Does ethnomethodological CA have a 'soft underbelly'?

Steven Levinson in his 2013 remarks on “action formation and ascription” finds a “loose hermeneutics” of “intuitive characterizations” as the “the soft underbelly of CA”. It is a remarkable formulation, and by tugging on its filaments we hope to bring into view the radical departures taken by Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff from the normative appointments of social science, and also how we may find an impulse to return to those appointments in the literature of the Epistemic Analytic Framework (see below). EAF treatments of assessment sequences show it well. A transcript anchors the argument.