BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Discerning the Relations Between Conversationand Cognition

Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter (eds): Conversationand Cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005

Ben Matthews

Published online: 30 December 2009

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Although hailing from cognate analytical schools, the contributors to

Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter’s edited volume Conversation and Cognitionhold a remarkable diversity of views on the nature of ‘‘mental states’’ and their

import for the purposes of analyzing naturally occurring interaction. I offer a critical

analysis of some of the contributors’ discussions of cognition in social interaction in

an effort to clarify some obstinate issues with respect to the meanings of words in

our cognitive vocabulary (e.g. ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘realization’’) and their identification

in analyses of conversation.

Keywords Conversation analysis � Discursive psychology � Ethnomethodology �Human mentality � Meaning � Wittgenstein

What is the relationship between thinking and speaking, between mind and

language? While these are central questions for philosophical psychology, in

Conversation and Cognition, they are uniquely addressed through the empirical

examination of naturally occurring human interaction.

Conversation and Cognition is an important book, with many virtues. In the past,

the possible relations between pragmatic analyses of naturally occurring talk and

cognitive accounts of human action have been unclear at best. Many analysts of

conversation have preferred to examine the local organization of talk with a

principled indifference to the kinds of questions of inner causes or cognitive

mechanisms that motivate work in psychology and cognitive science. Rarely have

they made explicit their stance on the existence or nature of speakers’ mental states

and processes or their possible role in human interaction. Thus, this volume should

B. Matthews (&)

Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Alsion 2, 6400 Sønderborg, Denmark

e-mail: matthews@mci.sdu.dk

123

Hum Stud (2009) 32:487–502

DOI 10.1007/s10746-009-9129-x

be welcome for directly initiating this discussion; all the more so for the fact that it

exhibits the reflections of some of the renowned figures in conversation analysis

(represented in chapters by Robert Sanders, Anita Pomerantz, Nora Schaeffer and

Douglas Maynard, Robert Hopper, Paul Drew, John Heritage, and Robin Wooffitt),

ethnomethodology (chapters by Jeff Coulter, and Michael Lynch and David Bogen),

and discursive psychology (the chapter by Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, and

the introduction by Jonathan Potter and Hedwig te Molder). Each of the contributors

(with one exception) demonstrates a perspective on the relation between cognition

and conversation through an analysis of empirical material of recorded and

transcribed interaction. In a number of respects, the book comprises a casebook of

approaches to how cognition might be treated in the analysis of conversation,

drawing lessons for possible understandings of cognition along the way.

Interestingly, the lessons are divergent, and sometimes antithetical. Although the

general orientation of the volume is heavily informed by ethnomethodology and

conversation analysis, this collection is not a synoptic treatment of cognition by a

homogeneous school of thought. (A contrast might be drawn with Graham Button’s

(1991) edited volume, in which each chapter treats a different topic of central

interest to the human sciences, yet in a remarkably cohesive fashion.) In this regard,

Conversation and Cognition as a whole does not significantly develop the themes or

perspectives treated in earlier works by some of its contributing authors (e.g.

Edwards 1997). Rather it is a striking document of some of the differences that exist

within and between conversation analysis (CA), ethnomethodology (EM), and

discursive psychology (DP). Naturally, this too is valuable of itself.

The book is put together with an audience in mind that includes psychologists

and cognitive scientists, not to mention sociologists, linguists, and analysts of

discourse. On this score it makes notable efforts to demonstrate the illuminating

potential of taking the interaction order seriously and on its own terms, prior to

addressing the kinds of questions that psychologists and cognitive scientists are

likely to bring to inquiry. The editors’ valuable, wide-ranging and uncomplicated

introduction is to be commended for teasing out points of dialogue, issues and

challenges that the accompanying studies of interaction raise for the cognitive

sciences. This is another reason Conversation and Cognition is likely to enjoy, and

is deserving of, a broad interdisciplinary readership. Yet, as some within the volume

imply, the emphasis placed on having something to say to the cognitive sciences

comes with difficulties of its own. This is a point I will return to later.

The book is also deeply philosophical. The issues it addresses through the

empirical analysis of conversation necessarily impinge on topics such as the nature

of human minds, the relationship(s) between thought and action, and the

implications of the revelation of the social organization of conversation including

sequence and structure for possible theories of the (causal) basis of human

interaction. It is ‘‘deeply’’ philosophical in part because these issues are of

themselves deep or at least murky; in part because these issues are frequently

implicit in the analyses presented, and the presumptions on which they are founded

often lie under the surface of analyses; and in part because in spite of the 50 years

that have passed since the publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s PhilosophicalInvestigations, we (lay persons and analysts alike) still tend to entangle ourselves

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within the same webs of language, and are still misled by the same pictures of ‘‘the

mental’’ that our forms of expression lead us into. This volume’s direct focus on

cognition through the analysis of naturally occurring interaction brings out some of

these difficulties in a way that could not be possible in a collection of, say,

philosophical essays on these topics. This is immensely useful, all the more so on

account of the diversity of views on cognition present within it.

I begin this review by articulating what I find to be its clearest demonstrations

and strongest contributions. I then chart some of the diversity inherent in the volume

by posing certain questions that receive quite different answers from some of the

book’s contributing authors. I have devoted the majority of my space to a critical

discussion that uses two analytic examples from the book to re-examine some of the

difficulties that Wittgenstein’s exposition of the operation of our psychological

vocabulary poses for analyses of human interaction that take an interest in

cognition.

