Source: Human Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2/4, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: East and West (Oct., 1999), pp. 163-181 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20011238 . Accessed: 26/05/2014 19:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Human Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions U Human Studies 22: 163-181, 1999. jg3 P* ? 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Discourse and Mind JEFF COULTER Department of Sociology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, U.S.A. Abstract. In recent years, various attempts have been made to advance a project sometimes characterized as "discursive psychology". Grounded in what its proponents term "social constructionism", the discursive approach to the elucidation of 'mental' phenomena is here contrasted to an ethnomethodological position informed by the later work of Wittgenstein. In particular, it is argued that discursive psychology still contains Cartesian residua, notwithstanding its professed objective of expurgating Cartesian thought from the behavioral sciences. One principal issue has been the confusion of "conceptual analysis" with the empirical study of speech practices. If these distinct enterprises are conflated, the critical achievements of conceptual analysis are obscured or even misconstrued. A different picture of how best to analyze human conduct and mentality emerges if the lessons of Wittgensteinian grammatical analysis are preserved and extended, one more compatible with several themes in ethnomethodology. "The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials". William James. In recent years, a theoretical characterization of human mentality as in some sense a "discursive construction" has been advanced. The social construction (or: constitution) of the mental has been construed as a thesis which proposes that the human mind and its various properties are generated in and through discourse: in essence, the 'mind' is revealed in and through analyseable features of the things that people say and do through their talk, especially through their talk about the mental. I believe that this focus upon "discursivity" is both restrictive and misleading, and in what follows I shall contrast it to what I prefer to characterise as a "praxiological" approach. Indeed, some proponents of the discursive-construction thesis have identified some of my work as advancing a similar position to their own. I beg to differ. Grammatical investigations are not variants of discourse or conversation analysis, even though some of the concepts and methods of the latter can be employed to deepen and broaden the scope of grammatical inquiry. I shall discuss the nature of "grammatical inquiry" a little further on. In some respects, this paper is an instance of, let us say, biting the hands that read you. However, to quote J.L.Austin, importance is not important: the truth of the matter is. First, I shall outline the principal claims and arguments of the "discursive construction" theorists. This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 164 JEFF COULTER The Mind as 'Discursive' Construction The intellectual dispute, as I see it, is between those who call themselves "social constructionists" and the ethnomethodologists of a Wittgensteinian persuasion. Let me elaborate on this. Edwards and Potter ( 1992:18) wrote a book entitled: Discursive Psychology. In this work, they seem to me to have embarked upon a process of theoretical dilution, if I may put it this way. They write: Cognitive processes [sic], on this [social-constructionist-JC] view, are not the springs of human sense and action, however much our everyday concepts of mind may get to be refined [sic] by experimental psychology and cognitive science. Rather, they are ideas generated within cultures, conceptions of sense, action and motive [sic] that people invent to mediate their dealings with each other, to engage in social forms of life. This line of argument is familiar, in one form or another, in the work of social constructionist writers such as Gergen (1982), Harre (1979, 1983), Moscovici (1984), Sampson (1988) and Shorter (1984). ([Sic]'s are by the author, J.C.). This passage already concedes far too much: it concedes the existence of putative "cognitive processes" (whose nature is left unspecified), as well as the contentious notion that theoretical psychologists can "refine" our "everyday concepts of the mental. Exactly how this procedure might work is also neither specified nor defended. Indeed, subsequently, our authors note that in so establishing the framework for thinking of the mental in socio cultural terms, they leave the door wide open for the counter-argument that: . . . not only do individuals perceive, reason and make sense of the world without having to talk to anybody else about it, but also that none of those social, communicative kinds of representation are possible without the presumption of individual minds designed to grasp, analyse and take part in such practices. Whatever can be done socially needs a set of individuals with the cognitive machinery [sic] and competence to take part... So no amount of demonstration of the cultural basis of human thought and action need make the slightest difference to a cognitivist position. (Edwards and Potter, 