‘Epistemic’ Conversation Analysis and ‘Radical’ Ethnomethodology: a
hybrid study with a focus on advice.
Roman Pankow 10000813 Research Master’s social sciences, GSSS, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: dr. Gerben Moerman Second reader: dr. Bregje de Kok 14/04/2018 Amsterdam
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Summary
The following master’s thesis ‘Epistemic’ Conversation Analysis and ‘Radical’
Ethnomethodology: a hybrid study with a focus on advice is motivated by a recent debate that emerged in the journal Discourse Studies edited by Teun van Dijk. In two special issues ‘The epistemics of Epistemics’ (Lynch & Macbeth 2016a) and ‘Epistemics – The rebuttal special issue’ (Drew 2018a) representatives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis rallied to consider the recent research on “epistemics” in talk-in-interaction. By taking up the challenge of presenting a study in conversation analysis afflicted by the emergence of epistemics that is still recognizable as ethnomethodological, the study answers the question of how the
conceptual tools developed in this epistemic research could be utilized to understand the methodological and conceptual repertoire of these two research traditions against this new horizon.
The thesis responds thereby to the invitation from ethnomethodologists commenting from the sidelines to consider the future of the discipline by orienting the research tools inwardly in search of a new course (cf. Anderson & Sharrock 2017) and functions thus as an original contribution to the emerging debate characterized by considering novelties in the conceptual repertoires from the standpoint of an invocation of the past. Since this invocation consists of the writings and teachings of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and Harold Garfinkel remembered through the references and citations found in the writings of the clashing authors, the study starts with an overview of this past in search of central theoretical and methodological notions that could be reconsidered through the lens of epistemics. This results in a presentation of the methodological policies for understanding actors and actions through the central conversation analytical methodology of the next turn proof procedure. After the epistemic innovations are discussed, the Jeffersonian renderings of naturally occurring advice sequences in preventive pediatric health services in a large
municipality in the Netherlands will be introduced. This corpuses enables a demonstration of showing the practical contingencies inherent in conceptual glosses. Conversation analysis afflicted with epistemic research is shown to point to the what else underlying the
asymmetries of the action “advice” in conversation analytical institutional talk research and invites a reconsideration of neighboring notions as “actor” “member” and “identity” through two extended case analyses. These concepts and their usage in literature seem to obscure the practical accomplishments necessary for their recognizability as concepts. Furthermore, since the epistemic literature seems to rely on unexamined commonsense relationships between “actor”, “action” and “institution”, a suggestion will be made to understand these conceptual relationships as practical accomplishments.
2 Contents Summary ... 1 Introduction... 3 Ethnomethodological Roots ... 6 Theoretical/methodological framework ... 10
“Policies” of Ethnomethodology in relation to Conversation Analysis ... 10
Formalizing descriptions ... 11
Understanding ... 12
Members/Identities– Indexicality/Context– Actions/Actors ... 13
Next turn proof procedure ... 16
Accounting for the epistemic order ... 18
The analytic “armamentarium” relevant to the epistemic research agenda ... 19
Hydraulics ... 20
Oh and other potential indexes for assessing knowledge status... 22
Spatial metaphors: creeks in status and open realms ... 23
Deontic authority ... 25
Ethics, corpus and transcriptions ... 26
Advice: a reading ... 28
Advice extent of the definition: preliminary observations ... 29
Advice: Practices in sight ... 32
Advice formation: The importance of knowledge transmission ... 35
Advice and knowledge: the role of asymmetries ... 38
Deontic underpinning: contested rejectables ... 41
Advice and “identity” or a focus on actors ... 44
Conclusion and reflection ... 52
Literature ... 54
Appendix A ... 62
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Introduction
In the most recent newsletter of the EMCA section of the American Sociological Association, chairs Liberman and Nishizaka describe the current predicament of the section as a “glass half full” (2018: 1-3). Lively debates are organized, but the section struggles with
maintaining the required minimum of 150 members as their numbers started to diminish after reaching this in 2013. Albeit the newsletter is addressed to the “dear EMCA Community”, a curious look into one of the leading contemporary publication outlets for professionals working in this community, Discourse Studies, suggests that the joining of the EM of Ethnomethodology and the CA of Conversation Analysis could be described as a precarious situation.
Against a background rife with orientations to leading figures from the disciplines’ past, a discussion emerged in and around two special issues of this journal, ‘The epistemics of Epistemics’ (Lynch & Macbeth 2016a) and ‘Epistemics – the rebuttal’ (Drew 2018a) (mapped in figure 1), that show clear cleavages in potential future trajectories of what is currently presented to the rest of professional sociology as kindred endeavors. Whereas the authors responsible for the ‘epistemics of Epistemics’ special issue position themselves as inspired by what was once ‘radical’ in ethnomethodology the latter set of authors is defending innovations, specifically around the theme of epistemics, within the field of conversation analysis. As subsequent interventions and digitally published rejoinders based on draft
materials suggest that the future of the disciplines is at stake, it might be disheartening to note that arguments range from being focused on theoretical issues to ad hominems to highly specific technical discussions about the correct line for placing a pause in transcriptions. One might thus start to question the extent in which proponents of these research traditions should really be addressed as one “dear … community”.
Figure 1. A representation of the EMCA community directly involved with the two special issues of
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While ethnomethodologists from Manchester were invited by the guest editor of the epistemics of Epistemic special issue, Michael Lynch, to share their concerns about the disciplines in light of this new research on epistemics, they, as per Anderson (2016) remained characteristically indifferent and were not especially concerned with this trend of
“constructivism”.ii Although the special issue cast the research on epistemics of Heritage (e.g. 2008; 2011; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2012d; 2013a), some co-authored with Geoffrey Raymond (2005; 2006; 2012), as requiring a restatement of what made ethnomethodology and conversation analysis ‘radical’ vis-à-vis conventional social sciences, Lynch had to note that his question of what to do now was “backward looking: [by] holding present-day ethnomethodology and CA accountable to the programmatic writings and exemplary studies by founders of those fields” (2016a: 24). In return Douglas W. Maynard and Steven E. Clayman (2018) criticized the authors of epistemics of Epistemics in their contribution to the Rebuttal issue in support of Heritage, because their usage of the term “radical” lacks a proper definition. Something they find in the Oxford English Dictionary which enables them to point out that the mistakes of the so called ‘radicals’ were already found in the work of Egon Bittner when he described such movements (1963). It is in this light of these derailing arguments that the recent suggestion of Anderson & Sharrock (2017) of reorienting
ethnomethodology to its own body of work to envision a road ahead more clearly seems like a helpful suggestion. iii
The remainder of this thesis manuscript will thus be an attempt of work in the organization of a recognizable future oriented study for the EMCA community afflicted by these recent debates about the merits of “epistemics” as part of the research procedures in conversation analysis. It thereby answers the question of how the conceptual tools developed in the epistemic research could be utilized to understand the methodological and conceptual repertoire of these two research traditions against this new horizon. As such it immediately encounters the principle question raised in the first publication of Harvey Sacks. Namely of how “description [is] to be warranted when, however long or intensive it be, it may
nonetheless be indefinitely extended?” (Sacks 1963: 10)” iv. It seems well known in the circles of EMCA that a solution is found in what has been called the etcetera clause. A clause that indicates that retrospectively other facets than initially described might also bear
relevance or that “even purported descriptions of particular objects neglect some
undetermined set of their features” (Sacks 1963: 13, emp. in original; cf. Garfinkel 1967: 73-74). As many thorough descriptions of the conversation analytical work appeared in text book accounts over the years (e.g. Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998; Ten Have 2007; Clift 2016), an attempt is made to represent conversation analysis in light of the factors that lead to the emergence of the etcetera problem. These factors are that descriptions are written in a
language that is itself not analyzed and that descriptions appeal to common experience (Sacks 1963: 16). The third factor, that the object of description is itself a developing and changing object, remains an ongoing problem for this thesis.
