ABSTRACT
The point of the paper The fact that natural language serves persons doing sociology, laymen or professionals, as circumstances, as topics, and as resources of their inquiries, furnishes to the technology of their inquiries and to their practical sociological reasoning its circumstances, its topics, and its resources. That reflexivity is encountered by sociologists in the actual occasions of their inquiries as indexical properties of natural language. These properties are sometimes characterized by summarily observing that a description, for example, in the ways it may be a constituent part of the circumstances it describes, in endlesss ways and unavoidably, ‘elaborates’ those circumstances and is ‘elaborated’ by them. That reflexivity assures to natural language characteristic indexical properties such as the following: The definiteness of expressions resides in their consequences; definitions can be used to assure a definite collection of ‘considerations’ without providing a boundary; the definiteness of a collection is assured by circumstantial possibilities of indefinite elaboration.1
