How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology and subsequent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I argue that a point of continuity in ethnomethodology and CA, which marks both as radically different from long-standing traditions in Western philosophy and social science, is the claim that social order is evidently produced in ongoing activities, and that no specialized theory or methodology is necessary for making such order observable and accountable. In the half-century following the publication of (...) Studies, Garfinkel explicitly aimed to radicalize ethnomethodology’s stance toward what he called “formal” or “classical” treatments of social order, while much of CA pursued the path of an empirical social science that became increasingly integrated with other branches of social science. Nevertheless, I argue, Garfinkel’s radical initiatives are not completely out of play in ethnomethodological conversational analysis, and the potential remains for further elucidating, exemplifying, and developing them. (shrink)

Over the lifetime of Conversation Analysis (CA), scholars have discovered many systems of action organisation (machineries) describing how conversational turns occur, what actions are expected, and how intersubjectivity in conversation is maintained. However, when John Heritage proposed a new machinery that examines the knowledge orientation of participants in interactions, a debate broke out between conversation analysts in which Michael Lynch and his colleagues in radical ethnomethodology descend upon on epistemics. The controversy begins with Lynch accusing Heritage of cognitivism and the (...) extra-situational nature of epistemics, while research on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis has traditionally focused on situated action. The discussion of epistemics points to an internal tension in CA as to where the boundaries of situations lie and what, therefore, can be the focus of CA. This article reactualises the problem of situationality in CA by analysing the arguments in the debate on epistemics. The authors show that epistemics and the debates surrounding it constitute a serious test for CA, revealing a conceptual problem that has hitherto been obscured - the relation and potential hierarchy of different machineries. Turning to the origins of the concept of situationality in the writings of Goffman and Sacks, the authors demonstrate that for opposing sides, the localisation of phenomena within situations is an analytical decision about what can be seen in empirical data. In contrast, distinguishing between the position of the analyst and the participant in the interaction shifts the analyst's attention to how the machineries become relevant to the interactants, that is, how their omnirelevance is realised. The authors argue that this is a more productive formulation of the question than that of the boundaries of the situation. (shrink)