A Procedure rather than a Theory: Kotarbinski’s and Garfinkel’s praxeologies

Résumé 0

If praxeology deserves our attention today, it is because it allows us to go back to the origins of the “theories of action”, the sociologies of action or the philosophies of action that have marked the 20th century. In what follows, I will try to show that the very idea of taking “action” as the object of investigation, and of proposing a theory of it, is far from clear. I will pursue this investigation in the company of Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886-1981), an analytical philosopher, and Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011), a heterodox sociologist. As a result, this text will defend the thesis that among the most striking consequences of Garfinkel’s work is the demystification of “action theory”, and that several of his intuitions are to be found already in Kotarbiński’s early works (which Garfinkel ends up considering as “a tremendously important failure”). Praxeology in both authors is not a discipline, but a way of seeing the studied practice as a whole, similar to the research carried out by Gestalt theorists. The atheoretical dimension of the study of human action proposed here allows us to hope that one day, the phenomena that surround us will be studied for what they are, and not for what an elegant theorycan say about them.