1992). Having thus so peremptorily sold out the anti-Cartesian and anticognitivist position, Edwards and Potter proceed to embrace what can only be termed a "theoretical pragmatism" In this domain of inquiry (a version of which had earlier been championed by Jack Bilmes (1986) in his book, Discourse and Behavior, and to which I (Coulter, 1992) objected in a published exchange with its author (Bilmes, 1992)). They construe the alternatives in the field to consist in mere "rhetorical strategies" which suggest themselves, including the eclectic proposal to divide the academic labor between the various "perspectives" on offer (e.g., cognitivist, social-constructionist, etc) and the This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 165 theoretically-driven idea that some version or other of Vygotsky or Piaget might license a form of developmentalism according to which "the higher, cultural forms of cognition are later developments that build upon earlier, more primitive individual ones". They confess to having made some ?f these "moves" themselves (Edwards and Potter, 1992: 19). In these renditions of the issues, it seems clear to me that these writers have not understood the depth of the arguments against all forms of cognitivist reasoning, nor have they adequately appreciated the logical alternatives for inquiry and analysis made available in and through the critique of cognitive science undertaken by the ethnomethodologists and neo-Wittgensteinians whose work they frequently cite. What, for example, are these "higher, cultural forms of cognition" such that we might construe them as "later developments that build upon earlier, more primitive individual ones"? No-one who takes Wittgenstein's later logical analyses seriously has argued that cognition is anything other than knowledge,1 and that individuals clearly are those who can possess it (although it is also true to note that institutions can have knowledge, even memory!). However, the essential point is being missed in all of this: namely, that 'cognition' is intersubjectively ascribable and ratifiably avowable. That is the nub, if you will, of the 'social' take on 'cognition'. In Wittgenstein's (1969: Sec 378) own terms: "Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement". To give one more example from the work we are discussing, consider the following: Quite independently of questions about the reality of particular personality theories and types, or mentalistic [sic] notions such as motives, we can study their use in discourse (Coulter, 1989). We can explore how particular constructions of self and others are used to stabilize and make factual seeming [sic], particular versions of events in the world which themselves contribute to the organization of current activities. This reminds me of Bilmes' line, which asserts that while there very well may be interior, 'mental' phenomena named by mental predicates and concepts, the discourse analyst can proceed in complete independence of adopting any position on the 'reality' or 'unreality' of such putatively interior phenomena, arguing instead for an analysis of the ways in which such predicates are ascribed in discourse. Also, note the concession to Cartesianism in the qualification of the quotidian word 'motive' as somehow or other a 'mentalistic' notion. I believe that what I said in 1992 to Bilmes on this score holds just as well for Edwards and Potter: if you concede the ontological status attributed to the 'mental' and the 'cognitive' by your opponents for one moment, you have undercut the requirement that your own alternative modes of inquiry be taken at all seriously. For, z/the mental and the cognitive (and the 'personality' and the 'self) are indeed real entities in some sense, then the entire discursive approach is at best a side-show: the serious business at hand will remain the This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 166 JEFF COULTER work of the cognitive sciences, as they define this, viz., to depict the putative 'operations' of the individual 'mind/brain' in computational or connectionist terms. No ground has been gained at all. Edwards (1997) however, progressed to a much richer treatment of the issues, and in his major work, Discourse and Cognition, his arguments are more subtle, although still, to my mind, far too concessionary. In this recent version of discourse analysis and its relationship to the issues pertaining to human mentality, Mind and reality are treated analytically as discourse's topics and business, the stuff the talk is about, and the analytic task is to examine how participants descriptively construct them. (Edwards, 1997: 48). The problem with such a formulation is that it restricts the appeal to ordinary language conceptualization to that which is revealed only in a fully topical and explicit manner: the 'mental' is thus to be construed solely in terms of what people say about it. This naturally leads to a conflation of members' lay substantive (even psychologistic) theorising discourse with their deployment of mental predicates in a host of practical language-games. We are thus deprived of a major resource for criticising members' own appropriations of cognitivist and mentalistic theorising by reference to the logic of the actual avowal, ascription and presupposition of the so-called 'mental' concepts in language. If