20011238

Discourse and Mind
Author(s): Jeff Coulter

Source: Human Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2/4, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: East
and West (Oct., 1999), pp. 163-181
Published by: Springer
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U Human Studies 22:
163-181,
1999.
jg3
P*
? 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Discourse and Mind
JEFF COULTER
Department of Sociology,
Boston
University,
Boston,
MA
02215,
U.S.A.
Abstract. In recent
years,
various
attempts
have been made to advance a
project
sometimes
characterized as "discursive
psychology".
Grounded in what its
proponents
term "social
constructionism",
the discursive
approach
to the elucidation of 'mental'
phenomena
is here
contrasted to an
ethnomethodological position
informed
by
the later work of
Wittgenstein.
In
particular,
it is
argued
that discursive
psychology
still contains Cartesian
residua,
notwithstanding
its
professed objective
of
expurgating
Cartesian
thought
from the behavioral
sciences. One
principal
issue has been the confusion of
"conceptual analysis"
with the
empirical study
of
speech practices.
If these distinct
enterprises
are
conflated,
the critical
achievements of
conceptual analysis
are obscured or even misconstrued. A different
picture
of how best to
analyze
human conduct and
mentality emerges
if the lessons of
Wittgensteinian
grammatical analysis
are
preserved
and
extended,
one more
compatible
with several themes
in
ethnomethodology.
"The
theorizing
mind tends
always
to the
over-simplification
of its materials".
William James.
In recent
years,
a
theoretical characterization of human
mentality
as in some
sense a "discursive construction" has been advanced. The social construction
(or: constitution)
of the mental has been construed as a thesis which
proposes
that the human mind and its various
properties
are
generated
in and
through
discourse: in
essence,
the 'mind' is revealed in and
through analyseable
features
of the
things
that
people say
and do
through
their
talk,
especially through
their
talk about the mental. I believe that this focus
upon
"discursivity"
is both
restrictive and
misleading,
and in what follows I shall contrast it to what I
prefer
to characterise as a
"praxiological" approach. Indeed,
some
proponents
of the
discursive-construction thesis have identified some of
my
work as
advancing
a
similar
position
to their own. I
beg
to differ. Grammatical
investigations
are not
variants of discourse or conversation
analysis,
even
though
some of the
concepts
and methods of the latter can be
employed
to
deepen
and broaden the
scope
of
grammatical inquiry.
I shall discuss the nature of
"grammatical inquiry"
a little
further on. In some
respects,
this
paper
is an
instance
of,
let us
say,
biting
the
hands that read
you. However,
to
quote J.L.Austin,
importance
is not
important:
the truth of the matter is.
First,
I shall outline the
principal
claims and
arguments
of the "discursive construction" theorists.
164 JEFF COULTER
The Mind as 'Discursive' Construction
The intellectual
dispute,
as I see
it,
is between those who call themselves "social
constructionists" and the
ethnomethodologists
of a
Wittgensteinian persuasion.
Let me elaborate on this. Edwards and Potter
( 1992:18)
wrote a book entitled:
Discursive
Psychology.
In this
work,
they
seem to me to have embarked
upon
a
process
of theoretical
dilution,
if I
may put
it this
way. They
write:
Cognitive processes [sic],
on this
[social-constructionist-JC] view,
are not
the
springs
of human sense and
action,
however much our
everyday
concepts
of mind
may get
to be refined
[sic] by experimental psychology
and
cognitive
science.
Rather, they
are ideas
generated
within
cultures,
conceptions
of
sense,
action and motive
[sic]
that
people
invent to mediate
their
dealings
with each
other,
to
engage
in social forms of life. This line
of
argument
is
familiar,
in one form or
another,
in the work of social
constructionist writers such as
Gergen (1982),
Harre
(1979, 1983),
Moscovici
(1984), Sampson (1988)
and Shorter
(1984). ([Sic]'s
are
by
the
author, J.C.).
This
passage already
concedes far too much: it concedes the existence of
putative "cognitive processes" (whose
nature is left
unspecified),
as well as
the contentious notion that theoretical
psychologists
can "refine" our
"everyday concepts
of the mental.
Exactly
how this
procedure might
work
is also neither
specified
nor defended.
Indeed,
subsequently,
our authors note
that in so
establishing
the framework for
thinking
of the mental in socio
cultural
terms,
they
leave the door wide
open
for the
counter-argument
that:
. . .
not
only
do individuals
perceive,
reason and make sense of the world
without
having
to talk to
anybody
else about
it,
but also that none of those
social,
communicative kinds of
representation
are
possible
without the
presumption
of individual minds
designed
to
grasp, analyse
and take
part
in such
practices.
Whatever can be done
socially
needs a set of individuals
with the
cognitive machinery [sic]
and
competence
to take
part...
So no
amount of demonstration of the cultural basis of human
thought
and action
need make the
slightest
difference to a
cognitivist position. (Edwards
and
Potter, 1992).
Having
thus so
peremptorily
sold out the anti-Cartesian and
anticognitivist
position,
Edwards and Potter
proceed
to embrace what can
only
be termed a
"theoretical
pragmatism"
In this domain of
inquiry (a
version of which had
earlier been
championed by
Jack Bilmes
(1986)
in his
book,
Discourse and
Behavior,
and to which I
(Coulter, 1992) objected
in a
published exchange
with its author
(Bilmes, 1992)). They
construe the alternatives in the field to
consist in mere "rhetorical
strategies"
which
suggest themselves,
including
the eclectic
proposal
to divide the academic labor between the various
"perspectives"
on offer
(e.g., cognitivist,
social-constructionist, etc)
and the
DISCOURSE AND MIND 165
theoretically-driven
idea that some version or other of
Vygotsky
or
Piaget
might
license a form of
developmentalism according
to which "the
higher,
cultural forms of
cognition
are later
developments
that build
upon earlier,
more
primitive
individual ones".
They
confess to
having
made some ?f these
"moves" themselves
(Edwards
and
Potter,
1992:
19).
In these renditions of
the
issues,
it seems clear to me that these writers have not understood the
depth
of the
arguments against
all
forms
of
cognitivist reasoning,
nor
have
they
adequately appreciated
the
logical
alternatives for
inquiry
and
analysis
made
available in and
through
the
critique
of
cognitive
science undertaken
by
the
ethnomethodologists
and
neo-Wittgensteinians
whose work
they frequently
cite.
What,
for
example,
are these
"higher,
cultural forms of
cognition"
such
that we
might
construe them as "later
developments
that build
upon earlier,
more
primitive
individual ones"? No-one who takes
Wittgenstein's
later
logical
analyses seriously
has
argued
that
cognition
is
anything
other than
knowledge,1
and that individuals
clearly
are those who can
possess
it
(although
it is also
true to note that institutions can have
knowledge,
even
memory!). However,
the essential
point
is
being
missed in all of this:
namely,
that
'cognition'
is
intersubjectively
ascribable and
ratifiably
avowable. That is the
nub,
if
you
will,
of the 'social' take on
'cognition'.
