| Summary: | In this texte-montage Isaac Joseph began formulating his call for articles for an issue of “Practical reasons” devoted to La Croyance et l’enquête (Belief and the Survey, 2004). Some of his favourite themes are to be found here: the community of explorers who, in co-constructing public reason through survey and experiment, become the community of believers; vulnerable audiences who, facing the risk of imposture, of phoney news, of practical jokes and rumour, are like the ‘suckers’ gulled by the card-sharp playing Bonneteau as described by Goffman. He also writes in defence of cooperative ethnography and the principle of irreducible observation attributed to the early Chicago pragmatists and sociologists; then some thoughts that oscillate between belief according to William James, worried by a religious experience and faith in the ‘experimental method’ propounded by Peirce, Mead and Dewey.
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