someone were to assert, in discourse, that "I think in my head", Edwards would be programmatically bound to conclude that "think", for (this or those) members is used in a Cartesian manner, and there's an end to it all. However, Wittgenstein's appeal to the logical grammar of our concepts in language-games does not entail any sort of endorsement of (nor neutrality towards) lay persons' theoretical speculations, any more than it involves acceding to professional theorists' discourses. The problem, then, concerns the conflation of "language-games" with "domains of discourse", a conflation that has plagued the "appeal to ordinary use" for decades. They are, I maintain, utterly distinctive matters. "Language-games" consist in activities within which the use of language is interwoven: complaints, involving ascriptions of'intention', accusations, involving attributions of 'motive', insults, involving the ascription of 'per? sonality' types, claims, involving the avowals of'memory' and 'perception', and so forth. Discourse, however, while indeed it obviously involves the deployment of concepts, is more generally understood in these texts as "talk about. . . X\ whetherXis a mental or any other 'topic'. Discourse is, within linguistics, a trans-sentential unit of the use of language: although I think that even this stipulative, theoretically-motivated definition is restrictive upon what actually could count as a discursive move in a language-game. Nonetheless, the issue for us, however, as anti-Cartesians, is not to furnish a blanket endorsement to whatever members may choose to say about the This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 167 "mental" (or the "discursive"): rather, it is to examine the rules of use of the mental predicates in their language, as rule-governed practices, in order precisely to demonstrate that their pre-theoretical and pre-reflective ways of using these words does not accord with any form of Cartesian or cognitivist discourse about them. Notwithstanding lay persons' occasional interest in lay psychological theorising, their lay mental-predicate attributions comprise another order of phenomena entirely. And the elucidation of the logical grammar of such predicates may be appealed to in correcting and con? straining "mentalistic discourse" of all stripes, 'lay or professional'. Grammar is normative: what people may actually say is, of course, up to them. But what they then can mean by whatever they say (if anything) is not solely up to them to say. Let us briefly return to our example of a bit of discourse which a member might produce if asked where he does his thinking-he answers: "I think in my head". Now, functionally, this locution can operate to signify the obvious fact that, on occasion, a thinker's thoughts are not disclosed. But the metaphysical and Cartesian interpretation of such a locution is a natural temptation (especially if we are to treat the "mental" as that which members speak of it as). Nonetheless, this temptation can be resisted: if "I" is being used to designate the speaker qua person, then it is straightforward enough to note that he or she as a person is not located in his or her own head, and thus his or her thinking is not done there but rather in offices, apartments, the automobile, the street, etc., etc. The 'mental' predicates and concepts are not to be understood in terms of how "participants descriptively construct them" {supra) but, rather, in terms of how members acquire and use these concepts according to rules in the myriad of mundane activities in which they engage. Of course, many (but by no means all) of these activities will be discursive insofar as they involve the use of language, but they will not relevantly consist in topical treatments of them as objects of lay, theoretical reflection. Lay, theoretical reflection is as much subject to critique for its conceptual errors and solecisms as is professional theoretical reflection. The "discourse analysts" concerned with the nature of the mental consistently miss this central point, tending (perhaps unwittingly) radically to relativize lay discourse's truth values when it comprises assertions, propositions, claims, and other truth-functional locutions about the mind, the mental, or about anything else. A good example of how the conflation of discourse with conceptual analysis can lead us astray is furnished by Edwards in his consideration of 'memory' : From a discursive perspective, relations between narrative and memory can be studied in two related ways. First, narrative accounts can be studied as acts of remembering, as the discursive equivalent to what people do in memory experiments when they recall events .. . Second, we can study memory as a participants' concern, examining the situated uses of words This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 168 JEFF COULTER such as 'remember', 'forget', and so on. And we can study how these two things go together, how appeals to notions such as remembering and forgetting feature in the dynamics of event reporting, and vice versa. Relations between narrative accounts and references to remembering are part of how ordinary discourse deals with relations between mind and world: in this case, with events in relation to memory." (Edwards, 1997: 282). The first point to note here is that Edwards confuses an act of