To discuss the conceptual innovations of epistemics as contribution to a discipline that is averse to “theoretical ambiguities” that are “produced and solved without surfacing” in the process of analysis and writing (Schegloff 1984: 50; cf. Lindwall et al. 2016: 504; Heritage
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2018: 38-39), the discussion between the proponents of ‘epistemic’ conversation analysis and ‘radical’ ethnomethodology and their remembrances of the past will be approached as
relating a way of work that bears relevance to what has been glossed as the “EMCA community”. This circumvention is inspired by the early ethnomethodological approach of engaging with descriptive texts as practical tutorials (Garfinkel 2002; cf. Rawls 2006: 26) and more recent investigations in the organization of bibliographies and literature lists a
researchable phenomenon of order through reading and comparison (Carlin 2007; 2009). This results in a discussion of the ‘policies’, to adopt Garfinkel’s term, of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis affected by the emerging discussion on epistemics. This is followed by an exposition of an explicitized theoretical framework drawn from the tools provided by Heritage accompanied by other complementary indexes based on work on ‘deontics’ and discursive psychology.
To furtherly enable the purpose of presenting a conversation analytical study a corpus of recordings of interactions in preventive pediatric health care services in a large
municipality in the Netherlands will be studied. While others writing for the professional medical field have noted the large array of practices that might be present in these recording (e.g. Luijks 2017; American Academy of Pediatrics 2017), presenting a new et cetera
problem in itself, the focus while lay on the central practice of advice giving in these services. This because the practice was initially paradigmatically described in the work of Heritage, co-authored with Sefi (1992) and Lindström (2012), and presents a recognizable practices that is by definition relevant to the proposals in his research on epistemics. Comparable to the ‘radical’ ethnomethodologists presentation of “oh” in the early work of Heritage (e.g. 1984a) as an early announcement of what they consider a turn to “cognitivism” and
“informationism” (cf. Macbeth et al 2016; Macbeth & Wong 2016; Lynch & Wong 2016), “advice” giving lends itself for a practical account of the contemporary juncture in
conversation analysis. This because studying the fundamental asymmetrical dimensions of advice giving on a turn by turn basis results in reconsidering the interactional contingency inherent in what is glossed as “actor” as both advice affecting and being affected by advice in the recordings of the preventive youth health care meetings in a large municipality in the Netherlands. While efforts are currently made to keep “juggernauts” as linguistics (Lynch 2016a: 18) or psychology at bay in conversation analytical research, this thesis argues that even within the codifications of epistemics there remains ample room to analyze interaction in its local specificities. Before showing this some academic and historical context is provided that raises a relief to address the data from a position indebted to the rich and enduring work of what is now considered the EMCA community
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Ethnomethodological Roots
The studies of interactions that developed under the name of “conversation analysis” are often described as “the most successful off-shoot” (Ten Have 2002) or “outgrowth” (Heritage 2009) of Ethnomethodology and is as such concerned with “the methods people use in doing social life” as Harvey Sacks puts it eloquently (1984a: 21). While Sacks claimed that “there is no other way that conversation is being studied systematically except my way” (1992: 549), his talk about conversation analysis developed in close collaboration with Harold Garfinkel (cf. Silverman 1998; Schegloff 1992; Ten Have 2007: 6) in what was once infamously described as the “re-enchantment industry” that emerged on Californian campus grounds (Gellner 1975).
While later doubts will be discussed, Garfinkel, as the founder of the field of
“ethnomethodology”v, presented the pioneering work of Sacks at various points in his life as exemplars of ethnomethodological studies (e.g. 1988; Hill & Crittenden 1986).vi Garfinkel’s presentation of what these studies in “ethnomethodology” were about ranged from more complex descriptions as “[the] organizational study of a member's knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable” (Hill & Crittenden 1968: 10) to the more simple statement that ethnomethodology is concerned with the “routine grounds of everyday
actions” in his foundational Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). While groundbreaking this publication was initially met with embarrassing dismissal in some circles of established and establishing sociology. Fellow sociologist James Coleman famously called the text a “non-book” full of “points which are so commonplace that they would appear banal if stated in straightforward English” (1968: 126, 130) and Lewis Coser associated ethnomethodology with a “symptom of the decline of a discipline” in his Presidential address to the American Sociology Association (1975: 695).vii
Against this background conversation analysis, as a kindred discipline wherein “talk itself was the action” (Schegloff 1992: 8) had to find home initially in journals of linguistics, anthropology and pragmatic philosophy. While contemporary scholars commemorate this as part of the development of conversation analysis into a truly interdisciplinary in their
introductions in hand books (e.g. Stivers & Sidnell 2013), recent writings for fellow conversation analysts ponder if other social scientists would not still look to the field as a “branch of the occult” (Levinson 2013: 105) or even if kindred conversation analysists would not view their methodological plea for the common social science method of coding as “heretical” (Stivers 2015).
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Figure 2. A representation of the relevant part of the EMCA community.
Such self-reflexive statements are not surprising when one considers the waves of internal criticisms that rippled the scenes of EMCA earlier whereof two points are made relevant in the recent discussion in Discourse studies (see figure 2 for a representation of these scenes). First, two years after Sack’s untimely passing Gail Jefferson felt reason to express a “wild side” of conversation analysis as “an antidote to the drastically constricted version of the field” that appeared after the publication of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s paper ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of Turn-taking for Conversation’ (1974) (Jefferson 1996: 2). A point also taken up by Garfinkel when he wrote in an unpublished paper:
“Latter day CA which, since Harvey Sacks’ death [in 1975], insists upon coded turns’ sequentially organized ways of speaking of talk and structure, makes talk out as structure’s mandarins: ruling it, insiders to everything that counts, dreaming science, all dignity, pedantic, and corporately correct. These ways make talk out as really the just what all concerns with structure could have been about, and, to the point of these remarks, the just what ethnomethodological concerns with structure could have been about” (Garfinkel et al., 1988: 65 as per Lynch 2016a: 14).
