Abstract
The goal of this article is to present a sociology of intimate problems or of the self-inquiries. In the first part, I expose the concept of inquiry, as treated by pragmatist philosophy. Then I discuss how Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot give to it a sociological facet. Instead of delimiting the elementary forms of human inquiry, as John Dewey did, they propose a sociology of the actors’ axiological inquiries. In the third part, I expose how Francis Chateauraynaud, with Didier Torny, turns the discussion from the fair agreement to the conditions of happiness of the production of an effective whistleblower. Finally, I propose to redirect the discussion towards a sociology on an individual scale, as in Bernard Lahire and Margaret Archer works. Thus, I intend to propose a sociology of intimate problems as a sociology of actors’ self-inquiry.
Keywords Intimate problems; self-inquiry; pragmatic sociology; pragmatism; interiority