This book arises from a series of collaborative efforts that began in 2003 as an international project on affiliation in social interaction led by Anna Lindström: “Language and social action: a comparative study of affiliation and disaffiliation across national communities and institutional contexts.” That project resulted in, among other things, the creation of a research network of conversation analysts focusing on what has been emerging as a new and particularly significant dimension of talk-in-interaction – namely the displays of and negotiations concerning participants' epistemic status relative to one another. The turn to epistemics was a natural extension of the prior interest in affiliation. We will argue in this book that to understand affiliation – and indeed cooperation more generally – we must understand how interactants manage the domain of knowledge. The process leading to this volume included four workshops: two in Aarhus, Denmark; one in Lyon, France; and one in Nijmegen, the Netherlands – each of which substantively shaped not only the individual contributions but also our collective thinking about the domain as a whole. For this reason we express gratitude to our fellow contributors who inspired and intensively discussed each chapter of this book over the course of its development. It is for this reason too that, although the introduction was formally written by the editors, it represents a thought process that all contributors were part of.

We dedicate this book to Gail Jefferson and her legacy.

Introduction

In everyday social interaction, knowledge displays and negotiations are ubiquitous. At issue is whether we have epistemic access to some state of affairs, but also how certain we are about what we know, our relative authority and our differential rights and responsibilities with respect to this knowledge. Implicit in this conceptualization is that knowledge is dynamic, graded and multi-dimensional and that our deployment of and reliance on epistemic resources are normatively organized. As Drew puts it, there is a “conventional ascription of warrantable rights or entitlements over the possession and use of certain kinds of knowledge” (1991: 45). As in any normatively organized system, we can and do hold one another accountable for justifiably asserting our rights and fulfilling our obligations with respect to knowledge. It is in this way that we see the epistemic domain as morally ordered.

This orientation to and monitoring of the moral order might seem completely different from the moral reasoning used in tasks requiring judgements of whether a given scenario (e.g., about sharing resources or unintentionally killing someone) is morally acceptable or not (e.g., Hauser 2006; Henrich et al. 2004). However, the micro-level moral order can be understood as cut from the same cloth as other forms of moral reasoning. And these micro-interactional moral calibrations have critical consequences for our social relations, most directly through our moment-by-moment alignments and affiliations with others.

Introduction

A most fundamental kind of knowing is that which is based on what someone sees or experiences. Direct perceptual access to an event informs our knowledge and understanding of something that has transpired, and both entitles and obligates us to act and to tell others about it in particular ways. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, one of the most basic and pervasive features of language use has to do with how participants design and implement their talk by reference to their own entitlements to knowledge, and what they figure others' to be. In this chapter, I examine how children aged 14 to 30 months, who are in the early stages of language use, come to have a practiced grasp of how knowledge matters for the organization of interaction – in particular, for how their own and others' differential access to an event motivates and shapes the lines of action they take.

For very young children, an understanding of the relationship between what someone sees and what they know is considered a developmental milestone, one that indexes a major cognitive shift in the way we understand other persons as intentional agents. A long line of research in developmental and cognitive psychology has been concerned with children's abilities to assess another person's knowledge based on his or her perceptual access to an event.

Introduction

In everyday conversation, when a speaker adopts an evaluative stance toward a referent that is accessible to his/her recipient (a first assessment), this invites the recipient to convey his/her evaluative stance about the same referent in the next turn (a second assessment). Second assessments can be formulated as agreements or disagreements in multiple ways, and their design manifests a systematic preference for agreements over disagreements in interaction (Pomerantz 1984a). For instance, Pomerantz (1984a) observes that for English conversation a speaker who is agreeing with a prior assessment often proffers an upgraded evaluation (e.g., “It's just gorgeous,” to agree with “It's a beautiful day”) while a disagreement tends to be prefaced with a same-degree, or formulated via a downgraded, evaluation. This bias toward agreement can be seen as a way in which speakers orient to the maintenance and maximization of social solidarity in interaction (Heritage 1984b: 265).

However, agreement or disagreement on evaluative stances is not the only issue that matters when interactants assess a referent in conversation. Interactants also display their concern with their and their interlocutor's epistemic stances vis-à-vis the referent (Goodwin and Goodwin 1987; Hayano 2007a, b; Heritage 2002a; Heritage and Raymond 2005; Kanai 2004; Morita 2005; Raymond and Heritage 2006; Schegloff 1996a; Sorjonen 2001). When speakers produce a first assessment, they adopt not only an evaluative stance but also an epistemic stance. Employing linguistic resources, they embody how they see information or knowledge to be distributed between them and the recipients.

Introduction

Between the ages of three and five or thereabouts, children engage in a form of imaginative play that involves a transformation of ordinary objects and persons into characters in a fictional world. Such “make-believe” or “pretend-play” has long been of interest to scholars of child development, and a number of theories concerning the role it plays in the child's moral and cognitive maturation have been advanced. Considerably less attention has been paid to the actual structures and practices associated with the activities of make-believe. This is unfortunate given the obvious importance that these play in the everyday lives of children. In an attempt to redress this situation, in this chapter I treat make-believe as a form of social interaction and attempt to describe some of its basic features. As in any other form of social interaction, participants in make-believe orient to it as a normatively organized set of practices – one practice can make another expectable or “conditionally relevant” (see Schegloff 1968, 2007b), and if that second action is not done it can be found absent by the participants.