Contributions

A valuable contribution consists simply in demonstrating the analytic difficulty in

identifying ‘‘moments of cognition’’ in interaction. That is, trouble abounds for

cognitive scientists who would seek to find an empirical basis for the unproblematic

explanation of human conduct by use of cognitive concepts. Several chapters

provide clear examples of this point, though I will focus on just two. John Heritage

revisits the use of the particle ‘‘oh’’ in interaction as a ‘‘change of cognitive state’’ of

the speaker (p. 189). The use of ‘‘oh’’ in interaction is produced and treated as an

indication of new knowledge, suggesting that what has just been said qualifies as

news. The appearance of ‘‘oh’’ might seem to be a prime contender for the

correspondence of a cognitive state with an interactional phenomenon. But Heritage

clearly shows that such correspondence would be fictive in many cases, since ‘‘oh’’

is produced by speakers in interactionally relevant places, rather than as obvious or

unproblematic reports of mental events. Similarly, Nora Schaeffer and Douglas

Maynard’s chapter examines interaction in a survey interview, showing that silences

following the interviewer’s question cannot easily be treated as an instance of

mental processing (e.g. thinking, trying to understand, interpreting etc.) on the part

of the interviewee. Silences serve interactional purposes, such as soliciting

clarification from the interviewer. Treating the silence in this way is something

wholly other than seeing it as a site of cognition.1

As such, a rare argument on which the volume as a whole provides a fairly

synoptic position is for the autonomy of the interaction order. Even Robert Sanders,

who is the most outspoken cognitivist of the contributors, recognizes that an undue

focus on cognitive and other putatively inner processes may distract analytic

attention away from the organization of interaction, which is often explicable

1 One reviewer of this essay found this puzzling. Why is ‘‘soliciting clarification’’ any less an instance of

cognition than, say, ‘‘trying to understand’’? The point is that the silence does the work of soliciting

clarification, whether or not it is the respondent’s intention to withhold an answer in order to solicit

clarification. It does that work in interaction independently of it ‘‘belonging’’ to any participant.

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without recourse to psychological categories (of which he has in mind e.g. motive

and intention). Similarly, Paul Drew, who also makes a concession to the possibility

of a cognitivist account of some aspects of interaction and is concerned to show the

possibility of the identification of ‘‘cognitive moments’’ in interaction, does so

primarily as a means of highlighting a range of intersections of cognition and

interaction, rather than e.g. as a means of generating a general cognitive explanation

of the production of actions in talk. Robin Wooffitt’s analysis of the organization of

‘‘flashbulb’’ memory accounts maintains a stronger line here. The structure of

people’s ‘‘flashbulb’’ accounts—accounts of what they were doing when something

memorable happened, such as a paranormal experience like seeing a ghost—can be

seen to be autonomous from the event itself (however that might otherwise be

examined). That is, there is a consistent ‘‘cultural apparatus’’ that provides for the

structure of the accounts of such experiences. He argues on this basis that it makes

little sense to attempt to look for, or attribute, correspondence between an account

and a cognitive artifact such as ‘‘the actual memory’’ of an event.

Jeff Coulter’s paper is the only one not to consist of an empirical analysis. He

draws a (now) familiar post-Wittgensteinian line that undercuts the entire family of

mentalistic accounts of human action. Where this piece goes beyond his earlier

work, I think, is that rather than contenting itself with a penetrating critique of the

conceptualization of ‘‘mental’’ topics in cognitive theorists’ reflections, it offers a

positive characterization of an alternative. In this way he not only dislodges the

notion that ‘‘mind’’ is an entity from which springs human action, but supplants it

with an argument, drawn from Norman Malcolm, that language is ‘‘grafted’’ in

essential ways onto prelinguistic patterns of behavior. Our linguistic capacities are

not best seen as the product of prior episodes of mental processing, but rather as

complex elaborations of instinctual or natural reactions (though not of the stimulus-

response variety), in which case there is often no need to posit an inner or mental

process of ratiocination to account for their production.

One of the foremost achievements of the volume is the clear presentation of

many of the ways that cognitive aspects of human life are seamlessly embedded in

members’ practices of language use and description (Heritage), and for that matter,

in analysts’ own use of language in analyses (Sanders). This particular line has been

developed by Discursive Psychology’s emergent program of work. Derek Edwards

and Jonathan Potter’s chapter demonstrates DP’s unrelenting scrutiny of how

matters of psychology play out in members’ competing descriptions of events,

whether or not overtly psychological terms (e.g. ‘‘believe,’’ ‘‘intend’’ etc.) ever enter

discourse. Psychology is ubiquitous in both analysts’ and members’ practices of

description.2

The chapter by Michael Lynch and David Bogen, examining Oliver North’s

testimony to the Joint House-Senate inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair, makes a

unique contribution in its demonstration of the heterogeneity of ‘‘memory.’’

Recollections, claims of the inability to recall events, and related practices are

woven into a setting as a constituent part of the discursive, interactional

2 This, however, raises the contested question of what status such psychological terms have as

components of analysts’ explanations of members’ practices. More will be said on this shortly.