As Maynard and Clayman (2018) and Drew (2018b) note in their contribution to the rebuttal special issue, Michael Lynch used this quotation, amongst others, throughout his career to present conversation analysis after the turn-taking paper as an increasingly “corporate community” (e.g. Lynch 1993: 233; Lynch 2000: 521). Something that resembles a more familiar narrative of Harold Garfinkel who enjoyed close collaboration with Sacks (e.g. Garfinkel & Sacks 1970; cf. Lynch 2017), but did not pursue such relationships with Schegloff and Jefferson (cf. Rawls 2008: 726). Emanuel “Manny” Schegloff is in this
recurrent ethnomethodological narrative cast as the figure who worked towards codifying the approach with his numerous contributions and “disciplinary” accounts of the history of the discipline (cf. Lynch 2000; Carlin 2010).
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While the result of this work has been called one of the rare instances of a “normal” science in sociology by observant outsiders (e.g. Law & Lodge 1984: 283)viii, those of a more ethnomethodological bent started to note from at least the 1980s that there were many losses involved by a too restrictive focus on talk in the studies of the situated production of orderly phenomena (e.g. Atkinson 1988; Anderson 2016). The variety of topics and more and less systematic approaches found in the published lectures of Sacks alongside his quip that “conversations were something to begin with” (1984a: 25-26), are then pressed as fitting the myriad of ethnomethodological studies that were possible. They are now cast as contrived by an overtly restrictive focus on turn-taking in conversation. However, Schegloff is throughout his career similarly insistent on the point that conversation analysis is not solely concerned with conversations alone, but with talk-in-interaction or even broader interaction as the “primordial site of sociality” (e.g. 1987: 102). Tirelessly stressing that the fundamental tools of conversation analysis to study the generic properties of interaction are rich and rewarding by itself (cf. 1997; 1999; 2007a), he is credited by Garfinkel (1996: 8), cited by Lynch (2000: 520) for pressing that the objects of ethnomethodology have to be actually found out and cannot be imagined (2000: 520).
The authors of the Rebuttal special issue seem to have difficulties with grasping this dual functioning of Schegloff in ethnomethodological writing as both a codifier and a keeper of the radical spirit of Conversation Analysis. Drew calls Lynch an “unreliable guide” since he “critiques Sacks and Schegloff with the same warmth with which he now […] endorses them in recruiting them to his team in his critique of Heritage” (2018b: 9, emp. in original).ix While this critique of Heritage will be taken up again in the next chapter, a second branch of criticism also becomes relevant in the discussion of advice as an action done by actors. Namely the one that did not emerge from the inheritance of Sacks and the ‘Simplest
Systematics…’ paper, but from an increased popularity of the approach when it turned from what has been glossed as “classic” to a more “applied” conversation analysis (cf. Ten Have 2007). A set of studies that are, to utilize an older pair of terms, no longer geared to finding a priori structures as adjacency pairs, expansions and the organization of repairs as the central describable actions, but on contingent structures related to the environment where the talk was occasioned (cf. Coulter 1983).x Whereas the former set of structures were thought of as part of the machineries through which people talked (cf. Sacks 1992 passim), the latter were occasioned by specific institutional environments (cf. Drew & Heritage 1992).
The argument of the critical ethnomethodologist took a by now familiar shape of stressing the neglect of the what’s more in this institutional talk research, since it is not only too focused on the sequential ordering of talk, but it neglects thereby the other competences involved in being a successful participant in specific institutional interactions (cf. Hester & Francis 2000; Watson 2000). Furthermore, the “pessimistic” view argued that showing relevance and consequences of an institutional environment through sequential ordering lacks the empirical weight to consider institutional talk as sufficiently distinct from mundane conversations. This because the sequential orderings in the institutional setting are also found in mundane talk-in-interaction. While Schegloff initially suggested cautiousness when
extending analysis to attend for institutional feature and challenged the researchers to show the relevance of their notions in the details of talk-in-interaction (cf. 1991), he more recently recognized that he defended an approach that focused on “actions” while others attempted to
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develop analyses of “actors” (cf. 2010). As the contemporary field of EMCA is thus based on diverging orientations that could be attributed to different stances taken towards the import of texts and teachings in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the claim that
conversation analysis should be considered a ‘paradigm’ seems at odds with publicized accounts. The next chapter will thus start with a different view on the potential for divergent paths of research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that, combined with the two branches of criticism on the limiting focus on talk and the applied focus on institutions, forms the background to the “analytic mentality” (cf. Schenkhein 1978) of conversation analysis presented as concerned with formalizing understanding of members in context through their actions with help of the next turn proof procedure. These notions will be specified with help of the conceptual developments in and around epistemic research in order to assess the reliance on theoretical notions of this armamentarium through the analysis of data on advice giving practices in child health centres in the Netherlands.
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Theoretical/methodological framework
“Policies” of Ethnomethodology in relation to Conversation Analysis
While there were ridiculing descriptions abound in the early days of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis based on their concerns with “apolitical trivia”, as per Coulter (1976), the late Sudnow (2006)xi remarked in an infamous Wikipedia contribution that he and Garfinkel “sat, once, through a half hour of a chemistry lecture and then had a half hour conversation afterwards, and this becomes a 'jointly published' article”xii. These descriptions seem to indicate that the research “policies”, as Garfinkel used to call them, of
ethnomethodology were odd in the landscape of established sociological methodologies. One only has to recall the most famous exemplars of ethnomethodology, the breaching
experiments, done by undergraduate students and Garfinkel himself to make the “common place scenes visible” (cf. 1967: 36f.).
As such one of the merits of an ethnomethodological study is to be found in their instructive or pedagogical character (cf. Rawls 2002; Lynch 2012), not as a contribution to the literature canons of the “worldwide social science movement” to which
ethnomethodology functions as its “alternate” and professes indifference “as a policy… [or]… research practice” (Garfinkel 2002: 171). While Garfinkel mentioned in numerous writings his work on a bibliographical collection, with related corpus status, of
ethnomethodology (e.g. 1988; cf. Carlin 2007; Lynch 2012), his ‘indifference’ as “first segment of instructed action” claims not an abandonment of literature but a recognition that it is not needed to study activities as work (Garfinkel 2002: 170). While the studies that
stemmed from these early days had a broad range from Sudnow’s investigations playing piano, typewriting and achieving a highs core in the computer game Breakout (2001; 1979; 1983) to the earliest laboratory studies from a social sciences perspective (Lynch 1985) to studies in the foundational elements of mathematics (e.g. Livingston 1986), they could all fall under the rubric of what Garfinkel called from the early 1970s onwards the “study of work programme” (cf. Hester & Francis 2004: 21; Lynch 2015). Aside from these studies of work, wherein methods of so called members were learned, a different genre of
ethnomethodological studies mostly identified with Sacks was based on recordings and transcriptions of what came to be known as “naturally occurring data”.xiii
While some readings of Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 2002) suggest that the methodologies of social science disciplines inevitably distort the phenomena of lived society (cf. Livingston 2003; Wilson 2003), the radical position found in epistemics of Epistemics argues that it is the contribution of epistemics that furtherly distorts the “analytic mentality” of conversation analysis (cf. Schenkhein 1978). This mentality was by Schenkhein first and foremost identified by the form of the material, recordings and transcriptions, since it are however the principles of analyses that are contested the next chapter starts with an introduction of these followed by a presentation of the epistemic innovations. Thereafter the data will be introduced and transcription conventions will be discussed.