In
Wittgenstein's (1969:
Sec
378)
own
terms:
"Knowledge
is in the end based on
acknowledgement".
To
give
one
more
example
from the work we are
discussing,
consider the
following:
Quite independently
of
questions
about the
reality
of
particular personality
theories and
types,
or mentalistic
[sic]
notions such as
motives,
we can
study
their use in discourse
(Coulter, 1989).
We can
explore
how
particular
constructions of self and others are used to stabilize and make factual
seeming [sic], particular
versions of events in the world which themselves
contribute to the
organization
of current activities.
This reminds me of Bilmes'
line,
which asserts that while there
very
well
may
be
interior,
'mental'
phenomena
named
by
mental
predicates
and
concepts,
the discourse
analyst
can
proceed
in
complete independence
of
adopting any
position
on the
'reality'
or
'unreality'
of such
putatively
interior
phenomena,
arguing
instead for an
analysis
of the
ways
in which such
predicates
are
ascribed in discourse.
Also,
note the concession to Cartesianism in the
qualification
of the
quotidian
word 'motive' as somehow or other a
'mentalistic' notion.
I believe that what I said in 1992 to Bilmes on this score holds
just
as
well
for Edwards and Potter: if
you
concede the
ontological
status attributed to the
'mental' and the
'cognitive' by your opponents
for one
moment, you
have
undercut the
requirement
that
your
own
alternative modes of
inquiry
be taken
at all
seriously.
For,
z/the
mental and the
cognitive (and
the
'personality'
and
the
'self)
are
indeed real entities in some
sense,
then the entire discursive
approach
is at best a side-show: the serious business at hand will remain the
166 JEFF COULTER
work of the
cognitive
sciences,
as
they define this, viz.,
to
depict
the
putative
'operations'
of the individual 'mind/brain' in
computational
or connectionist
terms. No
ground
has been
gained
at all.
Edwards
(1997) however, progressed
to a much richer treatment of the
issues,
and in his
major
work,
Discourse and
Cognition,
his
arguments
are
more
subtle,
although
still,
to
my mind,
far too
concessionary.
In this recent
version of discourse
analysis
and its
relationship
to the issues
pertaining
to
human
mentality,
Mind and
reality
are treated
analytically
as discourse's
topics
and
business,
the stuff the talk is
about,
and the
analytic
task is to examine how
participants
descriptively
construct them.
(Edwards,
1997:
48).
The
problem
with such a
formulation is that it restricts the
appeal
to
ordinary
language conceptualization
to that which is revealed
only
in a
fully topical
and
explicit
manner: the 'mental' is thus to be construed
solely
in terms of
what
people say
about it. This
naturally
leads to a conflation of members'
lay
substantive
(even psychologistic) theorising
discourse with their
deployment
of mental
predicates
in a host of
practical language-games.
We are thus
deprived
of a
major
resource for
criticising
members' own
appropriations
of
cognitivist
and mentalistic
theorising by
reference to the
logic
of the actual
avowal, ascription
and
presupposition
of the so-called 'mental'
concepts
in
language.
If someone were to
assert,
in
discourse,
that "I think in
my head",
Edwards would be
programmatically
bound to conclude that
"think",
for
(this
or
those)
members is used in a
Cartesian
manner,
and there's an end to it all.
However,
Wittgenstein's appeal
to the
logical grammar
of our
concepts
in
language-games
does not entail
any
sort of endorsement of
(nor neutrality
towards) lay persons'
theoretical
speculations,
any
more than it involves
acceding
to
professional
theorists' discourses. The
problem,
then,
concerns
the conflation of
"language-games"
with "domains of
discourse",
a conflation
that has
plagued
the
"appeal
to
ordinary
use" for decades.
They
are,
I
maintain,
utterly
distinctive matters.
"Language-games"
consist in activities within which the use of
language
is interwoven:
complaints, involving ascriptions
of'intention', accusations,
involving
attributions of
'motive', insults, involving
the
ascription
of
'per?
sonality' types, claims,
involving
the avowals
of'memory'
and
'perception',
and so forth.
Discourse, however,
while indeed it
obviously
involves the
deployment
of
concepts,
is more
generally
understood in these texts as "talk
about.
. .
X\
whetherXis
a mental or
any
other
'topic'.
Discourse
is,
within
linguistics,
a trans-sentential unit of the use of
language: although
I think that
even this
stipulative, theoretically-motivated
definition is restrictive
upon
what
actually
could count as a
discursive
move in a
language-game.
Nonetheless,
the issue for
us, however,
as
anti-Cartesians,
is not to furnish
a blanket endorsement to whatever members
may
choose to
say
about the
"mental"
(or
the
"discursive"):
rather,
it is to examine the rules of use of the
mental
predicates
in their
language,
as
rule-governed practices,
in order
precisely
to demonstrate that their
pre-theoretical
and
pre-reflective
ways
of
using
these words does not accord with
any form of
Cartesian
or
cognitivist
discourse about them.
Notwithstanding lay persons'
occasional interest in
lay
psychological theorising,
their
lay mental-predicate
attributions
comprise
another order of
phenomena entirely.
And the elucidation of the
logical
grammar
of such
predicates may
be
appealed
to in
correcting
and
con?
straining
"mentalistic discourse" of all
stripes, 'lay
or
professional'.
Grammar is normative: what
people may actually say is,
of
course, up
to
them. But what
they
then can mean
by
whatever
they say (if anything)
is
not
solely up
to them to
say.
Let us
briefly
return to our
example
of a bit of discourse which a member
might produce
if asked where he does his
thinking-he
answers: "I think in
my
head".
Now, functionally,
this locution can
operate
to
signify
the obvious
fact
that,
on
occasion,
a thinker's
thoughts
are not disclosed. But the
metaphysical
and Cartesian
interpretation
of such
a locution is a natural
temptation (especially
if we are to treat the "mental" as that which members
speak of
it
as). Nonetheless,
this
temptation
can be resisted: if "I" is
being
used to
designate
the
speaker qua person,
then it is
straightforward enough
to
note that he or she
as a
person
is not located in his or her own
head,
and thus
his
or her
thinking
is not done there but rather in
offices, apartments,
the
automobile,
the
street, etc.,
etc.
The 'mental'
predicates
and
concepts
are not to be understood in terms of
how
"participants descriptively
construct them"
{supra)
but, rather,
in terms
of how members
acquire
and use these
concepts according
to rules in the
myriad
of mundane activities in which
they engage.