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management of speakers’ accountabilities. Memories and their accounts are tied to

the local, situational relevancies of their production. Furthermore, assessments of

the adequacy of a particular memory (or memory lapse) are contingent on moral

norms and commonsense reasoning about what one should or would be expected to

recall, given the particular set of circumstances being investigated. This type of

investigation of a topic such as ‘‘memory’’ runs entirely askew to cognitive

investigations of the same topic, since it dissolves the notion of ‘‘memory’’ as a

(personal, mental, neural etc.) phenomenon. Instead it reveals the ways in which

memories are produced responsive to a contextually sensitive ‘‘open texture’’ of

possible relevancies, claims, counter-claims, admissions and other aspects that are

alive in the setting for the participants. Thus, there is no reason to expect that there

might be some way to carve off ‘‘memory’’ (or ‘‘cognition’’ more generally) as a

coherent phenomenon for inquiry from this tangle of local situational relations.

Although related, these last two points about (a) the identification or appearance

of cognitive concepts in members’ practices of language use and (b) the dissolution

of cognitive concepts as phenomena, expose significant differences between the

contributors’ individual stances with regard to the conceptualization and investi-

gation of cognition in interaction. These differences may first appear incidental, but

they signify much deeper disagreements over issues such as the role of mental state

terms in analysts’ explanations of conduct, the empirical justification for the

analytical ascription of cognitive states to participants, the possibility for dialogue

between studies of interaction and the cognitive sciences, and the purpose of

studying interaction. It is these issues that I will pursue in the remainder of this

review essay.

What is the Relationship Between Cognition and Conversation?

A very quick tour through the book reveals a wide range of positions on the

relationship between conversation and cognition. Sanders shows that anti- or

a-cognitivist analysts such as Emanuel Schegloff and Potter impute motives in their

explications of conduct. Thus, cognition is already employed as an analytic resource

for the identification of social actions, and Sanders argues that analysts can inspect

aspects of the organization of interaction in order to produce psychological

explanations of behavior. Coulter, in contrast, argues that the entirety of the

cognitivist program is founded in problematic assumptions about the nature of

language, and that inquiries should instead be grounded in the logical grammar of

language. Anita Pomerantz cautiously advocates virtues of involving the partici-

pants of interaction in its analysis. She shows that a doctor’s comments on viewing

the video of an interaction sequence he was a participant in offered insights about

the issues at stake and his (and the patient’s) orientations that would have been

difficult to analytically identify otherwise. She suggests this methodological

practice raises ‘‘issues about the status and import of the mental lives of participants

in interaction’’ (p. 113). Schaeffer and Maynard suggest that consideration of the

pragmatic consequences of particular sequences of interaction shifts emphasis away

from the view that interaction is a playing field of individual participants’ mental

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processing towards a view that actions (such as answering an interviewer’s

questions) are fundamentally social, interactional achievements. This latter view

poses difficulties for identifying sites of cognitive processing in interaction. Robert

Hopper remains steadfastly agnostic about the potential of analytically identifying

cognition in interaction, preferring instead to focus analysis on practices such as

‘‘doing being cognitive’’ (p. 150). Drew thinks it possible to identify ‘‘cognitive

moments’’ in interaction, arguing that interaction is sometimes the basis for

cognitive states (e.g. confusion), but that sometimes cognitive states (e.g. realizing)

are the basis for the actions performed in conversation. Heritage resists the

identification of cognitive states and processes with interactional events, suggesting

instead that the exclamation ‘‘oh’’ in conversation is a conventionalized ‘‘‘semantic’

deployment’’ (p. 202) that indexes a cognitive (change of) state, rather than merely

an outward expression of an inner state. Wooffitt, Lynch and Bogen, and Edwards

and Potter would see the emergence of a ‘‘post-cognitive’’ study of topics such as

memory—one that looks at the structure and work of accounts as situated and

accountable interactional practices, rather than looking to investigate or theorize a

causal basis for the human capacity to remember.

In short, the authors of the volume differ rather sharply on what cognition ‘‘is’’

and how it is to figure in analysis. Yet considering Conversation and Cognition is

comprised entirely of contributors who follow Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks

in some way, it is surprising that there is not unanimous (a) rejection of the

sensefulness of the program of cognitive science, nor (b) adherence to a professional

analytic indifference to an explanatory human science based in a cognitive family of

concepts such as ‘‘motive,’’ ‘‘intent,’’ ‘‘desire,’’ ‘‘belief,’’ ‘‘thought,’’ etc. This

particularly is so, since these concepts are components of members’ explanations

and accounts of their own and others’ behavior, and as such one might expect them

to be among the topics of analysis, rather than among its resources (a position

clearly advocated at the end of Potter and te Molder’s introduction).

Instead, one finds very different answers to the question of the relation between

cognition and conversation. Cognition is the (or a) prior basis for human action

(Sanders, Pomerantz, Drew); it is (or can be) analytically problematic to identify in

interaction and its relation to action remains unclear (Pomerantz, Schaeffer and

Maynard, Hopper, Drew, Heritage); interaction is an autonomous domain of inquiry

(Schaeffer and Maynard, Hopper, Heritage, Wooffitt); cognitive concepts should be

investigated as they appear and are implicated in members’ pragmatic practices of

language use (Wooffitt, Lynch and Bogen, Edwards and Potter); cognition is not a

phenomenon (Coulter, Lynch and Bogen); cognitive concepts stand to be respecified

as multifarious interactional phenomena (Lynch and Bogen, Edwards and Potter).

