Reverting to a hidden interactional order: Epistemics, informationism, and conversation analysis

Abstract

This article critically examines the relations between epistemics in conversation analysis (CA) and linguistic and cognitivist conceptions of communicative interaction that emphasize information and information transfer. The epistemic program (EP) adheres to the focus on recorded instances of talk-in-interaction that is characteristic of CA, explicitly identifies its theoretical origins with ethnomethodology, and points to implications of its research for the social distribution of knowledge. However, despite such affiliations with CA and ethnomethodology, the EP is cognitivist in the way it emphasizes information exchange as an underlying, extrasituational ‘driver’ in social interaction. To document how the EP draws upon cognitivist conceptions of information and knowledge, we review examples from the corpus of transcripts analyzed in key publications on epistemics. Our re-analysis casts doubt upon the way EP analysis invokes an underlying order that supposedly drives the evident sequential organization of those transcripts.

Actions in practice: On details in collections

“…Failure to acknowledge the normatively intertwined relationship between position and composition appears to be the source of much confusion in the Lynch et al (2016) special issue. For instance, Macbeth et al (2016: 562) claim that Heritage's (2002a) analysis of ohprefaced responses to assessments uses "a very different arrangement and a very different deployment" of sequence organization.…”

“…In a position paper examining what he and others (e.g., Lynch et al, 2016) understand to be the 'Epistemics Program' (sic), Lynch refers, with evident distaste, to "a recent trend (indeed, a juggernaut) in CA, involving a rapprochement with linguistics…" (2016: 18). 2 To cast the relationship between CA and linguistics as a "rapprochement"-and a recent one, at that-is to misunderstand both this relationship and its history.…”

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AbstractSeveral of the contributions to the Lynch, et al (2016) special issue make the claim that conversation-analytic research into epistemics is "routinely crafted at the expense of actual, produced and constitutive detail, and what that detail may show us" (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 585-6). Here we seek to address the inappositeness of this critique by tracing precisely how it is that recognisable actions emerge from distinct practices of interaction.

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“…One of the central claims of the contributions to the Lynch et al (2016) special issue is that conversation-analytic work in epistemics is "disengaged from the details of the transcript" (Lynch and Wong 2016: 539), that it is based on assumptions other than "on an inspection of the detailed materials in the fragment" (Lindwall et al, 2016: 512). 14 In what follows, we target and unpack various components of this claim, with the objective of demonstrating that, rather than being produced "at the expense of actual, produced and constitutive detail, and what that detail may show us" (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 585-6; our emphasis), epistemic findings are unambiguously anchored in such detail; and indeed, it is precisely our attention to these details which, to once again invoke Heritage (this issue), force us to draw certain conclusions about participants' moment-by-moment negotiations of rights and obligations to knowledge.…”

From Garfinkel’s ‘Experiments in Miniature’ to the Ethnomethodological Analysis of Interaction

“…For an example for such a critique see recent publications on the "Epistemics Program" in Discourse Studies (seeButton and Sharrock 2016;Lynch and Wong 2016).…”