Of
course,
many (but by
no means
all)
of these activities will be discursive insofar as
they
involve the
use of
language,
but
they
will not
relevantly
consist in
topical
treatments of
them as
objects
of
lay,
theoretical reflection.
Lay,
theoretical reflection is as
much
subject
to
critique
for its
conceptual
errors and solecisms as is
professional
theoretical reflection. The "discourse
analysts"
concerned with
the nature of the mental
consistently
miss this central
point, tending (perhaps
unwittingly) radically
to relativize
lay
discourse's truth values when it
comprises assertions, propositions,
claims,
and other truth-functional locutions
about the
mind,
the
mental,
or about
anything
else.
A
good example
of how the conflation of discourse with
conceptual analysis
can lead us
astray
is furnished
by
Edwards in his consideration of
'memory'
:
From a discursive
perspective,
relations between narrative and
memory
can be studied in two related
ways. First,
narrative accounts can be studied
as acts of
remembering,
as the discursive
equivalent
to what
people
do
in
memory experiments
when
they
recall events
.. .
Second,
we can
study
memory
as a
participants'
concern,
examining
the situated uses of words
168 JEFF COULTER
such as
'remember',
'forget',
and so on.
And
we can
study
how these two
things go together,
how
appeals
to notions such as
remembering
and
forgetting
feature in the
dynamics
of event
reporting,
and vice versa.
Relations between narrative accounts and references to
remembering
are
part
of how
ordinary
discourse deals with relations between mind and world:
in this
case,
with events in relation to
memory." (Edwards,
1997:
282).
The first
point
to note here is that Edwards confuses an act of
recounting
a
recollection with an "act of
remembering":
but there is no such
thing
as the
latter,
as
Ryle taught
us over 50
years ago.
Remembering
is not an
act-verb,
but akin to an
achievement-verb: to remember is to be correct about what
occurred,
and as
such is a
'success-verb',
akin to
'winning'
not to
'playing',
to
'arriving'
and not to
'travelling'.
This is revealed
by
a
conceptual analysis,
irrespective
of how various discourse
participants (which ones?) might
discuss the matter
(i.e., they might
misconstrue the
logic
of the verb
they
use
when
they engage
in
topical
discourse about
it).
The second
point
is to note
how Edwards leaves room for an interaction between "mind" on the one hand
and "world" on the
other,
a natural
piece
of
(neo-?)
Cartesianism if ever there
was one. If "mind" is not an
entity,
'it' cannot interact with
anything.
The eclectic tolerance for Cartesian residues inherent in the discourse
analysts'
treatments of the issue can
perhaps
best be seen in the
following (and
final) passage
from Edwards:
According
to
Wittgenstein,
words such as
'remember' and
'forget',
which
psychologists may
take to label
private
mental
processes,
are best
analysed
in terms of their
public
uses. This
focus
on
public
use is not a matter
of
denying
the existence
of
inner mental
processes. (Italics
mine
J.C.). Rather,
"what we
deny
is that the
picture
of the inner
process gives
us
the correct
idea of the use of the word 'to remember'
"
(Wittgenstein,
1958:
para 305.)
(Edwards, 1997:283).
It is
certainly
true that
Wittgenstein
did not
deny
thatsome
(mostly metaphorical)
talk of "mental
processes"
makes sense
(e.g., "calculating
in the head" or
"doing
mental arithmetic" would count as such a
usage),
but he
certainly
did
deny
that
"remembering" (and "forgetting")
were in
any
sense at all "mental"
(inner, private) processes.
The root
problem
with the "discourse
analysts'"
treatment of the
'mental',
as I see
it,
is this:
they
treat the 'mental'
predicates solely
as
"ways
of
talking",
as if
they
were
just 'fa?ons
de
parler",
and thence
they
court the
riposte:
so,
do
you deny
that
people actually think, remember, intend, believe,
etc.?
Are these
merely "ways
of
talking" among ourselves,
with no
greater
purchase upon
us than our
"ways
of
talking"
about
UFO's, gremlins,
phlogiston
or witches? The discourse
analysts
are
trapped
in a dilemma
which
they
themselves create
by misunderstanding
the
Wittgensteinian
arguments upon
which
they freely
trade: for
them,
'mental'
predicates
are
either names for
real,
interior entities
or
processes
or
they
are names
deployed
in discourse as
just "ways of talking"
about self and
other(s).2
The
notion that
they
are not names
of
phenomena
at
all,
and that their uses are
not restricted to
descriptive practices,
has not been
seriously registered by
our discourse
analysts
of the mental.
Edwards, elsewhere,
does
recognise
this
point,
but in his efforts to elide
conceptual
with discursive
investigations,
it is
a
point
which is often obscured.
The 'Mind' is not a
phenomenon
which,
like 'social realities' of various
kinds,
could
be,
to
repeat
a
phrase
of John
Heritage's (1984: xxx)
"talked into
being",
because there is
no-thing
to be talked into
being.
'Mind' is either
a
lay notion,
variously deployed,
or a
theorist's reification. When
vernacularly
used,
it is harmless
enough:
"she's on
my mind",
"it
slipped my mind",
"he
changes
his
mind",
and so
forth,
all have
clear-cut,
contextually-dependent
vernacular
paraphrases,
none of which commit a
speaker
to
any
form of
Cartesianism or neo-Cartesianism whatsoever.
Grammatical vs. Discourse
Analysis
Wittgenstein
once
distinguished
between two kinds of
"grammars" (in
an
uncharacteristically
taxonomic
fashion):
In the use of words one
might distinguish
'surface
grammar'
from
'depth
grammar'.
What
immediately impresses
itself
upon
us
about the use of a
word is the
way
it is used in the construction of the
sentence,
the
part
of its
use
-
one
might say
-
that can
be taken in
by
the ear. And now
compare
the
depth grammar, say
of the word 'to
mean',
with what its surface
grammar
would lead us to
suspect.
No wonder we
find it difficult to know our
way
about."
(Wittgenstein,
1968:
para. 664).
One of the
problems
with the
discursive-analytic approach
to
problems
in the
study
of
cognition
and
mentality
more
broadly
is that it
encourages exactly
this
propensity
to restrict itself to that
aspect
of the use of words "that can
be
taken in
by
the ear".