The range of these answers reveals some of the contributors’ deeper disagree-

ments over the nature of ‘‘the mental’’ and over the possibility for dialogue between

the cognitive sciences and studies of conversational interaction. At one end of the

spectrum, Coulter, and Lynch and Bogen, would explode the notion that cognition

could be a coherent domain of inquiry—cognitive science is founded on severe

misapprehensions of the nature and use of the concepts it takes as investigable

phenomena. At the other end, Sanders and (at times) Drew suggest that detailed

analysis of interaction could become a tool for cognitive scientists to investigate the

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topics of their interest. Between these poles is a range of other positions. Although

many of the book’s contributors would avow the autonomy of the structure of

interaction with respect to cognitive explanations, they hold different views about

this autonomy. Hopper leaves questions of cognition alone, refusing to speculate on

what empirical evidence might constitute sufficient grounds for identifying a

speaker’s mental state (e.g. an intentional strategy), whereas Wooffitt, and Edwards

and Potter, would transform cognitive science’s investigation of its phenomena (e.g.

memory) into the investigation of structures of interaction (e.g. memory accounts

and their local work). Heritage, and Schaeffer and Maynard, are content to identify

difficulties with the idea that cognition is locatable in interactional data, without

much implication for cognitive science.

What is the Point of Analyzing Interaction?

Considering the variety of ways cognition is conceived in these analyses of naturally

occurring interaction, it is worth asking what the point of analyzing naturally

occurring interaction typically is, particularly since cognition is likely to appear

incredibly relevant for some purposes and rather incidental to others. But

remarkably, this is a point on which Conversation and Cognition is unclear. The

editors’ introduction does raise the question of whether the cognitive should figure

in studies of interaction, but not the question of what purposes are being served by

taking it into account (or not), something that should bear directly on the prospects

for articulating lessons for cognitive science from such studies.

A salient issue here is that if EM and CA (and DP to the extent it borrows directly

from them) are programs that suspend an interest in constructing explanatory

accounts of people’s actions in favor of explicating the procedural basis of the

recognizability of social actions and the work they perform, then the potential for

dialogue between the cognitive sciences and EM/CA is going to be severely

compromised. The enterprises are bound to be talking at cross-purposes, and the

questions of relevance to one side are unlikely to be of interest or use to the other

(this position is adopted within the book most clearly by Lynch and Bogen). The

question is, to what extent is the EM/CA project still concerned with marking out

the formal structures of practical actions, an undertaking coterminous with

members’ methods of recognizing and identifying each others’ actions? To the

extent that this is still a valid characterization of work in EM and CA, some of the

intersections between conversation and cognition in the book appear contrived.

A useful example can be drawn from Sanders’ chapter. In it he examines one of

Emanuel Schegloff’s (1996) analyses to determine whether motive attribution to the

participants of the dialogue is a component of the analysis. Sanders demonstrates

that when Schegloff explicates the action of ‘‘confirming an allusion’’ (1996,

passim), he attributes motive to the actor. Sanders thinks he has caught Schegloff

out imputing motives, thereby demonstrating that ‘‘[conversation] analysts all along

have been attending to cognition… while denying that attention to cognition is

relevant’’ (p. 57). Sanders then mounts a rather intricate case that Schegloff has

attributed the wrong motive in one of his empirical examples; Sanders presents his

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own analysis of the segment that offers a better motive in its place. But he does not

appear to realize that this has no effect on the point of the enterprise. The only

significant criticism of Schegloff with respect to the project of CA would be to argue

that what he had identified was not the action he said it was; that the language,

structure, sequence etc. deployed in the ways that mark out this particular action do

not actually do the work of ‘‘confirming an allusion’’; that the participants in the

data are not doing what Schegloff claims they are. Yet Sanders’ re-analysis endorses

Schegloff’s identification of the action (p. 66), thereby leaving the project of CA

intact. Even if Sanders is successful (and he may be) in arguing that Schegloff has

misidentified the motive, he has not demonstrated that Schegloff has misidentified

the action or the basis of its recognizability. In short, Sanders’ critique appears to be

a veiled attempt to exchange the project of CA for the project of the cognitive

sciences, to provide explanations of and/or uncover the (causal, psychological,

neurophysiological, or inner) basis of social actions. Sanders says ‘‘one cannot

claim that [the speaker] disconfirmed an allusion without being able to attribute

relevant motivations to him’’ (p. 67). But irrespective of whether or not this is in fact

the case, it is a mistake to imply that CA practices or relies on a cognitivist form of

analysis that requires it to e.g. ascribe inner motives to the actors it studies. It is

Sanders’ treatment of cognition that is inherently cognitivist, not necessarily CA’s.

That is, Sanders equates the imputation of motive with the ascription of a hidden

‘‘inner state’’ to the actor. In this way, we can see how far his interest in the

organization of interaction has departed from earlier ethnomethodological and

conversation analytic discussions of motives as public aspects of actions and

circumstances (Sharrock and Watson 1984) rather than of a priori analytic value as

explanans.

How are Thoughts and Realizations Consequential in Interaction? What areThoughts and Realizations Anyway?

Usefully, Conversation and Cognition provides a unique basis for readdressing

some of the difficulties that Wittgenstein’s discussion of the meanings of words in

our psychological vocabulary poses for understandings of (and analyses of)

interaction. In using the book in this way, I have been necessarily selective in the

examples I have drawn from the volume in order to conscript them into an argument

of my own. My selectivity in examples runs a risk of mischaracterizing the volume

as a whole and the particular chapters from which the examples are taken, and

consequentially (by implication) the chapters I have not treated. I hope the brief

review above counteracts this to some extent, and I have taken care in what follows

to draw attention to where this practice is most likely to be unfair to the authors’

work I will consider, although footnotes to this effect may fail to do adequate justice

to the task.

