Systems of sociological refraction

Throughout his career, Wes Sharrock has, following in the footsteps of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Peter Winch and Harold Garfinkel, sought to argue against accounts of
the identity of an action which are the products of a social theory, a specific methodology
or what Garfinkel termed formal analysis. In contrast, much of contemporary
social science and social theory is grounded in a belief that ordinary or competent
members of societies are unreliable authorities on the identity of their own and
others’ actions because they are subject to systems of sociological refraction. The
idea being that ordinary members of society are systematically misled as to the identity
of their actions and those of their peers because they—or their perceptions of
actions—are subject to the refractive properties of (for example) ideology, or folk
theories of action, and so on. In this paper, I subject to analysis this core commitment
of much social science and social theory.