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Formalizing descriptions
Akin to principles of “ethnomethodology”, conversation analysis, as a set of research
procedures, consists of studying the organization of actions through the actions of what once were called members in a specific social situation. With their groundbreaking paper in 1974 Sacks et al. provided a description of this organization for conversations as a systematics of turn-taking. These systematics provided a descriptive, formalized specification of the organization of interaction in what Garfinkel (2002) considered, years before
“ethnomethodology”, as locally situated time referred to as “sequential”. As “any sign can signify anything” (Garfinkel 2002: 106) understanding is made possible against the horizon of a developing order of sequences of embodied interaction (cf. Rawls 2002; Rawls 2005).
The ‘Simplest systematics…’ project was an attempt to describe this order of sequences and resources utilized in actual talk-in-interaction, understood as a rule governed system. While emerging in the tumultuous and charged background of American Cold War sociology, the “turn taking system”, as social scientific description, was by itself proposed as having a “‘context-free’, ‘context-sensitive’ status”. The system was presented as a “vehicle for interaction between parties with any potential identities, and with any potential
familiarity” (Sacks et al 1974: 699-700). By focusing on the conduct made possible by shared understanding, the central question for a sequential analysis of this vehicle, that is being employed by both participants and analysts alike, becomes “why that now?” (Schegloff & Sacks 1973: 229).
An issue that pivots on what is being done by ‘that’ (Schegloff 2007b: 2), that seems to be placed in the context of the “now” based on the assumption there is a describable organized relationship, or “why”, between the two. This relationship is shown to depend on the sequential organization of turns taken in conversation, or sequentially ordered “that”s”, through mechanisms of what has been described as turn taking system, “adjacency pairs” (cf. Schegloff & Sacks 1973) and the organization of “repair” (cf. Schegloff et al. 1977). As such the focal point of this form of analysis is the organization of actions (cf. Schegloff 2010). Actions that are first and foremost interpreted through the usage and understandings displayed by the studied ‘members’. Before turning to the procedures for describing acting members in their specific situation, the decisive role of understanding will be discussed followed by the defining methodological resource in the next turn proof principle.
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Understanding
As one of the central problematics of social scientific research that deals with the et cetera problem is the unexamined reliance of a common language used in social scientific research (cf. Sacks 1963), the ethnomethodological “incommensurable… asymmetrically alternate” (cf. Garfinkel 1996: 9-11) provides research policies geared towards a descriptive analysis based on the understandings displayed by members engaged in practices. The understanding of a sequentially located action is first and foremost a members’ problem, as it are they who:
“continually, there and then without recourse to follow up tests, mutual examination of memoirs, surprise quizzes and other ways of checking on understanding
demonstrate to one another that they understood or failed to understand the talk they are party to” (Moerman & Sacks 1988).
As such the interactions of the parties in the conversations are understood to do this
continuous understanding based on their understanding of what happened before and project possibilities for subsequent understandings. As what happens next functions as the principle provider of interpretative context (Rawls 2005), as sequential time, the actions done through talk could thus be considered as both “context shaped” and “context renewable” (cf. Heritage 1984a). Because what is being done is understood within the context of prior actions and projects a context to interpret what follows.
What seems to be at stake in the discussion on the pages of Discourse Studies is to what extent the analysis of “there and then” should be supported by a descriptive apparatus that is not stemming from the work of the members, but is supposedly part of theoretical imagination. The next section will thus problematize working with these notions often found in the relevant literature and the main methodological tool for discipline, the “next turn proof procedure” (cf. Sacks et al. 1974: 728-729) in order to have sufficient relief to consider the epistemic innovations in the next chapters.
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Members/Identities– Indexicality/Context– Actions/Actors
The use of the notion of “members” in the previous sections was not only evocation of classical ethnomethodological terminology, but points also to one of the central problematics when confronted with a piece of naturally occurring data studied for the purpose of
descriptive social science. As Jefferson mentioned in her ‘Letter to the Editor’, occasioned by Pomerantz’s (1989) plea for “translating” conversation analysis technical vocabulary to vernacular terms, it might be
“conductive to good dialogue […] to start out with a clear sense of […] the alien character of conversation analysis. It is a field after all, founded by a man who took the position that humans are no more anthropomorphizable than, say, algae” (1989: 429)
One of the self-styled “quixotic” statements of Sacks (1992: 536) that reads quite puzzling, as it is not uncommon to interpret people talking in recordings as more anthropomorphic than other organisms.xiv However, by prioritizing actions as the focus points for descriptions Sacks attempted to move away from ascribing motives, emotions and similar stuff. This in line with Garfinkel’s famous, according to Heritage (2018: 23), quip that “there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there except brains” (1963: 190). The notion of “member” is an attempt to move away from such a motivational understanding and puts the situational and action based aspects first, since these result in recognizable members regardless of any “internal activity” (cf. Garfinkel 2006: 51).
This focus on recognizabilty is sometimes cast as [Edward] Shils’ problem or complaint, because he presumably argued in the company of other sociologists that “we’ll learn what about a jury’s deliberation makes them a small group. But we want to know what about their deliberations makes them a jury” (Garfinkel et al. 1981: 133). While Shils reportedly became convinced that the second question was the wrong one, this was not the case for Garfinkel who was also in attendance. For him it was first and foremost the situational properties in their local then-and-there specificities that should be considered formative for the mutual recognizability of social identity. Something echoed in the conversation analyses as pursued by Schegloff, founded on “the dangerous idea” that the social order, including the various identities, is the product of local interaction (cf. Levinson 2005).
As such the macro and the micro level of analyses are considered linked, but it is in the specificities of local interaction that identities come about analytically. In a noteworthy recorded conversation that resulted in the co-authored ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Action’ (Sacks & Garfinkel 1970), Sacks noted that “if a member were to say, “It’s nice to have you here with us.” A researcher would find himself engaged in doing such things as giving that statement a name, telling us where “here” is, who “us” are, and things like that” (1967 cited in Lynch 2017). These terms, understood as “indexical expressions” (cf. Bar-Hillel 1954; Garfinkel 1967: 4-5) rely according to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis for their meaning on the actions undertaken in their sequential context.