Wittgenstein
makes the distinction between 'surface' and
'depth' grammar
precisely
in order to alert us to the difference between
aspects
of the use of words which can be
easily grasped
and
aspects
which are not so
readily
available. He
is,
in this
observation,
not
resurrecting
the discredited
Tractarian
conception
of rules of use as buried or
"hidden in the medium of
the
understanding" (Wittgenstein,
1968:
para. 102): rather,
his later view was
that
"[t]he aspects
of
things
that are most
important
for us are
hidden because
of their
simplicity
and
familiarity". (Wittgenstein,
1968:
para. 129). Thus,
although
we
may
"take in" an utterance such as: "I said it and I meant it"
superficially
to articulate a
description
of two
activities,
one
physical ("I
said
it")
and the other mental
("I
meant
it"),
an
inspection
of further
examples
170 JEFF COULTER
of
use,
crucially including
their contexts and
purposes,
reveals that
"meaning
something"
is not an
activity,
and in the
prior example
of its use
("I
meant
it")
it therefore cannot
signify something
that I
did, but, rather,
must be
understood as
proclaiming my
commitment to what I
just
said
(i.e.,
it was
not
something
I am
likely
to retract or to
alter). (Hunter,
1985: ch.
24, Depth
Grammar).
How, then,
do
grammatical investigations essentially
differ from discourse
analytical
ones,
especially
if
Wittgenstein
is not
advancing
the idea that we
must somehow discern beneath or below the 'surface' forms of utterances how
we use our
words? Gordon Beam
(1997:
Ch.
3)
is
helpful
here in
proposing
a notion of
"superficial
essentialism".
'Essence',
a term that
Wittgenstein
uses
at several
junctures
in his later
writings,3
has taken on a new
significance.
After
all,
like
many
of our
words,
'essence' itself can have various and diverse uses.
Phenomenologically,
an 'essence' is that
property
or
properties
without which
the
phenomenon (e.g.,
the
concept)
cannot be what it is. In his mature
work,
for
Wittgenstein
it no
longer
means
(as
it had for
generations
before
him)
a
hidden, unitary
core or
commonality
across
instances,
revealed as
such
only
by philosophical analysis
and
abstraction, but, rather,
'essence' now
encompasses
those
myriad
cases of the use of a word which
perspicuously
exhibits its
grammar
of
use,
the
ways
in which it can
(and contrastively, cannot)
be used
intelligibly,
thus
constituting
what
concept
it
expresses.
In Beam's
(1997: 110) helpful phrase, "grammatical investigations
would uncover
superficial
essences"-i.e.,
what constitutes the
intelligibility
of a
concept
is
to be discovered
by laying
out
many richly-detailed examples
of the roles it
plays
in the weave of our lives as we
observably
live them
(including,
of
course,
in the weave of our discursive actions and
interactions).
'Essences'
are,
if
you
will,
distributed
inform,
but
functionally specify
what constitutes the
meaning
of a word. In Beam's
terms,
Grammatical
investigations
are
investigations
of the uses of words in
various situations. Hence these
investigations
are not concerned with
language
in a narrow
sense',
they
include or touch
upon every aspect
of
our life with words. For
instance,
Wittgenstein says,
'It is
part
of the
grammar
of the word 'chair' that this is what
we call 'to sit on a chair"
{BIB, p. 24).
The force of the italicized demonstrative is to invoke the
way
we move our
body
when we sit. So too the
grammar
of
'explanation'
will
include how and where we turn
up
our noses at dubious
explanations.
It is
simply
a mistake to think that
Wittgenstein's philosophical
method is
hypnotized by
words,
needing further
elaboration in terms
of
the
patterns
of activity manifest
in
different parts of
our lives.
Wittgenstein's grammatical
investigations
were
already investigations of
the
forms of
our lives."
(Beam,
1997: 115.
Emphases added).
Construing Wittgenstein's grammatical inquiries thereby
as 'existential'
ones,
Beam
emphasises (as
I have tried to
elsewhere) (Coulter, 1989)
that the
DISCOURSE AND MIND 1 71
analysis
of the
conceptual
structures that human
beings employ
facilitates a
contemporary
form of
inquiry
into what Alfred Schutz once characterised as
the 'constitutive
phenomenology
of the natural attitude'. In contrast to
Schutz,
however, Wittgenstein's
focus
upon 'grammar'
as
furnishing
'essences'
enabled him more
richly
to
represent,
in his
examples
and discussions of
them,
how
notionally 'subjective' concepts
have
intersubjective
uses which
give
them their sense
(including,
of
course,
concepts
such as
"mind", "meaning",
and the
phenomenologists'
favorite, "consciousness",
none of which
Wittgenstein
saw as
posing problems of
a
different
kind than
inquiries
into
the
meaning
of
ordinary
words like
"lamp"
and
"tree").4
Against
this,
it
may
be
argued
that
analysts
of discourse and their
allies,
the 'discursive
psychologists',
are
engaged
in a
purely empirical enterprise.
When
they
discuss 'theoretical' issues
pertaining
to human
mentality,
however,
inductive methods alone are
unhelpful.
We do not need an
empirical sample
of instances of what various
people happen
to
say
about mental
concepts
and
predicates,
but rather we need
examples
of their use in
engaged
activities,
what
Wittgenstein (1968: para. 122)
called
an
"?bersichtlichkeit
Darstellung"
-
a
"perspicuous representation", involving
the
adducing
of
arrays
of
richly
described cases of conduct and relevant circumstances in and
through
which
the
concept
or
conceptual
stmctures of interest can be revealed. Abstracted
bits of
empirically-sampled
'discourse' will not
help
us here if
they
are
chosen
at
random,
since it is clear that
people
can,
and
do,
misuse words on
occasion,
and
may
even do so in
ways
which are not
locally
corrected nor
challenged
by participant
interlocutors.
Hence,
although, of
course, real-world cases are
our
preferred forms of
instances,
no
purely empiricist
or
distributional criteria
will suffice for
our
purposes
of
clarifying
the
grammars
of our
concepts:
for
that,
we
require
to
distinguish
between
intelligible
vs.
unintelligible
uses,
correct vs.
incorrect,
appropriate
vs.
inappropriate,
etc,
uses vs.
misuses,
and
to
argue
our cases for such
judgments by appeal
to the connections
(and,
where
relevant, disconnections)
between
contexts,
speech, implications, entailments,
and conduct.
Edwards,
to
my mind,
conflates these
enterprises
in a
confusing
way
when he asserts:
My
own more
empirical (rather
than
philosophical) analysis suggests
that
mental state
descriptions
are not
semantically
fixed in their
'dispositionaP
or
'episodic' implications,
but
can
be to some extmtworked
up discursively,
on
occasions,
as one
kind
or another. This links 'mental state' terms to a
Wittgensteinian
notion of how
they
function as tokens in
everyday 'language
games',
but also to a
requirement
to
study
them
empirically,
in use."5
Unfortunately,
Edwards does not seem to
appreciate
that
"dispositionaP'
and
"episodic"
words did not exhaust
Ryle's
extensive
range
of distinctions
between what he had called 'mental-conduct
concepts'.
What
happened
to
the
semi-hypothetical?
the
achievement,
task and heed distinctions? And
many
172 JEFF COULTER
others.
