasion seem to draw certain conclusions that are not asserted or logically implied, and Grice tries to describe and explain how they do it.Perhaps we can reconcile Grice and Garfinkel by treating Grice's maxims as resources that members can call upon and use according to the situation, that is, "as a recoverable, reproducible stock of knowledge and skills available in daily, routine, mundane ways of talking and acting" (Lee 1992:225).The Gricean maxims are precisely about "situated practices of looking-and-telling," i.e., about accounting practices.Although the maxims are given in general terms, they are deeply indexical:2 "Make your contribution as informative as is required" or "Be I This is my own interpretation.Garfinkel does not elucidate these practices.2In this, they resemble Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974) turn-taking rules.