If there is a genuinely Wittgensteinian program of research in the human

sciences, one might have thought that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis

would be the most likely contenders. Their general anathematization of theory,

uncompromising focus on the action-orientation of language, and recognition of the

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embodied, real-time features of interaction that figure in human practices and work

to make those practices identifiable can be seen as ingenious extensions of certain

aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.3 But the extent to which Wittgenstein’s

philosophy in general is carried through in analyses (rather than deployed as a

historical touchstone) often is not clear.4 Wittgenstein was perhaps no more

manifestly iconoclastic in his later work than in his exposition of psychological

concepts, and this collection of studies offers a rare opportunity to examine some of

the genuine differences in philosophical and methodological orientation with

respect to ‘‘the mental’’ that inhere in and are available to the practices of analysis of

CA, DP and EM. Uncovering some of these is the aim of this section, in which I

scrutinize two examples of analyses from the book.

Drew argues that (some) interaction is contingent on mental states (p. 171). His

empirical material at this point in his argument5 consists of a segment in which one

participant (Emma) has offered an invitation (‘‘wanna come down and have a bit of

lunch with me?’’). The other participant (Nancy) has, after a short pause, responded

with a well-prefaced turn (‘‘well you’re real sweet hon…’’) at which point Emma

anticipates that a declination is forthcoming, and interjects ‘‘or do you have

something else…’’. Drew suggests that a cognitive state of realizing is the prior

basis of Emma’s action here—her interjection before Nancy’s declination actually

arrives. Yet such an analysis raises a number of questions. Why the need to posit a

mental state of realization to account for the ostensibly anticipatory interjection

here? (To borrow a phrase Garfinkel used in a different context, who has what need

of such a device?) Why is the organization of the interaction insufficient to account

for Emma’s turn? Drew attempts to explain a speaker’s action of interjecting by

invoking a prior, mental realization. This analytic move instantiates a distinction

between a mental realization and a conversational action. But this is not necessary.

To invoke a realization as the cause or basis of the action (as Drew does on p. 171),

the same action that is the criterial warrant for analytically identifying the

realization in the first place, is a mistake. The relation between a realization and itsmanifestation in action is criterial (logical), not causal. Realizations are constituted

in (but not identical with) actions like offering comments, making noticings, and

other varieties of response. Such actions are criterial for having come to a

realization (though not always or exclusively). Furthermore, this analytic tack

presumes that words like ‘‘realize’’ (or ‘‘intend,’’ ‘‘want’’ etc.) refer to a private

realm of inaccessible-to-the-analyst ‘‘inner’’ phenomena, treating the ‘‘cognitive’’ as

prior to and separable from action. It also presumes that when we invoke such words

3 Many ethnomethodologists, Garfinkel among them, are more closely associated with phenomenology

(Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, frequently) than analytic philosophy

(Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle and the ‘‘ordinary language’’ school). This volume, however, is more

explicitly oriented to the latter than the former. DP has tended to cite Ryle and Wittgenstein as influences;

the CA community is often inexplicit in identifying its philosophical forebears. Lynch (1999) provides a

valuable and much more nuanced discussion of the EM/CA relationship to theory.4 This is not to suggest that EM and CA are merely extensions of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which

would deny the genuine originality of Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ programs.5 Drew’s chapter is interesting for reasons other than those I discuss here, and the analytic example of his

that I scrutinize is only one piece in his presentation of a variety of ways cognition and the analysis of

interaction might intersect.

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in describing social actions we are necessarily making an inference based on

observables; we are adding to our description an untestable hypothesis that in

addition to the behavior there was a prior, hidden, mental state of realization.

The Wittgensteinian alternative would be to accept that the meanings of these

words are not simply referential to events or processes in a private realm, and are

not divorceable from the selfsame features that are (mis)taken to be mere indicatorsof them. But to acknowledge this is not to say that in every case realizations must be

behaviorally manifested in some way. As with thoughts, feelings, and other

cognitive and affective concepts, these are ‘‘things’’ we can and sometimes do keep

to ourselves. It is this aspect of them which gives rise to the faulty picture that inevery case there are two things, one which we keep to ourselves (the actual, mental

realization), and its expression which is publicly manifested; that in every case we

cannot know for sure about others’ thoughts since the real thing is private, and the

other thing (which is not necessarily but only contingently related to it) is public;

that we can only ever surmise about others’ mental events on the basis of what

people say and do.6

This was the picture that was the target of Wittgenstein’s assault on the idea of

‘‘private language’’ and his exposition of how our words for thoughts, feelings,

sensations, etc. are meaningful. As he demonstrates quite exhaustively, such

concepts are necessarily tied in the first instance to natural human reactions and

expressions in our various forms of life. It would be pedantic to repeat those

arguments here. But the essential tie of these concepts to nonverbal behavior is how

they acquire meaning, criteria for use, how we come to use them of ourselves and

others, and without which they could not be words for anything. One source of

confusion that arises, as Malcolm (1977) has pointed out, is that they quickly ‘‘go

beyond’’ this essential tie with our actions. People’s testimony becomes a new

criterion of what they think and feel that we may credit ‘‘over and above and even in

conflict with the earlier nonverbal criteria’’ (p. 101). That is, there is often no

additional behavioral criteria (reactions, expressions etc.) for what people are

thinking other than what they say they are thinking: ‘‘to a great extent we cannot

check it [what people say they are thinking, feeling, hoping etc.] against anything

else and yet to a great extent we credit it’’ (p. 102). Does this mean that people’s

testimony of what they are thinking just is what they are thinking? If that were the

case we would not possess a conceptual distinction between what one thinks and

6 Following a similar line of thought, there has been a temptation to expunge all ‘‘mental’’ words from

the analyst’s vocabulary, which leaves one with a form of behaviourism. The rather unique confusions

posed by our words for the cognitive relate to their divergent grammars; that they are words that can be

