The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ group

Abstract

In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization. Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements of the critique: (a) my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal psychological analysis for the classic conversation analytic (CA) focus on the normative accountability of social action, (b) my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, (c) my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of conflict and hostility into CA thinking, (d) various concepts that I have introduced involve the invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field and (e) that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and reasoning that inhabit these papers.