Introduction

In the cognitive sciences, activities like seeing, remembering, recognizing, learning, problem solving and decision making tend to be treated as individual processes for recording, retrieving and configuring information. Everyday actions are regarded as surface behaviours which are caused by underlying mental and neurological processes; processes that are often masked by the contingencies of everyday situations and the referential ambiguities of ordinary language. Technological advances in the ability to visualize the interior of the skull have reinforced the tendency to pursue cognitive processes into the recesses of the mind-brain.

Although fuelled by impressive neuroscientific breakthroughs, the philosophy of mind that animates cognitive science has been criticized for more than a half century by Wittgensteinians and ordinary language philosophers. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein (1958) rejects the presumption that thinking, knowing, giving reasons, looking, seeing, and so forth, are products of internal mental mechanisms. He does not propose a competing causal explanation of thought, mind and knowledge, but instead he explicates how ‘mental’ concepts (like other everyday concepts) are grounded in communicative actions produced by competent members of a linguistic community. To the extent that they pay any attention to such arguments, proponents of cognitive science typically dismiss them as out of date and unscientific, but as Button et al. (1995) argue, Wittgensteinian and ordinary language arguments are as pertinent as ever.

Introduction

To make significant strides in reworking traditional understanding of cognition we need to engage cognitive scientists: we have to show that we can speak directly to the concerns which animate their disciplines. And this demonstration must not rest in theoretical or conceptual arguments, important as these are; instead, it is necessary to show how the results of empirical analyses mesh with, and have real implications for, research agenda and methodological developments in cognitive science.

To this end, I'm going to talk about a type of memory which has come to be known as flashbulb memory. These kinds of memories have been the subject of a substantial amount of research in cognitive psychology, particularly in the United States. In recent years some researchers have begun to reflect critically on the methodology of their research. Equally, there has been a willingness to question some of the core premises which have traditionally motivated their research. Finally there has been an openness to explore analytic techniques and data which would hitherto have been considered inappropriate for research in cognitive science. And it is at this juncture that the orientations and findings of conversation analytic and discourse analytic studies become relevant.

To begin, then, I'll give a brief account of the origins of the concept of flashbulb memory and outline some of the main themes which run through research on this topic.

As conversation analysts, we analyze the sense-making practices that participants use to accomplish conversational actions, identities and roles. We study these practices by closely observing the details of the conduct of people in interaction as captured or rendered on videotape and/or audiotape recordings. For a number of reasons, many conversation analysts have been strongly reluctant to turn to the participants of an interaction as informants about aspects of the interaction. The reluctance is based on scepticism about a model of social action in which aspects of cognition are used to explain social action, the methods of eliciting self-reports of subjects' perceptions, the validity of such reports, and the temptation to privilege informants' accounts over, or even substitute them for, investigators' analyses of practices.

Through much of my professional career, the sole data I used for my analyses were audiotapes and videotapes of interaction. In some more recent studies, my collaborators and I used ethnographic data along with tape-recordings of interaction. We collected video stimulated comments as data, obtained by asking each of the participants of the interaction under investigation to view a videotape of the interaction and offer comments while viewing it. I will refer to the initial videotaped interaction as Event and the subsequent interaction in which an Event participant offered comments while viewing the videotape as Event.

The position that I am advocating is the following: the conversation analytic program of research is built on close analysis of interactional data, for example, audio and videotapes of interaction.

Overview

This book addresses issues of conversation and cognition. For the first time some of the world's experts on interaction analysis have been brought together to consider the nature and role of cognition. They address the question of what part, if any, cognitive entities should play in the analysis of interaction. They develop different answers. Some are consistent with current thinking in cognitive psychology and cognitive science; others are more critical, questioning the idea that cognition is the obvious and necessary start point for the study of human action.

The question of the relation of language and thought has been a central one in cognitive and developmental psychology for more than thirty years. For the contributors here the focus is not on language as it is traditionally understood but rather on talk or, even more specifically, on talk-in-interaction. That is, not on language as an abstract set of words, meanings, or a system of contrasts as it has usually been conceived, but talk as a practical, social activity, located in settings, occurring between people, used in practices. This approach has significant implications for the way traditional issues of cognition are treated. Talk and cognition have been brought together only rarely in the past and often for particular purposes local to one discipline. However, there are some important precursors to the current enterprise, and we will describe them in detail below.