(defeasibly) ascribed with varying criteria for their application. Thus, the question as to their generaladmissibility in descriptions and explanations of persons and events in interaction is misguided for its

presumption that there ever could be a general answer. Any answer as to the admissibility of such terms in

an analysis of conduct cannot be given in the absence of the particulars of the lived detail of an occasion

of use. This does not mean they are not admissible any more than it means they are always so. This is part

of what gives rise to theorists’ confusions here—for cognitive science, ‘‘cognition’’ is (mis)taken to be

omnirelevant for explanations of human action; for behaviourism, it is (mis)taken to be perennially

methodologically inaccessible even if it does exist. Both approaches mistake the grammars of the words

we have for mental things. One attempts to unduly stretch, the other expunge, their uses in service of an

explanatory science of human action.

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what one says one thinks. The point is merely to recognize what else must be in

place in order to raise the question of whether someone ‘‘really thinks’’ that or is

‘‘just saying’’ that (c.f. Wittgenstein, 1967, § 95). For this reason the distinction

between what one says and what one thinks (conversation and cognition) is not, and

cannot be, omnirelevant. This is not an empirical claim but a conceptual one that

relates to the ways that what one says and does are criteria (albeit defeasible criteria)

for what one thinks.

Coming back to Drew’s identification of a ‘‘cognitive moment’’ in interaction,

then, there does not need to be anything surreptitiously cognitive about the moment

he has identified. We can also see that there is no need to infer that Emma has come

to a realization—the empirical material furnishes an analyst with warrant enough to

describe what she does in interjecting as ‘‘realizing’’ that the invitation is likely to

be rejected. The analyst is doing nothing more in describing Emma’s reaction as a

realization than using the word ‘‘realize’’ as we ordinarily do.7 Realizing is manifest

in such actions, rather than something that stands behind them or explains them.

Drew appears to presume a priori that a realization is a private, mental object of

some kind, one that exists in an inner realm prior to and underlying the interjection.

But again, there is nothing necessarily hidden about realizing something, and there

is nothing analytically to be gained by invoking a prior mental realization as the

cause or basis of this action. The local work of Nancy’s pause and well-prefaced

turn are sufficient to account for Emma’s realization—one that is constituted in her

timely response.

On a very different side of these issues stand Edwards and Potter. Unlike Drew,

Edwards and Potter are explicitly opposed to the reification of our mental

vocabulary for the purposes of explaining behavior. They do not posit a cognitivist

explanation for the local organization of talk and the actions produced therein. Yet

in my view, they do something equally unnecessary. They attribute the pragmatic

force of what speakers accomplish in conversation to a latent form of lay

cognitivism. Instead of acceding (as Drew does) that a mental event such as

‘‘realizing’’ forms the prior basis of actions in discourse, we have the unusual claim

that a mistaken notion of private mental content is responsible for the purchase of

our psychological vocabulary in discourse. ‘‘The status of it [cognitivism] as a poor

general theory of language and mind does not prevent people making use of it as a

way of talking’’ (Edwards and Potter, p. 244). They contend that ‘‘there are

practical, common sense uses of such a notion… whose investigation requires no

commitment to mentalism on the analyst’s part’’ (p. 244). It is clearly the case that

the analysis of such discursive practices would require no commitment to

7 In their introduction, Potter and te Molder also draw attention to this particular example of Drew’s, and

they too argue he presupposes that a realization is a cognitive state. But then they join him in this

presupposition. ‘‘Does Drew analytically confirm the latter [that a realization is a conscious or

unconscious cognitive state] or is [it] a plausible everyday characterization of what is going on in a

culture that tends to offer cognitive characterizations of conduct?’’ (p. 52). With this rhetorical question,

Potter and te Molder suggest the issue is a cultural one, and imply that ‘‘cognitive characterizations’’ are

in essence problematic. My argument is that cognitive concepts are only problematic to the extent they

are identified with essentially ‘‘private,’’ ‘‘inner’’ phenomena.

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mentalism. But it is unclear whether and/or how a mistaken notion is consequential

in interaction in the way that they suggest.

True to the empirical nature of their program, they substantiate this claim through

an analysis of naturally-occurring interaction. I have re-presented it, and a part of

their analysis, below. My focus is restricted to their contention that speakers speak

‘‘as if’’ (p. 244) cognitivism is correct,8 and that it is this aspect of conversational

practice that is responsible for accomplishing (some of) the pragmatic work

conducted in interaction.

Extract (8) … comes from a counseling session with a husband and wife, ‘Jeff’

and ‘Mary.’