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This context was presented as an alternate to the context found when other social scientists were deemed the ‘community of relevance’ (cf. Schegloff 1999) that would follow the fixating impulses of “constructive analysis” or “formal analysis” in which “the world wide social science movement” is engaged (Garfinkel & Wieder 1992). The
ethnomethodological alternative would suggest that a potential place suggested by “here” or the membership category suggested by “us” should by studied as something uniquely accomplished each and every time. While Schegloff stressed in an earlier dispute about the developments of Membership Categorization Analysis the merits of sequential analysis in his ‘Tutorial’ (2007a), Carlin (2010) rightfully noted that the Sacks once proclaimed that:
‘‘What I want to be able to say is, that there can be ways of invoking the fact of a setting, and a bunch of its features, whatever the features are of settings; without having to do a formulation of a setting, and specifically without using an omni-relevant formulation of the setting’’ (Sacks 1976: G4 as per Carlin 2010: 259)
However, aside from a formal description of the order of the ‘there and then’ as sequential environment achieved through interaction, the research on “institutional talk” noted in their studies of sequential interaction in news interviews (e.g. Clayman & Whalen 1988), the court room (e.g. Atkinson & Drew 1979), police telephone recordings (e.g. Zimmerman 1984) and medical settings (e.g. Atkinson & Heath 1981) that there were enduring local specificities in the talk-in-these-contexts to be found that made them differ from mundane conversations.
Whereas for Garfinkel the social identity would be a local phenomenon of order*, the burgeoning institutional talk agenda presented the relationship the other way around. As Heritage writes that talk in institutions is not only oriented to the goals of the institutions but that identities are seen as mediating factors as the goals are “tied to their institution-relevant identities” (2005: 106). These identities are differentiated from the more classical
interactional identities and roles as “story teller, news deliverer, sympathizer” (Heritage & Clayman 2010: 43) by the more specific, and enduring, institutional character and the
obligations they come with. As such Heritage presents the latter “identities” not as one of the possible orientations, but as the one mediating between institutional context and talk-in-interaction. Examples he provides are paired identities of actors as “teacher and student” and “doctors and patient”, researched with reference to a larger set of “professionals” and “lay-people” (cf. Heritage 2005: 106-107). Two categories of actors, or discourse identities, often discussed in terms of foundational asymmetrical relationships in the applied conversation analytical literature (cf. Pilnick & Dingwall 2011). While such a persisting feature of
inequality in talk should be conceived of as produced through situated interaction, but seems to form a constitutive part of the research on institutional talk (cf. Ten Have 1991).
While this research of institutional talk has been called a “program” by Heritage, he and the authors of the Rebuttal special issue insist that his epistemic research does not constitute such a program that breaks from the “turn-taking machinery” found in Sacks et al. (1974) as the critics imply. However, with the introduction of terms as “status” and “stance” the asymmetrical relationships found between the conceptual renderings of interacting people or
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actors, pivots crucially on asymmetry in the dimensions of knowledge. About this contestable knowledge
“we might conclude that, since the languages of the world uniformly make grammatical distinctions between interrogative and declarative utterances and deploy them with enormous frequency, the entire human race is inclined to take an interest in who has knowledge of what and when and to treat it with care” (Heritage 2018: 17).
As Heritage notes the specific tasks and obligations that make up the asymmetrical
relationships between speakers are not, as the critics claimed, “hidden” but are commonly or constantly oriented to through interactions as it is an inclination of our race to be interested herein. While these relationships echo Sacks’ (1972) early membership categorization analysis in terms of “standardized relational pairs” such as husband-wife, doctor-patient, student-teacher with typical or predicated rights and obligations between them. And, as for example Hester & Francis (2004: 40) note, invoking one part of the pair implies the other. Albeit this allows for clustered relationships on different scales, such as a parents and child pair encapsulated by an medical professional and lay person pairing, further potential
differentiations, between for example doctors, nurses and interns, obliges that both the parties and the analyst to show how the relationships are made relevant as pairs. Albeit reducing the analytical scope to the dimension of epistemics makes this possible by positioning people as either more or less knowledgeable relative to another, there are also statements found in Heritage that seems to suggest a move in the other direction and an import of the macro to the micro. For example when he writes about societal positions in the “West” (2012c: 77). Before turning towards an attempt to save the research on epistemics from this position of relying on understandings based on extra-interactional abstraction, a classical methodological resource will be discussed, followed by an account of the innovations presented by Heritage. This will allows for a discussion of the data in the context of a medical constellation oriented to by the parties engaged in talk-in-interaction that affects their status as actors and enables an
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Next turn proof procedure
Founded on the sequential understanding of interaction that emerged in these
ethnomethodological and conversation analytic circles, is the “next-turn proof procedure”. This procedure is presented in the turn-tacking paper as “a central methodological resource” (Sacks et al. 1974: 728-729). A resource that is a fundamental characteristic of the
organization of conversation, wherein “a turn's talk will display its speaker's understanding of a prior turn's talk, and whatever other talk it marks itself as directed to”. It functions as such as the gateway to an analytical interpretation of a turn through the interpretations found in the next turn.
The status of this “proof procedure” found an early critic in Coulter (1983) who noted that there is little reason to prioritize the understanding found in the subsequent turn over the understanding that might have been meant in the production of the turn (1983: 370-71). Furthermore, he is averse of the connotation of the term “proof”, as it suggests that this interpretation through next-turns should be considered definite. A criticism also found in the epistemics of Epistemics special issue where Macbeth & Wong note that it is not “really about proving” but should be considered the usage of “vernacular reckonings to discipline our professional reckonings, by consulting how the parties discipline their own” (2016: 586). This is congruent with Schegloff’s insistence on presenting the procedure as one of the defining features of conversation analysis in his Primer (2007) and tireless efforts to stress that it functions as a restraint on possible interpretations (e.g. 1996: 172).
While Heritage (2012d: 387) cites Levinson’s “for every motivation (or context) in the hand, there are five in the bush” favorably to indicate the necessity of working with a methodological principle that limits possible interpretations, his critics state that coinciding with the emergence of epistemics he and Levinson also started to steer away from what the latter described as the “soft underbelly” of Conversation Analysis that “is one of the reasons that other disciplines sometimes think of CA as a branch of the occult” (Levinson 2013:105; cf. Macbeth & Wong 2016: 586; Macbeth 2016: 14f.).xv Something Heritage also seems favorable towards when he notes with some regret that “action was examined through the lens of reaction, and the consideration of sequential positioning took precedence over examination of the composition of the turns themselves” (2012a:2) and that epistemic orientations in interaction are underlying the organization of sequences and adjacency pairs on which the next turn proof procedure is founded (cf. 2012b).
While Heritage mentions that he did “have plenty of use” for the next turn proof procedure (2018: 28), his project is in large parts a development of the resources for interpreting turns through their deployment, which is also mentioned as a central analytical resource discussed in recent textbook accounts of the methodology of conversation analysis (cf. Clayman & Gill 2004; 2012). However, in contrast to earlier research on preference structures as a product of turn design are Heritage’s analytical resources presented as a departure from “the relatively highly defined domain of adjacency pairs” (Heritage 2012b: 48). The resources that he offers to make an analysis per turn possible are morphosyntax, intonation and, most importantly, orientations to the epistemic domain (cf. Heritage 2012a: 4). This domain, understood as prior to the organization of sequences and actions, fits other
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recent suggestions of “second-order” organizations that were recently developed in the circles of conversation analysists currently working at the UCLA (e.g. Stivers & Robinson 2006).