Introduction

Our aim in this chapter is to show how discursive psychology (DP) deals with psychological states and characteristics. We do this in several ways: by defining what DP is, by demonstrating it analytically, and by discussing various criticisms and misunderstandings of it. As for defining it, DP works in three closely related ways:

1. Respecification and critique. Standard psychological topics are respecified as discourse practices. Topics recognized in mainstream psychology such as ‘memory’, ‘causal attribution’, ‘script’ knowledge, and so on, are re-worked in terms of discourse practices.We study how people ordinarily, as part of everyday activities, report and explain actions and events, how they characterize the actors in those events, and how they manage various implications generated in the act of reporting. DP often generates a critical stance on cognitive psychology. For example, cognitive theory and measurement of ‘attitudes’ is criticized and replaced by the study of argumentative and evaluative practices in discourse (Billig, 1987; Potter, 1998a; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wiggins, 2002; Wiggins and Potter, 2003). Similarly, cognitive methods and theory on ‘causal attribution’ are critically opposed by analyses of how people manage accountability in everyday talk (Antaki, 1994; Edwards and Potter, 1992a, 1993).

2. The psychological thesaurus. DP explores the situated, occasioned, rhetorical uses of the rich common sense psychological lexicon or thesaurus: terms such as angry, jealous, know, believe, feel, want, and so on. For example, expressions such as ‘I don't know’, or ‘your angry stage’ are examined for the local contrasts and interactional work for which they are used (e.g., Edwards, 1995; Potter, 1998b). By grounding such studies in empirical materials, we are able to explore the ways in which concepts such as ‘know’ or ‘angry’ are used interactionally and rhetorically, with regard to specific, locally relevant alternative descriptions. We develop some examples in this chapter.

What are we talking about?

Power is not a bad thing – those who are in power will confirm it. They will argue convincingly that power is necessary in every system, for it is often that which allows the system to function in particular ways, without which the system would disintegrate or cease to operate effectively. Yet, power is a concern to many people, something that is easily translated into topics of discussion or narration. Power, its actors, its victims, and its mechanisms are often the talk of the town, and our everyday conversations, our mass media, our creative arts gladly use power as themes or motifs in discourses on society at large. Few stories are juicier than those of a president brutally abusing his power for his own personal benefit or for his own personal wrath against competitors for power – All the President's Men was a great movie. Few individuals are more fascinating than those who embody and emanate absolute power and are not afraid of wielding it in unscrupulous ways – Stalin, Napoleon, Mobutu, W. R. Hearst, and Onassis were all culture heroes of some sort in their days and afterwards. And scores of scholars ranging from Plato over Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, Gramsci to Foucault and Althusser have all theorised on the nature of power. Thus, we seem to have a strangely ambivalent attitude towards power: it attracts as well as repels; it fascinates and abhors at the same time; it has a beauty as well as an ugliness to it that match those of few other phenomena.

Introduction

Identity is who and what you are. That sounds simple and straightforward, and in everyday life, we find ourselves continually involved in identity rituals. Dating or developing friendships involve intricate narratives about one's self and requests for such narratives from the interlocutor – a matter of ‘getting to know one another’. Meetings will start with a sequence in which everyone present tells his or her name and a couple of biographical and/or professional items sufficient to situate one's self in relation to the group and the occasion (when the meeting is professional, one is not likely to start off by saying ‘Hi, I am so-and-so and my marriage is falling apart’). In highly bureaucratised societies we have to flash our identity every time we enter into contact with administrative bodies, and in the job market, a written genre called the CV together with several other modes of talking about one's self play a crucial role. When we go to watch a sports game, we are likely to shift into another identity gear and wear caps, T-shirts, and banners with ‘our’ team's logo or colours. On the day of our country's independence or of our king's birthday, we get the day off because we are citizens of that country. And when abroad, we discover ourselves talking a lot about that country, living up to its stereotypes, defending its values and virtues, and in return receiving flak because of the mistakes it made or makes.