. . .
Moreover,
and more to the
point,
Edwards
appears
to believe
(as
do
many discourse-analytic theorists)
in the indefinite discursive
flexibility
or
'negotiability'
of
meanings, implying
that distinctions between kinds of
use must
always
be
provisional
in some sense.
Thus,
we are told that "mental
state
descriptions" (we
are not at this
precise juncture
told
exactly
which
ones)
are
open
to
being
"worked
up"
as either
episodic
or
dispositional.
However,
if
'believing'
is,
as
Ryle
claimed,
in various contexts
deployed
as a dis?
positional
verb,
and
never as an
episodic
one
(you
cannot ask: 'how
long
did
your believing
take?',
which
you
would have to be allowed were
'believing'
ever an
episodic verb),
then Edwards' claim makes no sense. This is not a
matter of
empiricism
?
of
empirical adjudication
based
upon
appeals
to
whatever
anyone might
have
actually
said
-
but of
logico-grammatical
argument
based
upon perspicuous
instances of use.
People
can
say
whatever
they
like: whether
they
then mean
something (including
what
they
can or could
mean)
is not a matter for
merely empirical
determination. It is a normative
issue,
as we should
expect
when we are
talking
about rules of
use,
not mere
empirical usage. Consider,
for
example,
someone's
empirical
claim that
whenever
they speak
of
"knowledge" they thereby
mean "true belief. And
now consider the
following:
would someone who
espoused
such a
semantics
be
prepared
to handle the entailments of such a claim? For
example,
if I
tmly
believed that
so-and-so,
and then I ceased to believe
it,
I would not
thereby
have
forgotten
what I
formerly truly
believed. On the other
hand,
if I
genuinely
could be said to have known that so-and-so and
subsequently
ceased to know
it,
surely
this would
logically
entail that I had
forgotten
it.
What is left here of the discursive doctrine that
"knowledge
=
true belief?
Proper
use combats
improper
use,
and also "mere"
(e.g., idle) usage,
where
relevantly
invoked.
'The Discursive Mind5 and Social Constructionism
We
are,
in this
discussion,
primarily
concerned with the issue of how best to
characterise human
mentality
and
cognition.
One
major proponent
of what I
am
calling
"discursivism" in this effort is Rom Harr?. A
distinguished
philosopher
of
science,
Harr? has in recent
years
turned his attention to the
reconstruction of social
psychology,
and he has been a substantial intellectual
ally
to
many
of us in
refusing
to
accept contemporary cognitivist depictions
of human conduct.
However,
in a recent co-authored
work, (with
Grant
Gillett,
a
neurosurgeon
and
philosopher),
Harr?
(Harr?
and
Gillert, 1994)
seems to
me to have
begun
to make far too
many
concessions to our
(erstwhile)
collective
opposition.
Harr? and Gillett
(1994: viii) (hence: H&G)
announce in their 'Preface'
that discursive
psychology
is to be understood as the "culmination of a number
of
independent developments
...
It
incorporates
such
contemporary
move?
ments as
ethnomethodology,
social
constmctionism,
and
ethogenics". (This
latter is a term of Harr?'s
devising). Strangely enough,
however,
having
introduced the term
"ethnomethodology" up
front
(albeit
as a mere
precursor
to what
they
claim is a
'successor'
field),
neither author refers to
any aspect
of
ethnomethodological
work in the remainder of the book!
Perhaps
that is
just
as
well, since,
as
far
as I can
see,
there is
barely anything
ethno?
methodological
in its treatment of the issues it addresses. I shall return to the
relationship
between
ethnomethodological
studies of human
practices
and
grammatical investigations,
as I conceive of this
relationship,
further on.
H&G
begin
their
concessionary
treatment of the nature of "mind" in the
following
remark:
...
the
study
of the mind is a
way
of
understanding
the
phenomena
that
arise when different sociocultural discourses are
integrated
within an
identifiable human individual situated in relation to those discourses."
(p.
22).
So,
'mind' becomes
'phenomena' arising
out of the
integration
within an
individual of discourses. But where is this 'within'? And in what does such
an
"integration" actually
consist?
The resonances with G.H. Mead and L.S.
Vygotsky
are clear: in
spite
of
the brief discussion of the
importance ofWittgenstein's
later work with which
this
chapter begins,
it becomes
apparent
that a more
restricted,
but at the same
time much more
'theorized',
account is to be advanced. For H&G:
"Many
psychological phenomena
are to be
interpreted
as
properties
or features
of
discourse."
(p. 27).
Note the restriction here
upon
the
widely ramifying
domains of
praxis
and circumstance which
Wittgenstein argued extensively
are involved in the constitution of the 'mental' attributes of
persons. (This
restriction
being
shared
by
all of the discursivist scholars under consideration
in this
essay).
It is not that "discourse" is
unimportant:
far from it. But to
exclude
by (theoretical) stipulation
the
gamut
of other
practices, expressions
(facial, gestural, etc),
visual
orientations,
relationships,
circumstances of
varying
kinds,
constitutive of
mentality
is to
ignore
whole dimensions of our
social
being
relevant to the dissolution of the Cartesian and
cognitivist
problematics.
"The
workings
of each other's minds are available to us in what we
jointly
create
conversationally
. .
."
say
H&G
(p. 27), again oddly delimiting
the
domains of
praxis
and circumstance relevant to
recollection,
perception,
comprehension, thought, belief, expectation
and the rest.
For
H&G,
we must allow for the
"privacy
or
internality
of the mind" insofar
as "the
meanings
that inform our
subjectivity [which]
arise in
public
discourse
...
may
not be
expressed
or even named
by
the
subject." (pp. 35?36). Although
174 JEFF COULTER
it
may
be true that
my
conduct
expresses
a
mental,
perceptual, experiential
or
affective
concept
known to
you
but not known to me
(although certainly
know able
to
me,
provided
that I am a
normally functioning agent),
in what sense
does this
fact license
generic
talk about
"privacy"
and
"internality"?,
And if the
mental,
the
experiential,
etc.,
are now
being
construed as
comprising
a
"subjectivity",
what
has
happened
to the
Wittgensteinian insight
into the
intersubjective, grammatical
constitution of mental attributes and
properties?
What has
happened
to the
Wittgensteinian conception
of 'outward criteria' and their contextual satisfaction?
Is the 'mental' now
being
construed,
along
Cartesian
lines,
as
'subjective'
in a
sense other than that non-Cartesian
(and unproblematic)
sense in which it
is,
of
course,
subjects (i.e., persons)
who are the loci of their
avowal,
ascription
and
display?
From the text
alone,
it is hard to
say.
However,
we encounter an even
stronger
concession to Cartesian
ways
of
construing
the
mind-body relationship
in the
following:
"The
way
a
person
thinks about
objects
informs and
guides
his or her behavior."
