ABSTRACT
Discursive psychology (DP) offers a very powerful challenge to the practice of treating minds as sehlf-contained computational-representational phenomena, which exclude any constitutive role of language and meaning (see Edwards, 1997; Potter and Wetherall, 1987). Much of cognitive science is deconstructed by way of DP showing that what we know about psychological phenomena is constructed in the use of language. DP is commendable for its efforts to move psychological research to a place that attends to ‘everyday doings’ (Edwards, 1997). Shotter and others have pointed out, however, that DP focuses on technological analysis-of-talk that neglects embodiment (i.e. a human’s physical being in the world with others) by treating it as nothing other than a topic about which we can talk (Cresswell, 2012; Shotter, 2005). Elsewhere, we have coined the term ‘expressive realism’ to highlight how language constitutes deeply compelling experiential realities as we express it. In conversation with a friend, for example, we are compelled to describe a particular situations as ‘exciting’ and so constitute how it really is. Expressive realism highlights how underestimating the embodied quality of language in DP results in a muted ability to address realities people socially constitute in the expression of language (Cresswell and Baerveldt, 2011). In an effort to turn psychology back to life and away from abstracted cognitivist presuppositions, DP’s methodological prescriptiveness has itself turned away from lived realities of life and its own goal (see Matusov and van Duyke, 2012).
