Reply to Michael Lynch’s Comment on “Is Representation a ‘Folk’ Term?”

Abstract

I welcome Mike Lynch’s response to my article and thank him for it. It is, perhaps, necessary to reiterate that the article was not primarily about ethnomethodology, or even about ethnomethodological work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), but about a particular line of argument – what can crudely be called radical constructionism – which has long been part of STS and continues to be influential in some quarters there, as Lynch acknowledges. My discussion of ethnomethodology in the article pointed to a parallel between this line of argument and some ethnomethodological sources; this probably stemming from the influence of the latter on the former. I have written about ethnomethodology itself at length elsewhere, in publications referenced in the article (for example Hammersley 2019). Lynch claims that I ‘lump [...] ethnomethodology together with latter-day constructionism in the anti-representationalist camp.’ I tried to make clear that I was referring to the work of some ethnomethodologists, rather than to ethnomethodology as a whole. He questions my interpretation of a quotation from Coopmans et al. (2014, 2) but what he presents as an alternative is his