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.

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