recounting a recollection with an "act of remembering": but there is no such thing as the latter, as Ryle taught us over 50 years ago. Remembering is not an act-verb, but akin to an achievement-verb: to remember is to be correct about what occurred, and as such is a 'success-verb', akin to 'winning' not to 'playing', to 'arriving' and not to 'travelling'. This is revealed by a conceptual analysis, irrespective of how various discourse participants (which ones?) might discuss the matter (i.e., they might misconstrue the logic of the verb they use when they engage in topical discourse about it). The second point is to note how Edwards leaves room for an interaction between "mind" on the one hand and "world" on the other, a natural piece of (neo-?) Cartesianism if ever there was one. If "mind" is not an entity, 'it' cannot interact with anything. The eclectic tolerance for Cartesian residues inherent in the discourse analysts' treatments of the issue can perhaps best be seen in the following (and final) passage from Edwards: According to Wittgenstein, words such as 'remember' and 'forget', which psychologists may take to label private mental processes, are best analysed in terms of their public uses. This focus on public use is not a matter of denying the existence of inner mental processes. (Italics mine J.C.). Rather, "what we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word 'to remember' " (Wittgenstein, 1958: para 305.) (Edwards, 1997:283). It is certainly true that Wittgenstein did not deny thatsome (mostly metaphorical) talk of "mental processes" makes sense (e.g., "calculating in the head" or "doing mental arithmetic" would count as such a usage), but he certainly did deny that "remembering" (and "forgetting") were in any sense at all "mental" (inner, private) processes. The root problem with the "discourse analysts'" treatment of the 'mental', as I see it, is this: they treat the 'mental' predicates solely as "ways of talking", as if they were just 'fa?ons de parler", and thence they court the riposte: so, do you deny that people actually think, remember, intend, believe, etc.? Are these merely "ways of talking" among ourselves, with no greater purchase upon us than our "ways of talking" about UFO's, gremlins, phlogiston or witches? The discourse analysts are trapped in a dilemma which they themselves create by misunderstanding the Wittgensteinian arguments upon which they freely trade: for them, 'mental' predicates are This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 169 either names for real, interior entities or processes or they are names deployed in discourse as just "ways of talking" about self and other(s).2 The notion that they are not names of phenomena at all, and that their uses are not restricted to descriptive practices, has not been seriously registered by our discourse analysts of the mental. Edwards, elsewhere, does recognise this point, but in his efforts to elide conceptual with discursive investigations, it is a point which is often obscured. The 'Mind' is not a phenomenon which, like 'social realities' of various kinds, could be, to repeat a phrase of John Heritage's (1984: xxx) "talked into being", because there is no-thing to be talked into being. 'Mind' is either a lay notion, variously deployed, or a theorist's reification. When vernacularly used, it is harmless enough: "she's on my mind", "it slipped my mind", "he changes his mind", and so forth, all have clear-cut, contextually-dependent vernacular paraphrases, none of which commit a speaker to any form of Cartesianism or neo-Cartesianism whatsoever. Grammatical vs. Discourse Analysis Wittgenstein once distinguished between two kinds of "grammars" (in an uncharacteristically taxonomic fashion): In the use of words one might distinguish 'surface grammar' from 'depth grammar'. What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the way it is used in the construction of the sentence, the part of its use - one might say - that can be taken in by the ear. And now compare the depth grammar, say of the word 'to mean', with what its surface grammar would lead us to suspect. No wonder we find it difficult to know our way about." (Wittgenstein, 1968: para. 664). One of the problems with the discursive-analytic approach to problems in the study of cognition and mentality more broadly is that it encourages exactly this propensity to restrict itself to that aspect of the use of words "that can be taken in by the ear". Wittgenstein makes the distinction between 'surface' and 'depth' grammar precisely in order to alert us to the difference between aspects of the use of words which can be easily grasped and aspects which are not so readily available. He is, in this observation, not resurrecting the discredited Tractarian conception of rules of use as buried or "hidden in the medium of the understanding" (Wittgenstein, 1968: para. 102): rather, his later view was that "[t]he aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity". (Wittgenstein, 1968: para. 129). Thus, although we may "take in" an utterance such as: "I said it and I meant it" superficially to articulate a description of two activities, one physical ("I said it") and the other mental ("I meant it"), an inspection of further examples This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 170 JEFF COULTER of use, crucially including their contexts and purposes, reveals that "meaning something" is not an activity, and in the prior example of its use ("I meant it") it therefore cannot signify something that I did, but, rather, must be understood as proclaiming my commitment to what I just said (i.e., it was not something I am likely to retract or to alter). (Hunter, 1985: ch. 24, Depth Grammar). How, then, do grammatical investigations essentially differ from discourse analytical ones, especially if Wittgenstein is not advancing the idea that we must somehow discern beneath or below the 'surface' forms of utterances how we use our words? Gordon Beam (1997: Ch. 3) is helpful here in proposing a notion of "superficial essentialism". 