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When speakers p d u c e "1 don't knows" in ordinary conversation, they claim insufficient knowledge about the matters at hand. Analysis of diverse conversational environments reveal, however, that speakers' claims nevertheless accomplish a variety of subtle actions. "1 don't knows" may be strategically and ambiguously deployed m s s thefollowing achievements: (a) marking uncertainty and concerns about next-positioned opinions, assessments, or troubles; (b) constructing neutral positions, designed to mitigate agreement and disagreement, by disattending and seeking closure on 0th-initiated topics (e.g., moving toward completing stories or worbng to avoid troubling issues); and (c) postponing or zvithholding acceptance of others'invited and requested actions. By examining moments where insufficient knowledge claims are contingently used as a resource, understandings ofpactive yet delicately managed interactional conduct are forwarded. Such conduct is shown to be anchored in ordinmy conversations but adapted in similar yet distinct ways within institutional interactions such as courtroom cross-examination. ernacular understandings of utterances such as "I don't know" in ordinary conversation may reveal that speakers simply, and V unequivocally, do not know what they are talking about and are making that limitation known to others. Intuition alone makes obvious the fact that one's stock of knowledge is essentially incomplete, recurrently uncertain, and therefore limited in scope and application. For interactional participants and analysts alike, however, attributing verbat i m meanings to words and utterances disregards the acutely organized nature of social interaction. When speakers' utterances are understood as literal descriptions of the information they impart, as isolated from the interactional environments they were designed to be reponsive to, the semantic content of an utterance such as "I don't know" is commensurate with such matters as claiming insuficient knowledge. Yet, constituent features of "claiming" as a collaborative achievement remain elusive and underspecified, and there is ultimately no assurance that the situated work being done through "I don't know'' has anything at all to do with Wayne A. Beach is a professor and T m ' R. Metzger is an instructor in the School of Communication at San Diego State University. Correspondence should be forwarded to Wayne A.

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This study examines moments of mutual sensitivity during a health appraisal interview. Attention is given to how patient becomes visibly and audibly emotional when reporting personal problems, how these behaviors get attended to through subsequent interaction, and the delicacy involved in transitioning to discussion about reported childhood sexual abuse. Analysis reveals how delicate moments get closely monitored and collaboratively produced, why "medical" and "personal" distinctions are artificially dichotomous, ways "attending" should not be exclusively associated with the interactional responsibilities of interviewers, and how attention given to the patient's body gets transformed over the course of the historytaking interview. Attending to a patient's expressed and exhibited problems is an inevitable and valuable resource for generating a comprehensive understanding of psychosocial and biomedical circumstances.Medical history taking involves moments where patients raise sensitive issues about their personal, social, and family experiences. When faced with decisions about whether and how lifeworld experiences will be pursued, however, interviewers have been repeatedly shown to disattend patient-initiated concerns and thus overlook their significance for understanding symptoms and illness