Although these “second-order” proposals, to lent the terms of Heritage’s student Stivers (co-authored with Robinson 2006), still imply that the organization found in the simplest systematics is the principle one, the “pressures” or “drives” emerging in these new orders affect the organization of sequences and are as such at least positioned as equally fundamental. While such proposals about extra-sequential pressures or interpretative schemes for action formation were thought of as leading “inevitably [to] ‘wrestling with Manny’” (Levinson 2013: 129), it are now not only conversation analysts but also ethnomethodologists who raise an account of Schegloff’s work against the new resources for understanding talk-in-interaction. The concurrent presentation of Heritage’s epistemic research in this thesis will follow a tripartite structure consisting of hydraulics, spatial metaphors and a deontic and discursive addition to the interface that, taken together, form alongside the data the basis for the description of conversation analytical work that both interprets turns of talk through single turns as through subsequent understandings.
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Accounting for the epistemic order
While the transmission of knowledge in interaction was an older theme in Conversation Analytical literature already present in Sack’s lectures (1992) and epistemology, as a term for working with knowledge in conversation, was sporadically researched (e.g. Goodwin 1979; Koshik 2003), it was with a pair of papers on epistemic authority as socially established in assessment sequences, co-authored with Geoffrey Raymond (2005, 2006), that Heritage introduced epistemics as a research theme that has been adopted in a wide variety of
contemporary research (cf. Drew 2018a; 2018b). While Heritage protests against proposing a research “program” (cf. 2018), the strain of research has at least been presented as “key topic” in contemporary conversation analysis (Heritage 2012d).
Furthermore, while the authors of the Rebuttal special issue dispute the usage of ‘radical’ by the Epistemic of epistemics authors in their self-identification as ‘radical
ethnomethodology’ (cf. Drew 2018b; Cliff & Maynard 2018), it was a supportive Drew who heralded these proposals of Heritage as “quite radical” and representing a “novel departure and direction” in conversation analysis (2012: 63). Albeit Drew followed this assessment with expressing his struggles with conceptualizing succinctly what these radical and profound understanding entailed, the following pages provide an attempt to cover the wide ranging conceptual innovations found in the work of epistemics by Heritage. These encompass not only metaphors as engines, contested territories and a ticker, but also analytical terms as authority, status, stance and codes as “K+” and “K-”. This will result in an interface of epistemic interaction helpful in the understanding of the interactions presented in the chapter thereafter.
The persistent orientation to an enacted order of epistemics was developed in research wherein Heritage asked how people distinguish between utterances as statements or questions (2012a). In line with the pragmatist arguments raised in earlier Conversation Analysis,
Heritage found that orientations to the epistemic domain trump morphosyntax and intonation in determining, or recognizing, actions. This orientation is not only important in determining of a statement is a request or delivery of information, but Heritage writes confidentially that “it may nonetheless play a fundamental role in the determination of higher-order actions such as requests, offers, proposals, suggestions, compliments, and complaints, to name but a few” (Heritage 2012a: 25-26). One of the ‘higher-order actions’ that is, in the light of Heritage’s earlier work (Heritage & Sefi 1992; Heritage & Lindström 2012), curiously absent is the practice of “advice” giving. An action not only introduced to the conversation analytical research agenda by Heritage, but also an action that is by definition understood as determined by interactionally established asymmetrical access to knowledge.
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The analytic “armamentarium” relevant to the epistemic research agendaxvi
While Heritage’s proposals are themselves presented as novel in the tradition of conversation analysis by supporters, those more critical have made much of the repertoire from which he draws to support his breaks, or shift, from the established principles and procedures in his research on epistemics. The epistemics of Epistemics authors suggest that his work is founded on “the three Gs” of Garfinkel, Goffman and Grice (Lynch & Wong: 543), while the latter two are explicitly named as not being conversation analysis and critiqued from this stance by Schegloff (1988; 2001)
xviii
xvii
, they note a strong resemblance between the title of his central concept and a paper of cognitivist philosophers and psychologists Churchland & Churchland (1983) , and a general tendency to look for connection with linguistics and a social science programme geared to quantifications.
On the other hand, Heritage was a student of Schegloff, was among the earliest Britons to write a paper in conversation analysis (Heritage 2018: 23), and has written an authoritative account of Ethnomethodology (1984b). Furthermore, there are references abound in his epistemic papers to those with a far less questionable status in the canon, because alongside Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff feature Pomerantz (1980), Goodwin (1979), Terasaki (2004) and more recent scholars in the conversation analytical tradition as Kamio (1997). The result is a diverse theoretical array of notions to understand communicative interaction that could be presented as envisioning the workings of the “interaction order”, to lend a term from
Goffman (per Heritage 2009), based on hydraulic and spatial metaphors or concepts. The armamentarium that could be constructed from these texts is visually represented in figure 3, consisting of at least two speakers represented by K+ and K- by virtue of their access to epistemic domains. Something interactionally established akin to hydraulics and vigilantly followed by a ticker indexed by numerous devices ranging from “oh” to rhetorical questions.
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Hydraulics
As Harvey Sacks, according to Coulter (1976: 509), and Gail Jefferson (1972: 294) styled themselves as a technicians, it might come to no surprise that the discourse in the published lectures is rife with terms as “gadgets”, “devices” and “machinery” to describe the workings of actions in talk (1992 passim). While scholars recently started to dismiss these terms as reifying notions of times past (e.g. Watson 2015), Heritage’s research on epistemics is once more steeped in metaphors evoking the natural sciences. While the comparison of a turn of talk with a “complex organic molecule such as a protein” seems mostly used an evocative metaphor to illustrate the multi-faceted nature of talk (cf. Heritage 2012a: 25), there is a second set of more recurring mechanical metaphors, consisting of hydraulics, engines and tickers, that seem constitutive to the novel understanding of talk-in-interaction found throughout the literature on epistemics.xix
The domain of epistemics, considered as ethnomethodological “background
knowledge” (Heritage 2012a: 25), is described as an engine that drives sequences through its tendency to “level off” imbalances in information that are constantly produced throughout interaction (Drew 2012). According to the critics, information in interaction is hereby envisioned as a “flow of a fluid that seeks equilibrium” (Lynch 2016: 533). This flow motivates speakers to request and convey relevant information to resolve imbalances that occur throughout interaction. Within this epistemic framework these imbalances are an asymmetrical dimension persisting through all forms of interaction, something considered an inherent quality of “speech act agency” by proponents of this new turn in conversation analysis (cf. Enfield 2011: 301-302; 303f.).
Whereas the field of hydraulics describes the mechanical movement of increasing and decreasing pressures for resolving the imbalances in liquids, the asymmetry in the realm of epistemics is attached to epistemic statuses that find their moment-through-moment
expression in epistemic stances (cf. Heritage 2012a). Information is conceived of as flowing between speakers with a high information status, denoted with a K+, to speakers with a low status, denoted as K-. These statuses are produced through interaction and positioned relative to each other, introducing a normative component in the movement of information between speakers. This because the local orientations to knowledge asymmetries also implies that speakers “orient to the normatively organized social distributions of authoritative access to bodies or types of knowledge” (Drew 1991: 45).