Introduction

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is undoubtedly the most visible ‘school’ in the field under scrutiny in this book. At the same time, it would be a mistake to see CDA as the only possible critical perspective on language in society. This chapter offers a discussion of the emergence and development of the ‘school’ of CDA, as well as a survey of its main areas of inquiry: political discourse, media, advertisement, ideology, racism, institutional discourse. I shall also offer a brief survey of the main theoretical and methodological assumptions in CDA, and a glimpse of its major theoretical and empirical shortcomings. These shortcomings will be addressed more fully in some of the chapters that follow.

An obvious warning to be extended at this point is that whenever we make reference to a ‘school’, we find ourselves on thin ice. People identified as ‘members’ of this school may not always perceive themselves as such, and many observers would emphasise the incoherence and internal contradictions in what I am presenting here as a more or less unified and streamlined movement. What we are facing when we talk about CDA is a group of leading scholars, each with a background of their own, who agree on certain principles of analysis, who agree to address similar issues, and who have developed some institutional tools for doing so.

Introduction: choice or voice?

Many traditions in the study of language in society take the creative, negotiable features of human interaction and meaning-production as their points of departure, often in the form of unspoken assumptions, which becomes apparent in the use of a terminology emphasising (rational) choice, strategic moves, preferences in interactional organisation, and so forth. When communicating, people ‘choose’ from a range of options, they ‘select’ discourse forms deemed appropriate in the particular context, and they consciously ‘plan’ the sequential moves, either by ‘choosing’ to ‘follow rules’ or by ‘flouting’ these rules. We have already mentioned H. Paul Grice's influential discussions on ‘conversational maxims’ (Grice 1975) as a case in point. A lot of conversation-analytic terminology betrays similar assumptions (e.g. ‘preference organisation’ leading to ‘preferred’ or ‘dispreferred’ moves in a conversation; see, for example, Levinson 1983: chapter 6); theories of speech comprehension such as Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) see understanding as a selection of context/meaning out of a range of possible alternatives; and more specific sociolinguistic theories also emphasise choice, selection, and even rational calculation as basic to human communication. This is notably the case in some models of code-selection and code-switching, where speakers are supposed to calculate the relative advantages and disadvantages of shifts into particular codes (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1993).

I am sure that some of this terminological effort to emphasise the (relative) freedom of communicating people is a matter of widely accepted conventions for social-scientific writing about people in societies.

Introduction: context is/as critique

Critical trends in discourse analysis emphasise the connection between discourse and social structure. They locate the critical dimension of analysis in the interplay between discourse and society, and suggest ways in which features of social structure need to be treated as context in discourse analysis. For instance, in analysing doctor–patient interaction, the facts that one participant is a doctor and another is a patient, and that this interaction consequently develops in an institutional environment, are crucial elements in understanding the power balance in that interaction. There will be a particular power dynamic because one is a doctor and another is a patient, and because this turns the particular interaction into an instance of an institutionalised genre. Critical analysis is thus always and necessarily the analysis of situated, contextualised, language, and context itself becomes a crucial methodological and theoretical issue in the development of a critical study of language.

There is a vast and significant literature on context (see, for example, Auer and Di Luzio, 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Auer 1995), and the most general way of summarising it is to say that it addresses the way in which linguistic forms – ‘text’ – become part of, get integrated in, or become constitutive of larger activities in the social world (see also Scollon 2001). To some extent, this is self-evident: language is always produced by someone to someone else, at a particular time and place, with a purpose and so forth.

It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to produce a synthesis of work which in the present economy of academic publishing is dispersed over too many fragmented little bits. The opportunity was offered to me by Andrew Winnard of Cambridge University Press, to whom I express my gratitude. This is indeed a synthesis of thoughts and approaches developed over many years, and evidently too many people were involved in this process of development to even attempt to thank them all. I shall (have to) restrict myself here to those who directly influenced the genesis of this particular book.

There are, first, a number of intellectual partners who will undoubtedly find many echoes in this book of conversations I had with them over the years. My close friends in the Flemish National Science Foundation network on Language, Power, and Identity are prominent among them. Jim Collins, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck, and Jef Verschueren have not only discussed almost all the issues treated here repeatedly and at great length with me, they have also read drafts of the book and provided extremely important comments and suggestions. Dell Hymes, John Gumperz (to whom I dedicate this book), Michael Silverstein, and Ron Scollon are all great sources of inspiration for my approach and also provided tons of illuminating comments and useful suggestions on the manuscript.