Extract (8)

(1) J: And I TRI:ed, befor yo- I dunno a couple o’

(2) days it might work [() and all] of a=

(3) M: [((coughs))]

(4) J: sudden I’d- (0.9) you know I’d (.) I’d go to

(5) wor:k or: I’d be on my ow:n, (0.4) somewhere

(6) an:d (0.4) all these thoughts would fill my

(7) hea:d and the anger would build up\ and next

(8) [time I see Mary I’d have a go at her you see

Jeff is responding to a complaint by Mary that he is spoiling her efforts to get

closer to him, following an extramarital affair she had, because of his

continuing bad feelings about it. Jeff tells how he does make genuine efforts

(lines 1–2) but they are thwarted by a kind of process he undergoes, that he

cannot help, that happens to him against his best efforts, ‘all of a sudden’

(lines 2–4). His expression ‘all these thoughts would fill my head’ serves as a

kind of observational report on things happening within him, where a notion of

passively and reluctantly undergoing mental experiences is something other

than performing actions for which he might be blamed. Note how it is nicely

situated in contrast to his concerted efforts ‘I TRI:ed,’ line 1). Jeff is using a

familiar, common sense mind-as-container metaphor (cf. Lakoff 1987). What

it does here is enable him to say and feel bad things about Mary, to avow and

express anger and resentment, and not be very receptive to her overtures,

without those being actions that he culpably does. So reporting on ‘in the

head’ experiences is a culturally recognizable practice in talk, that has its uses.

Of course, analyzing it in this way, as an intelligible practice of accountability,

implies no ontological endorsement on our part of what Jeff claims about

events in his head… (Edwards and Potter, pp. 257–258).

Edwards and Potter suggest that Jeff’s utterance that ‘‘all these thoughts would

fill my head’’ works as a report of something he observes happening within him, and

they come to the conclusion that ‘‘reporting on ‘in the head’ experiences is a

8 In a number of other respects, the examples and arguments they present in their chapter are close in

kind to ethnomethodological work such as Lynch and Bogen’s contribution to the volume. My critical

discussion should not be treated as a rejection of the entirety of the points in their paper or their program

of discursive psychology.

498 B. Matthews

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culturally recognizable practice in talk that has its uses’’ (p. 258). But there are

difficulties here. They appear to assume that any remark made about thoughts in

one’s head is automatically illicit, i.e. cognitivist or mentalist. So on the one hand

they concede that Jeff is speaking metaphorically, yet they paradoxically portray his

use of language here as though it is imbued with some form of mentalism—that he

is referring to actual, physical (or functional, or neural, or computational, or inner,

or…) states or processes taking place, literally, in his head. Furthermore, they credit

this ‘‘culturally recognizable practice’’ of ‘‘reporting on ‘in the head’ experiences’’

as the basis for the usefulness of Jeff’s talk. Each of these moves is contentious.

For one, it is not the case that every mention of thoughts in one’s head is an

endorsement of a cognitivist (or any other) theory of mind. To talk of thoughts in

one’s head is merely to talk about what one is preoccupied with, concerned about, or

perhaps obsessing over. In spite of the similarity of the two constructions ‘‘in my

head’’ and ‘‘in my office,’’ the difference with respect to how statements of this sort

are learned, explained, modified, ratified, clarified, defeated, etc. was an essential

part of Wittgenstein’s achievement of explicating how words in language have

meaning. To ratify my claim that ‘‘all these birds are flying around my office,’’ I

might tell you to go look for yourself or I might take a picture to show you. To ratify

that ‘‘all these thoughts were floating around my head,’’ I cannot do any similar thing.

Rather, I might try to further express what kinds of thoughts they were, what kinds of

actions they led to or help make sense of, what else was going on at the time to

provoke those thoughts or make them otherwise appropriate or relevant, or a number

of other things that are palpably not under my skull. To suggest that the mere mention

of ‘‘thoughts in one’s head’’ is a lay form of cognitivism is to miss the point

Wittgenstein made when drawing our attention to the surface similarities of some of

our linguistic constructions. These are similarities which crumble when we compare

how the uses of these words are woven into different aspects of our common human

lives (Malcolm’s 1971 reply to Peter Strawson remains exemplary with respect to

this point). This is done when we compare cases of, for instance, learning the use of

these superficially similar expressions, explaining their meaning to someone,

ratifying their correct use, marking the differences between first person avowals and

third person ascriptions, and the other battery of examples introduced in the

Philosophical Investigations (see also Hacker 1990, ‘‘Avowals and descriptions’’).It is odd that Edwards and Potter appear to accept that Jeff’s talk is metaphorical,

yet they do this in the course of putting this analysis forward as a paradigmatic

example of how a mistaken notion of mentalism has currency in interaction. But this

transcript is not such an example. There is no evidence here that Jeff is taking his

statement that thoughts fill his head any more literally than Edwards and Potter are

when they describe the phrase as metaphorical. For Jeff to be doing what Edwards

and Potter claim he is, namely, to be talking ‘‘as if’’ he is describing things in his

head,9 we would need to be party to much more than his passing remark that

9 One possible (but unlikely, given their emphasis) interpretation of what Edwards and Potter are trying

to do when they claim that people speak ‘‘as if’’ they are describing things in their heads is that they are

pointing out that some of our ordinary linguistic constructions for mental things bear remarkable

similarity to some of our ordinary constructions for other things. For example, like ‘‘coin,’’ the word

‘‘thought’’ is used as a possessive noun; e.g. my wallet can be full of (my) coins, and my head can be full

Book Review 499

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‘‘thoughts… fill my head.’’ We would also need to see, for instance, what he sought

to do in order to explain or clarify what he meant by this, or how he attempted to

defend his claim when it was challenged. For example, for literally inner

phenomena, the criteria must likewise be inner. Thus, if Jeff were to request an

MRI, or to shine a light into his mouth in order to show how full of thoughts his

head was, there might be a case to be made that he had been speaking literally (and

thus, mistakenly) when claiming that thoughts were filling his head. But as

pedestrian a use of language as ‘‘all these thoughts would fill my head’’ is not of

itself a covert nod to a cognitivist theory of mind. There is nothing illicit about

Jeff’s use of language here.

