Throwing the baby out with the bath water?: Commentary on the criticism of the ‘Epistemic Program’

Jakob Steensig; Trine Heinemann

doi:10.1177/1461445616659173

Throwing the baby out with the bath water? Commentary on the criticism of the ‘Epistemic Program’

School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal/Conference contribution in journal/Contribution to newspaper › Journal article › Research › peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

It is timely and important that new developments in conversation analysis (CA) become the subject of principled debate. John Heritage’s recent papers on the role of epistemics constitute one such development, and by re-analysing excerpts from this work, the articles in this Special Issue reveal some significant problems with a programmatic approach to epistemics. This commentary agrees with the critics that there are dangers in an overemphasis on epistemics and in using isolated utterances and proposing abstract scales and terms. But the commentary also warns against totally rejecting epistemics as a domain of inquiry in CA and points to places where the critics exaggerate their criticisms in a way that makes them unnecessarily hostile.

Original language	English
Journal	Discourse Studies
Volume	18
Issue	5
Pages (from-to)	597-609
Number of pages	13
ISSN	1461-4456
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616659173
Publication status	Published - 2016

Keywords

Conversation Analysis
Criticism
Epistemics
Methodology
Re-analysis
Sequential analysis

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10.1177/1461445616659173

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title = "Throwing the baby out with the bath water?: Commentary on the criticism of the {\textquoteleft}Epistemic Program{\textquoteright}",

abstract = "It is timely and important that new developments in conversation analysis (CA) become the subject of principled debate. John Heritage{\textquoteright}s recent papers on the role of epistemics constitute one such development, and by re-analysing excerpts from this work, the articles in this Special Issue reveal some significant problems with a programmatic approach to epistemics. This commentary agrees with the critics that there are dangers in an overemphasis on epistemics and in using isolated utterances and proposing abstract scales and terms. But the commentary also warns against totally rejecting epistemics as a domain of inquiry in CA and points to places where the critics exaggerate their criticisms in a way that makes them unnecessarily hostile.",

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AB - It is timely and important that new developments in conversation analysis (CA) become the subject of principled debate. John Heritage’s recent papers on the role of epistemics constitute one such development, and by re-analysing excerpts from this work, the articles in this Special Issue reveal some significant problems with a programmatic approach to epistemics. This commentary agrees with the critics that there are dangers in an overemphasis on epistemics and in using isolated utterances and proposing abstract scales and terms. But the commentary also warns against totally rejecting epistemics as a domain of inquiry in CA and points to places where the critics exaggerate their criticisms in a way that makes them unnecessarily hostile.

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KW - Criticism

KW - Epistemics

KW - Methodology

KW - Re-analysis

KW - Sequential analysis

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ER -

Throwing the baby out with the bath water? Commentary on the criticism of the ‘Epistemic Program’

Abstract

Keywords

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