These positions of more or less authoritative access, codified by the “K+” and “K-” pair, are not only linked to these bodies of knowledges as absolute statuses wherein someone knows more in general than the other, but could also be used to indicate that one knows relatively more than someone else (Enfield 2011: 301-302). However, Heritage proposes to reserve the codes for the relative expressions of knowledge and use the terms ‘ knowing ’ and ‘unknowing’ to refer to claims absolute epistemic advantage (2012d: 377). With these codes the movement of information in interaction could be described as flowing between two or more speakers located on a gradient position between the ideal typical asymmetrical pairings of “K+” and “K-” and “K-” and “K+” (Heritage 2012a; cf. Enfield 2011: 301-302). While both the K+ and K- expression through their respective stances could be sequence initiating
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or result in the expansion of a sequence (Heritage 2012d: 388), but the more knowing stances tend to invite sequence closure while the less knowing stance tends to invite sequence
expansion (cf. Heritage 2012d: 378).
Ticker and orientations
The movement of this fluid like information is thus pressured towards resolving imbalances in a motion that has been has been described akin to a “seesaw” that drives sequences forward until the asymmetry between the K+ and K- position is, at least “for all practical purposes”, equalized (cf. Heritage 2012b). In the enactment of superior an inferior knowledge positions through epistemic stances, the informational imbalances are thus on a turn by turn basis managed and resolved in a way that could be codified as an alteration between K+ and K-.
This requires of members engaged in talk-in-interaction that they vigilantly monitor the relative knowledge position of others by means of what has been described as a
“continually updated epistemic ‘ticker’” (Heritage, 2012a: 25). This ticker, also referred to as “fast and frugal” heuristics (Heritage 2012c: 76-77), could be envisioned as part of
someone’s constant epistemic vigilance that tracks the relative epistemic positions expressed in utterances. A vigilance that is presented as not cognitivist, since one of the features of the indexicality of talk-in-interaction is that it provides speakers with short cuts to assess the epistemic state through interactional means (cf. Heritage 2012a: 25; Heritage 2018).
The ticker is thereby thus elevated to the status of a fundamental heuristic that is not switched on or off, but is considered an omnipresent orientation guided by syntax and the combination of “psychological verbs” combined with pronouns (cf. Heritage 2012c: 76-77; Heritage 2021a: 25). This phenomenon of a constant orientation to relative knowledge situations should not be understood, as some critics implied (Lynch & Wong 2016; Lymer et al. 2016), as something that happens in a hidden “order” but is part of the “background knowledge” oriented to by participants of talk-in-interaction (Heritage 2018: 36). As people are supposed to track the emerging epistemic relations constantly and vigilantly a fair
question would be how this becomes evidentially displayed for the study of talk-in-interaction.
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Oh and other potential indexes for assessing knowledge status
One paradigmatic way in which the movement captured by the notion of hydraulics is indexed is by what Heritage named a “change of state token” that is transcribed as “oh” (Heritage 1984a). Originally conceived as an indication of acknowledging new information or knowledge, the token was in his epistemic writings retroactively interpreted as an index of shifting epistemic changes of state (e.g. Heritage 2012a). While a “change of state” token might be read as implying a shift between one K stance to another K, the empirical examples discussed by Heritage are concerned with a change from a less informed (K-) to an informed state (K+) or put in more interactional terms as index of the “transmission from information from an informed to an uninformed party” (Heritage 1984a: 304).
Earlier ethnomethodological conversation analysis understood indexical expressions as locally ordered properties and took to the task of describing their function (Sacks & Garfinkel 1970: 159), but here the token “oh” functions also as index of substantive movements in the second fundamental order described by Heritage. The descriptions of transitions between “K-” and “K+” is underpinned by a theoretical understanding of interaction based on hydraulics and could be read as being part of a longer movement towards what was once deemed part of the “formal analysis” found in social sciences (e.g. Garfinkel 2002; cf. Macbeth et al. 2016; Macbeth & Wong 2016) or what recently has been considered the “heretical approach” of coding in conversation analysis (Stivers 2015). While “oh” is presented clearly as “indexical expression” in the sense that the meaning of the token is dependent on its sequential context (cf. Heritage 2018), other resources to interpret turns as belonging to K+ or K- are presented in the form of tabulations throughout the writings on epistemics. Furthermore, Heritage clearly indicates that “notwithstanding the vagaries of its condition as a social construction” determining the relative K+ and K- position is at least for the participants in the conversations a straightforward “presupposed” and “agreed upon” affair (2012a: 6). Together with his suggestion that “West” (2012c: 77), there seems a reading possible where the common experience and language use is imported to understand
interaction.
However, Heritage (2012c) also indicates that these positions and their moment to moment expression in talk-in-interaction are linked to an epistemic realm sometimes
described as a “multidimensional beast” or, explicitly in the Schützian terms he adapted from Sidnell (2012), as a “topographical map” understood as rights of access to different epistemic territories. Trotting these lands of knowledge moves away from the rigid machineries thus far used to describe the understanding of interaction. Furthermore, it opens up spaces of
possibilities wherein certain forms of information are made relevant in the action of advice giving and redraws the boundaries the authorities and identities expressed by “K+’ and “K-” through discongruenties between status and stance (cf. Heritage 2013a: 573).
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Spatial metaphors: creeks in status and open realms
The second set of metaphors involved in describing the relevance of epistemic positioning in conversation could be qualified as spatial metaphors and involve the theoretical envisioning of different types of access to knowledge of the participants engaged in talk-in-interaction. These forms of access, and the rights and responsibilities they entail, are considered to be defining the epistemic status relationships in conversation. Heritage’s work is in this regard an explicit development of Kamio’s (1997) Territories of information. These territories, sometimes called “epistemic domains” (e.g. Heritage 2012a), are understood as generic spatial short hands to express a speaker’s relation to the information oriented to (Heritage 2012d; cf. Hayano 2011). These relations could subsequently be mapped by the relative position the speaker on a continuum from “0”, for highly distant, to “1” for extremely close and possessed by the speaker (see figure 4 for a representation). This simple schematic represents the relative “information situation” of each speaker (Heritage 2012d: 375). Speakers are thus not only in a more or less knowing position relative to each other, but this relative position is defined by their supposed access to the relevant information domains.
Already present in the work of Kamio is the notion that this information situation does not only express who “knows what in what way”, but also “the rights to know and express it” (Heritage 2012d: 375f). While these differences between (not) knowing and being supposed to (not) know are dynamic and relative, they also seem flattened by a numerical
representation that, albeit allowing for an infinite number of possible positions between “0” and “1”, reduces the information position to one scale for every, theoretically individualized, actor to information that defines the interactional situation. One such possible information situation is visualized in figure one.
