Toward a hermeneutic ethnomethodology of conversation: An integration of Gadamer and Garfinkel (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Harold Garfinkel)

This dissertation investigates the theoretical and philosophical potential for an original perspective on conversation. The investigation begins by critically reviewing two lines of well-known work: Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. It examines both primary sources and the communication literature citing Gadamer and Garfinkel in order to clarify how these works relate to communication studies and to highlight weaknesses in each. The review includes 104 speech communication essays which reference Gadamer and 72 essays which cite Garfinkel and shows each perspective to be established in the literature. Further, Gadamer's hermeneutics is found to be difficult for speech communication scholars to apply because his perspective is anti-method and has a strong bias toward historical written texts. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology is problematic for the speech communication scholar because of his refusal to engage in theoretical discussions. These weaknesses, however, highlight the complementarity of these two perspectives: each provides what the other could be said to lack. Thus, an integrated hermeneutic ethnomethodology is proposed as a potential alternative to Cartesian treatments of conversation which persist in current research on conversation. This perspective emphasizes the event structure of communication, focuses on conversation as the primordial event of communication, and proposes an alternative conception of the communicating human being which may dissolve the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy prominent in current conceptions. Finally, research policies are recommended and limitations are discussed.