(p.
41
).
But much
of what I
do,
I do
non-ratiocinatively,
without
prior
reflection,
although
not
thereby 'thoughtlessly',
and on those occasions when it
genuinely
makes sense
to
say
that the
way
he
or
she
thought
about
something
was
related to what he
or she
subsequently
did
or
said,
the connection is not
necessarily (nor
even
empirically generally)
one of a
prior
action
guiding
a
consequent
one. It is in
and
through
the exhibited conduct toward or with the
object
that one can tell
in what
way
it was
'thought
about',
only
if
'thought
about' is here taken to
mean
something
like:
'construed', 'understood', etc,
and not as
signifying
a
prior spate
of reflection or of
interpretation.
The
conduct-with-the-object,
in other
words, displays
the
way(s)
in which the
object
was construed.
Invoking
the
expression
'thinks about' here
only
misleads us into
falsely postulating
antecedent,
undisclosed
'thoughts'
as omnirelevant in
understanding
conduct.
H&G
appear
to follow
Vygotsky,
not
Wittgenstein (despite
their occasional
appeals
to the
latter)
nor
ethnomethodology,
in
portraying
the links between the
public
and social
spheres
and the mental attributes of
persons,
and
they
find
themselves
having
to allow a
logical space
to arise for
inner,
internal 'realms'
within which the
'private
discourses' and
private 'symbol manipulations'
can
take
place. 'Thinking'
is still construed
as an inner
process
on
occasion,
only
now one facilitated
by
the
mastery
of a
system
of
socially-shared symbols.
'Thinking',
however,
is
zpolymorph
and is not the name for a
particular,
identifiable
process
with
specific ingredients,
such
as,
e.g., masticating
or
digesting.
I
can,
for
example,
on the basis of
my words/deeds,
be
correctly
said to "think that it is
Tuesday" (when
in fact it is
Wednesday)
without
my
ever
having
entertained such
a
discursive
expression
to
myself.
Note
as well
that,
context
apart, being
informed
simply
that someone is
"thinking"
does
not
yet specify
what he is
doing:
he
may
be
trying
to recall where he left his
cigarettes
or how to
spell
a
word,
figuring
out his tax
bill,
wondering
if it will
rain,
and a
myriad
of other
possibilities.
We are told
by
H&G that:
"...
thought
is not an overt
operation
on the world
[sic]...
the contents of
one's
thoughts
can be hidden from other
people.
In this
sense,
thoughts
are
potentially private. Thoughts,
then,
are not
objects
in the mind but the
activity
and essence of mind
. .
."(p. 49).
In the
latter,
the
regress
to Cartesianism is
virtually complete.
One does not
have to
deny
the occasions on which one or more
thoughts
remain undisclosed
in order to
reject
these
essentially
theoretical assertions.
'
Thoughts
'
are neither
the
activity
of mind
(because 'thoughts'
are not
activities)
nor
the essence
of mind
(because
it is
people
who
think,
not their
'minds'),
and
'thinking'
is not the name of
any particular activity either,
whether
public
or undisclosed
as
such,
but is
a
polymorph
in our
language.
The lessons of
logical grammar
have been left behind in these
passages
in the service of
theorising.
But
theorising
is driven out
by grammar
in this
domain,
if
Wittgenstein's
arguments
are
right.
In their discussion of
cognitive psychology,
H&G observe that
"slips
and
slides" occur between
appeals
to "brain
processes"
and
appeals
to
"thought
processes",
but
argue
that: "... the
danger
of
misinterpretation
must be
run,
because it is
just
those
ambiguities
that make
cognitive
models fruitful",
(p. 54).
Yet it remains unclear
exactly why
we should tolerate the
slips
and slides of neural
Cartesian
model-construction, especially
if,
as
these authors inform
us,
'mental'
phenomena
are
essentially
discursive,
not
neurological,
in nature.
Invoking
some
work
by
the
cognitivist
theorist Zenon
Pylyshyn,
H&G claim that his results
are
"exactly
what
one would
expect
if discourse and
signification
were
pervasive
in
representation". (p. 57).
In the context of
Pylyshyn's
commitment to a
'representational theory
of
mind',
this would
appear
to concede to
cognitivism,
its central notion: that of
"representation" (in
the
(hybrid) mind/brain), only
now
apparently
rendered
acceptable
if the
'representation'
is
something
'discursive'. In this
way,
H&G allow
through
the backdoor the Cartesian
Lockean doctrine
of'meanings
in the head'.
. .
.6
Everything
that
Wittgenstein
had to teach us about the nature of
'meaning' (as
rules of use in
language-games)
is
forgotten:
the allure of
cognitivism finally vanquishes
even the residues of
discursivism as a social
theory,
and the latent Cartesianism it
permits
comes
fully
to the
foreground, although
in its
contemporary
newra/-Cartesian
form,
according
to which the
phenomena
Descartes had attributed to the met?
aphysical
res
cogitans
are now
transposed
in
theorising
to the central nervous
system. Thence,
the
chapter
becomes dense with uncritical
(and largely
unargued-for)
allusions to
"cognitive operations"
and "information
pro?
cessing"
. . .
(p. 58).
The
rampant
eclecticism of H&G's work
might,
in some
circles,
be
acclaimed as the
beginning
of a
productive synthesis:
the authors themselves
proclaim
the
"possibility
of a link between this
contemporary
work in
cognitive
science and discursive
psychology
. .
."
(p. 75).
All
analytical
nerve now
sacrificed to the
gods
of
cognitive 'modeling',
H&G
display sharply something
176 JEFF COULTER
I have often
thought
but seldom discussed:
permitting
Mead and
Vygotsky
such
great play
in the context of the
mind-body-conduct problem only
facilitates a sort of
creeping
neo-Cartesianism,
when the whole
point
is to
vanquish
the
beast,
entrails and all.
Ethnomethodology,
Grammar and the Nature of
Mentality
There are so
many points
of
convergence
between what I am
arguing
here
and
ethnomethodological
studies of human
practices
that it
may appear
otiose
to
many
to reiterate them. On
pain
of
repetition, permit
me to elaborate.
Ethnomethodological
studies of in situ human
practices
have
demonstrated,
beyond question,
the failures of both behaviorist and
cognitivist approaches
to the
analysis
of human activities. These
(ethno.)
studies focus
upon
the
intersubjective, logical constitution/accomplishment
of social
order,
and their
detailed
analytical
achievements
clearly
exhibit the
implementation
of such a
programme, notwithstanding
the
(normally)
variable
quality
of work
actually
done under its
auspices.
