ABSTRACT
A persistent though sometimes subterranean theme of the conver- sation analysis literature concerns the place of tacit members’ knowledge in the doing and in the results of conversation analysis. This topic is treated by Zimmerman under the headings of “warranted inference,” “appropriate data,” and “constructed examples,” but there is considerably more that can be said about the matter. It is through concerns with this topic that conversation analysis is thematically as well as historically related to ethnomethodology. Further, it is in the way that conversation analysis treats tacit members’ knowledge that it is methodologically unique among the social sciences, with the possible exception of linguistics, whose posture on tacit members’ knowledge is similar to but, in crucial respects, also different from conversation analysis.
