ABSTRACT
Most research on language and social interaction (LSI) has been decidedly action focused, more concerned with what people do (i.e., vocal and visible behaviors) and how they do it (e.g., through mutual orientation and coordination), less concerned with subjects’ possible cognitive states (e.g., intentions, motivations, and understandings). Conversation analysis (CA) especially has been touted as an empirically rigorous alternative to mentalistic perspectives that regard language as a way to study underlying psychological states, structures, and competencies. Robert Hopper (1997), for example, described himself as a “cognitive agnostic.” Though not denying the existence and potential importance of cognition, he insisted that researchers “should distinguish between calculated speech and most social interaction…distinguish what actors do from what theorists may infer” (p. 6). Hopper’s agnostic stance was consistent with CA as it has generally been described and applied. Heritage (1990/1991) observed that “conversation analysts have sought, wherever possible, to avoid a terminology of social action that invokes mentalistic predicates and thereby anthropomorphizes processes that may be less anthropomorphic than we conventionally believe” (pp. 328-329). (See also Heritage, 1984; Hopper, 1989, 1990, 1992; Hopper, Koch, & Mandelbaum, 1986; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Jacobs, 1988; Levinson, 1983; Pomerantz, 1990; Psathas, 1995.)
We agree with and indeed celebrate the efforts of Hopper, Heritage, and others to place CA work on a rigorous foundation, one that does not allow ungrounded speculation with respect to interactants’ hypothesized states of mind. In our own studies of classroom interaction (cf, Koschmann, Glenn, & Conlee, 2000; LeBaron, 1998; LeBaron & Koschmann, 1999; LeBaron & Streeck, 2000), however, we have been brought to examine how participants avow and ascribe mentalistic predicates to themselves and to others in the course of their joint and ongoing learning activities. A question for us, therefore, has been how can we as analysts document the practical methods by which these activities are accomplished without abandoning the standards of warrantability set forth by the founders of our field?