Edwards and Potter’s position that ‘‘reference to internal mental states’’ can be

‘‘studied as a practice in public forms of life’’ (p. 256) is surely a sound one. But to

paraphrase Wittgenstein, we must take care that the word ‘‘refer’’ does not trick us.

The sense assigned to ‘‘reference’’ in their treatment is problematic. It is obviously

the case that words do refer to thoughts, feelings and sensations, but not on the

‘‘model of object and designation’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, § 293). Jeff refers to

thoughts that filled his head, and he is engaged in something like reporting on them

in this bit of talk—but more than this is required as evidence to demonstrate that his

use of this phrase here is operating on the (incorrect) object-designation model—a

model that is preserved in mentalistic theories. It is the theorists’ model that is

flawed, not ordinary uses of language such as Jeff’s.

Furthermore, and this is a crucial point with respect to Edwards and Potter’s

employment of this example, the location of the thoughts is inconsequential to their

pragmatic analysis of the segment. The pivotal aspect of their analysis of what Jeff

is doing is that he speaks of his thoughts as autonomous (as something just

happening to him), as opposed to painting himself as the deliberate author of

thoughts that dwell on his wife’s infidelity. One can see that their analysis of the

pragmatic force of Jeff’s talk in this passage would not be affected had Jeff rather

said that ‘‘all these thoughts would come to me’’ instead of ‘‘all these thoughts

would fill my head.’’ As Edwards and Potter clearly show, what is of consequence in

this sequence is his attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for the appearance

of the thoughts in the first place. And this is something Jeff attempts by employing aconstruction in the passive voice, not by locating his thoughts under his skull.

Footnote 9 continued

of (my) thoughts. This might be all they are drawing our attention to when making this claim. But this

would not be the news they present it as; it would merely be a restatement of some of the traps that inhere

in language, which frequently ensnare those who would offer philosophical reflections on the nature of

the mental. Wittgenstein makes this telling point:

In this case we already have a picture which forces itself on us at every turn—but does not help us out

of the difficulty, which only begins here…. ‘While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going

on in his head.’ In saying this, one is not thinking of brain-processes, but of thought-processes. The

picture should be taken seriously. We should really like to see into his head. And yet we only mean what

elsewhere we should mean by saying: we should like to know what he is thinking. I want to say: we have

this vivid picture—and that use, apparently contradicting the picture, which expresses the psychical.

(Wittgenstein 1958, §§ 425, 427)

It is the mismatch between the use and the picture that makes for the aura of mystery that persistently

accompanies reflections on the mental.

500 B. Matthews

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While Edwards and Potter do not propose the existence of prior mental states as a

basis for conduct, they still cloud the issue by proposing that speaking ‘‘as if’’

cognitivism is the case is a ‘‘useful way of talking.’’ Drew invokes a mental

realization to account for an action; they implicate a notion of mentalism in the

accomplishment of talk’s local work. In this regard, neither Drew nor Edwards and

Potter seem entirely content with the analytic project of explicating the local

organization of talk and the work it performs, but seek to supplement it with

something else. But I am unable to see the necessity of either of these

supplementations. These two examples suggest that the themes I have organized

my discussion of the volume around—the relation between cognition and

conversation, the purposes of analyzing naturally occurring talk, and the meanings

and pragmatic force of words in our psychological lexicon—may still require

clarification in light of some of the analyses presented therein. Neither the

invocation of a mental realization, nor the appeal to a notion of mentalism add

anything of substance to either of these otherwise incisive pragmatic analyses of

interaction, and both analytic moves appear to misapprehend (in quite different

ways) the meaning and operation of concepts in our psychological vocabulary—at

least insofar as I have been a reliable expositor of Wittgenstein’s grammatical

investigations.

Closing Remarks

For many of the reasons above, and for many more which I have neither the space

nor skill to address, Conversation and Cognition is a remarkable volume.

Interestingly, its close empirical scrutiny of the relations between psychology and

discourse suggest that a few of the leading practitioners of conversation analysis

have inclinations towards cognitivism, whereas others remain steadfastly agnostic

with respect to questions of cognition in interaction. The burgeoning field of

discursive psychology may still have one or two philosophical kinks to iron out of

its program, though it largely deserves the credit for bringing these issues into sharp

relief. In my opinion on this particular showing, ethnomethodology stands apart in

its clarity on the relations between cognition and conversation.

Acknowledgments Andy Crabtree offered critical comments on an earlier version of some of these

ideas. His remarks were particularly instructive for my appreciation of the distinction between empirical

and conceptual analyses—a distinction that does not entail superiority (one way or the other) in species of

reasoning. I am also grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback

on an earlier draft.

References

Button, G. (1991). Ethnomethodology and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, D. (1997). Discourse and cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hacker, P. M. S. (1990). Wittgenstein, meaning and mind. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

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Lynch, M. (1999). Silence in context: Ethnomethodology and social theory. Human Studies, 22, 211–233.

Malcolm, N. (1971). Strawson’s criticism. In O. R. Jones (Ed.), The private language argument(pp. 33–49). London: Macmillan.

Malcolm, N. (1977). Thought and knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Confirming allusions: Toward an empirical account of action. The AmericanJournal of Sociology, 102(1), 161–216.

Sharrock, W. W., & Watson, R. (1984). What’s the point of ‘rescuing motives’? The British Journal ofSociology, 35(3), 435–451.

Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel. Oxford: Blackwell.

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