Ethnomethodologists emphasize that the stable, constraining, recognizable, rational, and orderly properties of “social facts” are local accomplishments, whereas sociologists of scientific knowledge claim that “natural facts” are social constructions. Investigators in both fields try to show how taken-for-granted facts arise from concerted human activities, and they explicitly turn away from the idea that facts are manifestations of a transcendent natural order demonstrated through a rational method of inquiry. In a way, both ethnomethodology and the sociology of scientific knowledge are part of what Stanley Fish calls the “intellectual left” opposition to philosophical essentialism. Both insist that

Among the members of the intellectual left, Fish lists “Marx, Vico, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Gramsci, Jameson, Weber, Durkheim, Schutz, Kuhn, Hanson, Goffman, Rorty, Putnam, and Wittgenstein, and their common rallying cry would be ‘back (or forward) to history.’”