I will show that epistemic rights to talk about make-believe characters and events flow from participation in the activity. In activities that are essentially sole ventures, imaginative transformation is accomplished unproblematically by the use of bald assertions (e.g. “It's a Rubik's cube”). At the other end of the scale, a child who talks about a character being animated by another participant typically uses an interrogative format to do this (e.g. “Do they say you can't hide from me?”).

Introduction

Scholars working within quite divergent research traditions have argued that conversation requires speakers and recipients to assume that some things are held in common. These assumptions can range from the idea of a shared language and culture to details derived from joint experiences including prior conversation (Clark 1996; Grice 1975; Stalnaker 1978). In the conversation-analytic and ethnomethodological traditions, common ground, or intersubjectivity, figured as a central feature of interaction from early on. As demonstrated, for instance, by Garfinkel's ethnomethodological breaching experiments (Garfinkel 1967), failure to apply background knowledge when interacting with others has moral consequences. Reflecting on these experiments, Heritage concluded that “there is no quicker way, it appears, of provoking moral outrage than by not using background knowledge to make sense of other people's actions” (Heritage 1984b: 182).

The centrality of background knowledge to talk-in-interaction is evident in that languages provide resources dedicated to pointing out that information is shared. This chapter focuses on one such resource, namely the adverbs jo (Danish) and ju (Swedish). We begin with the observation that jo/ju, when used in an answer slot, claims that the questioner failed to take into account shared knowledge, which should have informed the design of the question. The inclusion of jo/ju in a slot where an answer is due thus embodies a claim of “epistemic incongruence,” in that the basic epistemic configuration of a question (Hayano this volume) – that the answerer knows something the questioner does not know – is challenged.

Introduction

Participants in social interaction rely on different ways of dealing with questions of rights and access to knowledge. For instance, they sometimes deal with questions of rights to know by addressing a person's access to the information as either exclusive or non-exclusive. And they sometimes address questions of rights to know by framing the information as something the co-participants ought to know or ought not to know, thereby making questions of epistemic stance accountable in talk. By dealing with these different aspects of epistemics, co-participants recurrently negotiate rights and access to knowledge as a basis for a common frame of understanding. This means that questions of epistemic stance are inherently related to questions of alignment and affiliation (Heritage and Raymond 2005).

Two of the major studies concerned with epistemics (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Raymond and Heritage 2006) have dealt with the role of epistemics in competing or disaligning actions that are embedded within an otherwise affiliating context. In one study (Heritage and Raymond 2005), the ongoing negotiation of the participants, about who has the primary right to know what, is dealt with as indexing epistemic authority and subordination in the talk. In another study (Raymond and Heritage 2006), epistemic rights are shown to function as a resource for participants to construct and establish identities in interaction.

In contrast to these studies, in the present chapter the focus is placed on the role of epistemics for aligning or affiliating actions in an otherwise disaffiliating context.

Introduction

There is a disparity between expressing what we know and what we don't know in interaction. Participants regularly convey what they know implicitly by stating, telling, assessing, etc. In contrast, what they don't know is typically claimed outright. However, there are sequential environments in conversation where knowledge displays are relevant. For example, the recipient of a question that asks for information is accountable for displaying knowledge. The asker of the question, by virtue of having asked this particular recipient, presupposes that she knows and can answer. Although the recipient has several resources to deal with this, simply saying “I don't know” is a highly sensitive act and has social consequences. Relying on Estonian interaction, this chapter will look at claims of “no knowledge” (mai tea, the counterpart of English I don't know), showing parallels in Swedish, Russian and English.

Issues of how speakers manage claims of knowledge across turns have been raised in a number of interactional studies (Beach and Metzger 1997; Goodwin 1979; Heritage 1984a; Heritage and Raymond 2005; Keevallik 2008; Labov and Fanshel 1977; Stivers 2005a). Some of them also specifically deal with lack of, or lesser, knowledge. For example, claiming secondary knowledge about something has been shown to function as a “fishing” device for the recipient to provide primary knowledge about the matter (Pomerantz 1980). Claiming forgetfulness can be a means of encouraging another knowing speaker to participate in the conversation (Goodwin 1987).

As conversation analysis forges new directions, it also faces significant challenges in a world of developing research, and shifting research interests. My purpose in this chapter is to address one of these challenges: to define more explicitly the elements of a framework that will license and constrain the observed structures of social interaction, and in turn their proper analysis. Part of the goal is to offer an account of human interaction that is general enough to address broader, interdisciplinary questions of the study of human behavior.

I aim to explicate a theoretical foundation for understanding the kinds of phenomena dealt with in the above chapters – that is, the negotiation of knowledge, responsibility and affiliation in interaction – building on four related concepts: enchrony, status, knowledge and agency. Each builds from the next, where enchrony entails accountability, status relativizes it, knowledge grounds it, and agency distributes it. Each is a source of asymmetry, and each thereby plays a role in defining a possibility space in the morality of knowledge in communication. The four concepts are well established in existing literature, although they may be known by other names, and may not have been brought together in quite the same way as here.

Enchrony

Our first element is a primal driving force for the ever-forward progression of social interaction, a force from which we derive sequence (Schegloff 2007b), from its simplest to its most complex manifestations.