This
point
holds
as well for the
major
achievements
of Sacks's
programme
for the
analysis
of conversation and other
speech
exchange systems
in social life. There once was a
time,
lo those
many years
ago,
when
analytical
endeavors
pertaining
to human actions were
thought
of
as either
(1) metaphorically
inclined
(Goffman), (2)
behavioristic
(Skinner,
Homans,
et
al.)
or,
more
usually, (3) cognitivistic-mentalistic (e.g.,
Blumer,
and the
symbolic
interactionist,
post-Mead program).
Other than
these,
versions
(barring
the more ludicrous idealizations of
"exchange theory" (and
much of
contemporary
'Rational Choice
Theory'), according
to which
virtually
all of human conduct was to be constmed
along
the lines of
purely
economic
behavior),
the coast was clear: and Garfinkel's
major
work inhabited the void
vis-a-vis the serious
logical analysis
of human conduct in all of its contextual
dimensions. There was
simply nothing
to contend with
it,
notwithstanding
contemporaneous
and
latter-day protestations
to the
contrary.
What, then,
is the
relationship
that I am
positing
between
ethnomethodology
and
logico-grammatical inquiries?
The first
thing
to consider is this:
my
own
preoccupation
for
many years
has been the issue of human
mentality
and its
relationship
to conduct
(among
other
things).
Garfinkel's
programmatic
declaration that: ".
..
there is no reason to look under the skull since
nothing
of interest is to be found there but brains. Indeed
questions
will be confined
to the
operations
that can be
performed
upon
events that are 'scenic' to the
person" (Garfinkel
in
Coulter,
1990:
6) posed
a
challenge:
was this
merely
a
methodological injunction,
or could it have been/be more than that? Did it
leave
open
a
space
for
"interiorising" speculation,
or was there a
way
of
ruling
that
out,
decisively,
once and for all? I took the latter
route,
and still do. And
I maintain that the dissolution of mentalistic and
cognitivistic
issues does
ethnomethodology (and
related
logical inquiries
into human
praxis)
a real
service
-
provided
that we
get
the
arguments right.
First of
all,
there is the issue of
theorising, upon
which both
Wittgensteinians
and
ethnomethodologists
find common
ground. Wittgenstein disparaged
the
constmction of 'theories' as
ways
to solve our
philosophical problems,
and
Garfinkel
(1967: viii) disparaged
what he termed the
"permissive
discussion
of
theory"
in
sociological
work.
Analysis
was to drive out
theory:
the
ethnomethodological insight
on this issue
was
simply
this: our
ordinary
language
and
practical,
commonsense
reasoning,
never
having
been
subject
to serious
empirical-analytical inquiry, comprises
methods and resources so
dense and so rich for
producing
social orders of all
stripes
that
'theorising'
was redundant. It could
only
and
ever
idealise,
abstract
from,
restrict the
appeal
to,
select
from,
distort
and, thereby, stipulatively
circumvent,
the real issues
that
actually,
in their rich
integrity,
arise within our
ordinary
affairs,
including
issues
pertaining
to the
putatively
'mental' attributes and features of
persons.
'Theorising',
within
ethnomethodology,
as within
Wittgensteinian grammar,
had a bad name. And
rightly
so. It
conjured
up
constructions like
"synechdoche",
"partiality", "extrapolation",
"idealization" with reference to domains and
issues for which such devices offered
nothing
but
regimented
and tmncated
versions, ignorant
of the
complexities
of actual
usage
and
quotidian
cir?
cumstances,
anxious to
strip away
the contextual features of real-world
cases
-as in Garfinkel's and Sacks' famous
dictum,
it was as if one
needed to remove
the walls of a house in order better to see what held the roof
up!
However,
this commitment meant
opposing
a whole academic
tradition,
especially,
but not
only,
the
positivistic
tradition. Positivism was itself
already
'under the
gun',
but other traditions were still alive and
well,
traditions which
encouraged theorising
as a route to
solving
intellectual
problems
in the human
sciences.
Ethnomethodology
and
Wittgensteinian grammar
stood
together
in
opposing
this
appeal
to
'Theorising'
and still do.
And we
may
not advance
any
kind of
theory.
There must not be
anything
hypothetical
in our considerations. We must do
away
with all
explanations,
and
description
alone must take its
place. (Wittgenstein,
1968:
para. 109).
Now,
I want to take
(modest)
issue with this remark as a blanket
programmatic
statement.
For,
as well we all
know,
ethnomethodologists posit procedural
explanations
?
they explicate
how social order is
accomplished
in situ. But
this
enterprise
is a far
cry
from inductive
(or, especially,
deductive
nomological)
forms of
explanation
familiar in the social sciences.
Indeed,
procedural explanations
are coeval with
precise descriptions
of how members'
practices actually
work, operate,
are
do-able, account-able,
intelligible,
and
so on.
There is no
significant, conceptual,
conflict here.
Discourse
analysts
of various
kinds, however,
especially
in
linguistics,
often
seek a
wholly
different kind of account:
they
tend to sustain an
interest in issues
178 JEFF COULTER
such
as
-why
do folks
speak
in those
ways
rather than others? what motivates
their
speaking
in such
ways?
what are their intentions and
strategies
and how
are these realised in and
through
the
deployment
of various discursive devices
and
designs?
and so on. It is no cause of
wonder, therefore,
that such
analysts
are sometimes
(theoretically)
driven to
postulate
"mental" causes or sources
for such discourse
fragments
as
they inspect.
Conversation
analysis,
in the hands of
Harvey Sacks, however,
is a
wholly
different
animal,
necessitating
no
appeal
whatsoever to
interior, 'mental',
'unconscious'
or
'cognitive' processes,
mechanisms or
operations.
The crucial difference is this: whereas most discourse
analysts
concern
themselves with the
putative 'cognitive' competences
of
'speakers'
and
'hearers',
inferring complex
mechanisms of
disambiguation, inference,
interpretation,
and the
like,
thus
courting
the "intellectualist
legend" against
which
Ryle
warned
nearly
half a
century ago,
CA
(at
its
best) disparages
all
such
talk, being preoccupied
with the
logical properties
of
actually produced
utterances, sequences, etc.,
construed
as sui
generis properties, i.e.,
as in
significant respects, analyseably "cohort-independent".7
Where, then,
do the
properties
of
speakers/hearers,
so to
speak,
re-arise
within Conversation
Analysis?
Sacks's brilliant
insights
into
Membership
Categories
and Devices
supplies
our answer:
persons (speaker-hearers)
are
construed
as assemblies of occasioned
features,8
contingent upon
how local
cohorts'
practices
constitute them. And the
practices whereby
such
properties
are constituted consist in
(ratified/ratifiable)
avowals, (ratified/ratifiable)
attributions,
detectable
presuppositions
of
conduct,
observable
displays-in
conduct,
and warrantable inferences. These
contingencies
hold true also for
each and
every constituting aspect
of the "mental" in
my
view. But that is an
argument
I have made
elsewhere,
and I shall not
repeat
it here.
