Abstract
In 1964 or 1965, H. Sacks advanced the idea of sociology as an inquiry into those procedures by which reproducible phenomena are produced. The idea of Conversation Analysis developed from it. In this paper I attempt to show the following points: (1) that inquiry is a conceptual, as opposed to empirical, one, or aims at what Wittgenstein called a ‘perspicuous representation’ of conceptual connections; (2) while both commonsense and sociological accounts of action are, like action as such, normative phenomena produced in the application of the grammar of concepts, Sacks' inquiry concerns the grammar (normative structures) of concepts and in these terms differs in its logical status from traditional sociological as well as commonsense accounts; and (3) the data Conversation Analysis uses to investigate the organization of interaction are reminders of the grammar of concepts rather than proofs for any hypotheses.