Figure 4. A representation of the stratified information situation
However, these differences on a quantitative dimension conceal their expression in
qualitative material wherein the studied-as-stratified access to information comes to the fore. Heritage combines these representations with more classical work on knowledge in
conversation analysis, namely Pomerantz (1980) conception of Type 1 knowables and Type 2 knowables. Type 1 knowables are those to which one has direct access and Type 2 are those
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which are known indirectly by “report, hearsay, inference, etc.” (cf. Heritage 2012d: 398). Pomerantz found that if a person presents knowledge from type 2 in a conversation to someone with type 1, his utterance will be treated as a request for information, which
Heritage presents as a further indication that his proposal are in line with earlier Conversation Analytical work. The sort of access to “1” stratifying the interactants is thus largely
dependent on the form of the “knowable” and the actors supposed relationship to it in terms of rights and obligations.
As such this realm opens up new possibilities to extend the understanding of possible orientations of participants to different relevant knowledge domains or “knowables”. Besides reconsidering older concepts to envision to social enactment of knowledge, newer concepts could be adapted to furtherly envision how people enact their relative access to knowledge. Scholars working in the neighboring discipline of discursive psychology, in its own way critical of cognitivism in social sciences (cf. Potter 2006), proposed recently to investigate the workings of what they called “O” and “S” side assessments (Edwards & Potter 2017). This to distinguish between statements as predicated on an object [O] or as displaying the subjective disposition of the speaker towards an object [S]. As this analytical distinction is according to the authors not one on one transposable to expressing a more or less knowledgeable position, the s-sided is at most a more personalized or marked assessment than the o-sided one, it might function precisely to understand the what’s more expressed through epistemic stances that is potentially reduced by working with an undifferentiated, all-encompassing metaphor of information or what the critics called the “informationism” latent in epistemic research (cf. Lynch & Wong 2016).
With the combined resources of “Oh” and other indexes, as o- and s-sided
assessments, to map the stratified access to knowledge understood as type 1 and 2 knowables an allusion could be made to the mechanisms through which orientations to knowledge are made relevant and emerge in the study of talk-in-interaction. Before utilizing this
armamentarium a last addition will be made that mirrors the earlier described conceptual apparatus but focuses on the right to decide what ought to be, or the normative dimension of conduct instead of knowledge.
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Deontic authority
Before turning to the application of this relatively hefty conceptual apparatus for the analysis of recordings of talk-in-interaction, one last element of the emerging epistemic research could be beneficially discussed. Since epistemics became a “key topic” in the literature of
conversation analysis others began to consider their research as complementary to these developments and proposed a different set of orientations that is, according to the proposers, as present in interaction as epistemics under the heading of “deontic authority” (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012; Stevanovic 2013; Zinken and Ogiermann 2011). Sprung from the fruit of research on deciding joint actions, it makes the normative dimension inherently at stake in asymmetrical epistemic relations analyzable.
Inspired by the field of philosophy, wherein epistemic authority was described as having a “sibling” in “deontic authority” (Stevanovic 2013: 18; cf. Bochenskí 1965), these authors argue that people are not only actively oriented throughout conversations to what is true, but also to what ought to be. More specifically what ought to be is enacted by one of the members of the conversation and as such treated as the product of interaction. As knowledge is treated as fundamental in determining what to do, the two dimensions are considered separate but interrelated (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012; Heritage 2013a: 569f.). While Sacks used to quip that that “members can't do pure formulating'' (1992: 521), these authors argue that the relationships do not only appear in mixtures of statements, but that there is also an enduring interface between the two notions of authority. While Stevanovic and Peräkylä claim that more research is needed to assess this interface, they also suggest that
“participants”, such as medical professionals, utilize their rights of access to expert knowledge as a basis for establishing deontic authority (2012: 317).
Explicitly mirroring the claims of the “epistemic talk agenda”, these scholars propose that just as there is a constant orientation towards differences in knowledge between
participants of talk-in-interaction there is also a consistent alertness to each other’s capacities to shape the course of future action. This alertness is guided by a “deontic ticker” oriented to the right to determine a future course of action is called the “deontic status” that finds
moment to moment expression in “deontic stances” (Stevanovic 2013). Just as the superior knowledge authority is encoded by K+, one could code the superior deontic position as D+ (viz. Heritage 2013a: 570)xx. A position that is by definition asymmetrically related to the D- position. While this asymmetry is theorized as present, possibly in a more restricted set of circumstances than epistemic orientations (cf. Heritage 2013a: 573), the ways in which it affects action- and sequence formation remain underdeveloped. As there is no notion as “hydraulics” to be found in this literature, one has to make do with assuming that there is a fundamental ongoing orientation towards cooperation in human action (Stevanovic 2013: 21f). More specified to real interactional encounters when Enfield notes that “in the kinds of interactional contexts in which interlocutors strive to build affiliation through the overt expression of agreement, the goal is symmetry of commitment” (Enfield 2011: 306; Enfield 2013: 125).
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Ethics, corpus and transcriptions
A researcher confronted with a corpus of naturally occurring data in the form of recordings in the current time period allows for disavowing Sacks’ description of analysis as to “sit down with a piece of data, make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go” (1984: 27). As much work have been done after his death was an attempt to establish conversation analysis as a discipline and the contributors to the Rebuttal special issue are insistent that epistemics as a part of the technical armamentarium provide resources to analyze relatively complex activities through the orientations of members, it seems only fitting to trade the stance of ‘unmotivated’ observation for one motivated by these recent conceptual developments.
While one of the benefits of working with recordings was that they could be “studied extendedly”, a further benefit is that they could be “somewhat” transcribed making it possible for others to agree or disagree (Sacks 1984: 26). Although these recordings were considered “good enough” starting point for analysis because “other things, to be sure, happened, but at least what was on the tape had happened” (Ibid.), the fine grained
transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson was precisely meant to retain as much of the interactional detail as possible to enrich the potential for possible understandings (e.g.
Jefferson 1985). Variations of this system now stand at the basis of countless pragmatic studies of language and are one of its most eye catching features of literature in conversation analysis and related field and will thus be adopted in the present study. As the complexities of the transcription systems led to a proliferation of difference even within approaches that adopt a “Jeffersonian” starting point (O’Connell & Kowal 1994) and “Jeffersonian” transcriptions are more time consuming than simple transcriptions, the suggestion of a conventional “reasonable economy” has been followed wherein the detail of the transcription is positively related to the amount of analytical attention that is spend on the fragment (cf. Clayman & Gill: 594). While transcriptions remain “virtually endlessly revisable” (Schegloff 1988: 238), they are hopefully considered reliable enough to understand the emerging
knowledge relationships in the renderings of conduct.
The corpus of recordings under discussion in this study was made in the context of a larger research project to evaluate the validity of a large scale longitudinal study in preventive health care services for children between ages 0-4 in a large municipality in the Netherlands.1 The parent(s) accompanying the visiting child were informed of this study in advance by letter and affirmed their consent before the recording of the meetings started. This resulted in a total of 42 video recorded meetings made between September 2016 and March 2017. After an initial research phase these have been narrowed down to 37 recordings of which the audio was studied repeatedly. These recordings were stored on encrypted drives and the video material was only made accessible on a computer without internet connection to protect confidentiality. An anonymization key based on Heritage’s (2014) practical advice for transcriptions in Word was followed, whereby three letter codes are used to differentiate