Having
made such
arguments,
we must
immediately
take stock of two
distinct
(although related)
issues:
(1)
the
policy
of
"ethnomethodological
indifference" to whatever truth-values
may
be inherent in members'
practices
(where
so
relevantly predicable),
and
(2)
the
apparently empiricist
character
of
ethnomethodological
studies. I shall consider these
problems
seriatim,
and
these will
comprise
my concluding
remarks.
A
paradox apparently
looms
large
for folks such as
myself:
on the one
hand,
we are
appealing
to mies of human
practices
in order to defeat
lay
as well as
professional misconceptions
of the
'mental',
'mind' and
'cognition'
inhuman
affairs.
However,
within
ethnomethodology,
a
major study policy
has been to
refrain from analytical
commitments to the truth or
falsity
of whatever
practice
might
be so assessed.
Nonetheless,
despite
such
an
apparent (and wholly
superficial) divergence, "ethnomethodological
indifference" taken
broadly
was
always
and
exclusively
intended
(as
I understand
it)
to refer to a
principled
indifference to the methods
of analysis of
the
constructive-analytic, positivistic
social
sciences,
and this is a far
cry
from
denying
that
any
results of such
ethnomethodological analyses
can be utilised for other
'philosophical' (in
Wittgenstein's sense) purposes.
Insofar as one is interested in
dissolving
the
mind-body-conduct problem
for
the human
sciences,
this constraint does not debar us from
employing
ethno
methodologically-researched
and
analysed examples
for our
purposes.
The
difference is in the
purposes being pursued,
the issues
being
addressed,
and not
in
any ontological
or
methodological
barriers
per
se. As I noted
above,
I am
concerned to liberate
ethnomethodological
work
(and
all of the behavioral
sciences) fromanyand
all
vestiges
of Cartesianism and 'modem
cognitive
science'
theorising.9
Now,
as we know full
well,
most
ethnomethodological
studies are of
practices,
not
(or,
at
least,
not in the first
instance)
of
people. Nonetheless,
the
apparently empiricist appeal
of
ethnomethodology
can be
appealed
to in order to
blind us to the fact
that,
in
principle,
it is an
enterprise
wedded to the
position
that
"there is
nothing
in the head of interest to us but brains ..."
Our
enterprises
are so
close,
that it
may
seem
pedantic
to stress the
point
of connection
(as
well as to eschew the
apparent divergencies). Nonetheless,
I want to finish with a
major,
albeit
contentious,
point.
It is this. In
my view,
ethnomethodological
studies do
not,
when best
accomplished, simply
result
in
inductive,
empirical, quasi-statistical,
distributional
generalities. They
have,
when
well-argued
and
documented,
a 'theorem-like' status.
They
reveal to us
the
"superficial
essences"
(to quote
Gordon Beam
yet again)
of our
ways
of
living together, ways
of
living
within which we
naturally deploy
the
ordinary
language
resources of
motive, intention, hope, thought,
recollection,
forgetting,
understanding,
and the rest of what Descartes
erroneously
took to be the
"invisible actions" of mankind.
. . .
Herein lies the
connection,
as I see
it,
between the
apparently disparate
endeavors of
Ludwig Wittgenstein
and
Harold Garfinkel.
Conjoined, they
have
a
world to win.
Notes
1. This of
course,
means that a
'cognitive process'
would be a
'knowledge process'
?
and
that construction makes no sense.
'Knowing'
is not a
process
at all.
2.
See, e.g., Edwards,
1997: 316: "The first reductionist
step
is
hardly
even
noticed,
being
the
adoption
of the standard
psychological paradigm
?
the
individualist,
in-the-head
conception
of what
everyday
notions such as
thinking, believing,
and
knowing
'refer
to'.
Having
conceived them as
actual
internal,
mental
processes,
rather than as
ways of
talking,
the second
step
is a much shorter
one,
which is to assume that
they
can be
specified
and reduced to the
step-by-step
internal
operations
of
mind, brain,
or
program."
Emphases
in the
original.
3.
E.g., Wittgenstein, (1968: para. 371):
"Essence is
expressed by grammar".
4. Cf.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1968: para. 97):
".
. .
of
course,
if the words
'language',
'experience', 'world',
have a
use,
it must be as humble a one as that of the words
'table',
'lamp',
'door'."
180 JEFF COULTER
5. Derek
Edwards,
1997:
167,
note 4. I am then cited as one who
might
endorse such a
formulation, although
Edwards is careful to note that I use the term
"ethnomethodology",
not "discourse
analysis",
in most of
my
work on this
topic.
6.
Eventually,
we arrive at the
following amazing
remark
(amazing, given
the
prior
discussions and Harr?'s own other
published arguments):
"The
brain,
for
any
individual
human
being,
is the
repository
of
meanings [sic]
in that it serves as the
physical
medium
in which mental content
[sic]
is realized and
plays
a
part
in the discursive activities of
individuals."
(p. 81).
Further
on,
we read: ".
. .
the brain stores
'experiences
in terms of
the
meanings'
that have structured that
experience [sic]
and the
responses
made
by
the
individual to
aspects
of the events
experienced."
7. I made this
argument
some time
ago
in a
paper
entitled:
"Contingent
and A Priori
Structures in
Sequential Analysis". (Coulter, 1983).
8. On the occasioned character of
settings
'
features, including
those
of persons/participants,
see the classic discussion
by
Zimmerman &
Pollner,
"The
Everyday
World as a
Phenomenon", reproduced
in J. Coulter 1990: 96-113.
9. For a first shot at
this,
in the context of the contributions of the late
Harvey Sacks,
see
my
"The Sacks Lectures".
(Coulter, 1995).
References
Beam,
G.C.F.
(1997). Waking
to Wonder:
Wittgenstein's
Existential
Investigations.
New York:
State
University
of New York Press.
Bilmes,
J.
(1986).
Discourse and Behavior. New York: Plenum Press.
Bilmes,
J.
(1992). Referring
to internal occurrences: A
reply
to Coulter. Journal
for
the
Theory of
Social Behaviour 22
(3):
253-263.
Coulter,
J.
(1983). Contingent
and a
priori
structures in
sequential anaylsis.
Human Studies
6
(4):
361-376.
Coulter,
J.
(1989).
Mind in Action. London:
Polity
Press.
Coulter,
J.
(1992).
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commentary.
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for
the
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of
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(3):
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J.
(1995).
The Sacks Lectures. Human Studies 18
(2):
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D.
(1997).
Discourse and
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Oaks,
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Sage
Publications.
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J.
(1992).
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R.
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R.
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Gillett,
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Heritage,
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Discourse and Mind

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