Mighty Digests # 4: EDWARDS, Discourse, Cognition and Social Practices...

Article: Edwards, D. (2006). Discourse, cognition and social practices: the rich surface of language and social interaction. Discourse Studies 8 (1), 41-49.

The article is an apologetic description of Discursive Psychology (DP).

Discursive psychology (DP)

“Discursive psychology (DP) approaches discourse not as the product or expression of thoughts or mental states lying behind or beneath it, but as a domain of public accountability in which psychological states are made relevant. […] Discursive psychology (DP) approaches the topics of cognition, mental states and psychological characteristics as matters under active management in talk and text. […] DP rejects the assumption that discourse is the product or expressionof thoughts or intentional states lying behind or beneath it. Instead, mental states, knowledge, thoughts, feelings, and the nature of the external world, figure as talk’s topics, assumptions and concerns.” (p. 41)

“DP has focused on examining in close empirical detail how common sense topics such as what people think, intend, feel or want, are handled and managed in everyday talk as part of everyday interactional business.” (p. 42)

The author stresses the importance of the practical, categorial and indexical nature of language (p. 42), but it is not clear to me what the author intends with “indexicality” and “categoriality” (p. 42)

I am not sure if I can agree, at this point, with the statement that:

“There is no realm of subjectivity, unconscious feelings, or objective reality, that language does not reach – indeed, the writings of those who are primarily concerned with such ostensibly language-independent and almost ineffable matters, is reflexive testimony to the adequacy of language for dealing with them.” (p. 42)

Reading this article, I am starting to think about CA, DP and ethnomethodology as the Gestalt of language in social context...

“Whatever people say is always action-oriented, specific to its occasion, performative on and for its occasion, selected from a indefinite range of options. […] There is therefore no point, for example, in picking quotations out of context and presenting them as what somebody thinks.” (p. 46)

Guess what? I just did it, and it sounds completely fine to me!

I don’t know, sometimes it looks like in these articles authors are trying to defend the undefendable, challenging common sense and use of language, and at the same time invoking it as evidence of their statements. I can see the value of DP defining discourse as “performative social action”, which underlines its pragmatic and social dimension, but I don’t agree the overall rejection of what lies “beneath and beyond”.

Further reading is required...