Abstract
From an ethnomethodological perspective, this article describes social actors’ everyday and virtual stances in terms of their practices of provisional doubt and belief for the purpose of fact-establishment. Facts are iterated, reinforced, elaborated, and transformed via phenomenal practices configuring relations of equipment, interpretation, and method organized as “other” than, but relevant to, the everyday. Such practices in scientific research involve forms of suspended belief; in other areas they can instead involve forms of suspended doubt. As an illuminating example of this latter class of virtual fact-establishment practices, I offer an extended analysis of the “yes; and…” principle of information-establishment used in improvisational theatre to progressively develop the content of a performance.
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Notes
I use the term “negotiation” here and throughout the article in a sense more like “to negotiate a path” than “to negotiate a contract”. Actors collectively “make their way” through a developing social reality as they interact. While overall “making way” processes likely include negotiations in the narrower sense, where distinct parties engage in forms of contestation as they each seek to increase their advantage, they also include a variety of non-contestatory interactive processes contributing to the collective “moving forward” of the group as a society.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nathan Stucky, John T. Warren, Ross Singer, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable discussions and suggestions for revision. Special thanks is also due to Lenore Langsdorf for introducing me to many of the key concepts employed in this article.
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Zaunbrecher, N.J. Suspending Belief and Suspending Doubt: The Everyday and the Virtual in Practices of Factuality. Hum Stud 35, 519–537 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9244-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9244-y