'Essence', a term that Wittgenstein uses at several junctures in his later writings,3 has taken on a new significance. After all, like many of our words, 'essence' itself can have various and diverse uses. Phenomenologically, an 'essence' is that property or properties without which the phenomenon (e.g., the concept) cannot be what it is. In his mature work, for Wittgenstein it no longer means (as it had for generations before him) a hidden, unitary core or commonality across instances, revealed as such only by philosophical analysis and abstraction, but, rather, 'essence' now encompasses those myriad cases of the use of a word which perspicuously exhibits its grammar of use, the ways in which it can (and contrastively, cannot) be used intelligibly, thus constituting what concept it expresses. In Beam's (1997: 110) helpful phrase, "grammatical investigations would uncover superficial essences"-i.e., what constitutes the intelligibility of a concept is to be discovered by laying out many richly-detailed examples of the roles it plays in the weave of our lives as we observably live them (including, of course, in the weave of our discursive actions and interactions). 'Essences' are, if you will, distributed inform, but functionally specify what constitutes the meaning of a word. In Beam's terms, Grammatical investigations are investigations of the uses of words in various situations. Hence these investigations are not concerned with language in a narrow sense', they include or touch upon every aspect of our life with words. For instance, Wittgenstein says, 'It is part of the grammar of the word 'chair' that this is what we call 'to sit on a chair" {BIB, p. 24). The force of the italicized demonstrative is to invoke the way we move our body when we sit. So too the grammar of 'explanation' will include how and where we turn up our noses at dubious explanations. It is simply a mistake to think that Wittgenstein's philosophical method is hypnotized by words, needing further elaboration in terms of the patterns of activity manifest in different parts of our lives. Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations were already investigations of the forms of our lives." (Beam, 1997: 115. Emphases added). Construing Wittgenstein's grammatical inquiries thereby as 'existential' ones, Beam emphasises (as I have tried to elsewhere) (Coulter, 1989) that the This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 1 71 analysis of the conceptual structures that human beings employ facilitates a contemporary form of inquiry into what Alfred Schutz once characterised as the 'constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude'. In contrast to Schutz, however, Wittgenstein's focus upon 'grammar' as furnishing 'essences' enabled him more richly to represent, in his examples and discussions of them, how notionally 'subjective' concepts have intersubjective uses which give them their sense (including, of course, concepts such as "mind", "meaning", and the phenomenologists' favorite, "consciousness", none of which Wittgenstein saw as posing problems of a different kind than inquiries into the meaning of ordinary words like "lamp" and "tree").4 Against this, it may be argued that analysts of discourse and their allies, the 'discursive psychologists', are engaged in a purely empirical enterprise. When they discuss 'theoretical' issues pertaining to human mentality, however, inductive methods alone are unhelpful. We do not need an empirical sample of instances of what various people happen to say about mental concepts and predicates, but rather we need examples of their use in engaged activities, what Wittgenstein (1968: para. 122) called an "?bersichtlichkeit Darstellung" - a "perspicuous representation", involving the adducing of arrays of richly described cases of conduct and relevant circumstances in and through which the concept or conceptual stmctures of interest can be revealed. Abstracted bits of empirically-sampled 'discourse' will not help us here if they are chosen at random, since it is clear that people can, and do, misuse words on occasion, and may even do so in ways which are not locally corrected nor challenged by participant interlocutors. Hence, although, of course, real-world cases are our preferred forms of instances, no purely empiricist or distributional criteria will suffice for our purposes of clarifying the grammars of our concepts: for that, we require to distinguish between intelligible vs. unintelligible uses, correct vs. incorrect, appropriate vs. inappropriate, etc, uses vs. misuses, and to argue our cases for such judgments by appeal to the connections (and, where relevant, disconnections) between contexts, speech, implications, entailments, and conduct. Edwards, to my mind, conflates these enterprises in a confusing way when he asserts: My own more empirical (rather than philosophical) analysis suggests that mental state descriptions are not semantically fixed in their 'dispositionaP or 'episodic' implications, but can be to some extmtworked up discursively, on occasions, as one kind or another. This links 'mental state' terms to a Wittgensteinian notion of how they function as tokens in everyday 'language games', but also to a requirement to study them empirically, in use."5 Unfortunately, Edwards does not seem to appreciate that "dispositionaP' and "episodic" words did not exhaust Ryle's extensive range of distinctions between what he had called 'mental-conduct concepts'. What happened to the semi-hypothetical? the achievement, task and heed distinctions? And many This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 172 JEFF COULTER others. . . . Moreover, and more to the point, Edwards appears to believe (as do many discourse-analytic theorists) in the indefinite discursive flexibility or 'negotiability' of meanings, implying that distinctions between kinds of use must always be provisional in some sense. Thus, we are told that "mental state descriptions" (we are not at this precise juncture told exactly which ones) are open to being "worked up" as either episodic or dispositional. However, if 'believing' is, as Ryle claimed, in various contexts deployed as a dis? positional verb, and never as an episodic one (you cannot ask: 'how long did your believing take?', which you would have to be allowed were 'believing' ever an episodic verb), then Edwards' claim makes no sense. This is not a matter of empiricism ? of empirical adjudication based upon appeals to whatever anyone might have actually said - but of logico-grammatical argument based upon perspicuous instances of use. People can say whatever they like: whether they then mean something (including what they can or could mean) is not a matter for merely empirical determination. It is a normative issue, as we should expect when we are talking about rules of use, not mere empirical usage. Consider, for example, someone's empirical claim that whenever they speak of "knowledge" they thereby mean "true belief. And now consider the following: would someone who espoused such a semantics be prepared to handle the entailments of such a claim? For example, if I tmly believed that so-and-so, and then I ceased to believe it, I would not thereby have forgotten what I formerly truly believed. On the other hand, if I genuinely could be said to have known that so-and-so and subsequently ceased to know it, surely this would logically entail that I had forgotten it. What is left here of the discursive doctrine that "knowledge = true belief? Proper use combats improper use, and also "mere" (e.g., idle) usage, where relevantly invoked. 'The Discursive Mind5 and Social Constructionism We are, in this discussion, primarily concerned with the issue of how best to characterise human mentality and cognition. One major proponent of what I am calling "discursivism" in this effort is Rom Harr?. A distinguished philosopher of science, Harr? has in recent years turned his attention to the reconstruction of social psychology, and he has been a substantial intellectual ally to many of us in refusing to accept contemporary cognitivist depictions of human conduct. However, in a recent co-authored work, (with Grant Gillett, a neurosurgeon and philosopher), Harr? (Harr? and Gillert, 1994) seems to me to have begun to make far too many concessions to our (erstwhile) collective opposition. Harr? and Gillett (1994: viii) (hence: H&G) announce in their 'Preface' that discursive psychology is to be understood as the "culmination of a number This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 173 of independent developments ... It incorporates such contemporary move? ments as ethnomethodology, social constmctionism, and ethogenics". (This latter is a term of Harr?'s devising). Strangely enough, however, having introduced the term "ethnomethodology" up front (albeit as a mere precursor to what they claim is a 'successor' field), neither author refers to any aspect of ethnomethodological work in the remainder of the book! Perhaps that is just as well, since, as far as I can see, there is barely anything ethno? methodological in its treatment of the issues it addresses. I shall return to the relationship between ethnomethodological studies of human practices and grammatical investigations, as I conceive of this relationship, further on. H&G begin their concessionary treatment of the nature of "mind" in the following remark: ... the study of the mind is a way of understanding the phenomena that arise when different sociocultural discourses are integrated within an identifiable human individual situated in relation to those discourses." (p. 22). So, 'mind' becomes 'phenomena' arising out of the integration within an individual of discourses. But where is this 'within'? And in what does such an "integration" actually consist? The resonances with G.H. Mead and L.S. Vygotsky are clear: in spite of the brief discussion of the importance ofWittgenstein's later work with which this chapter begins, it becomes apparent that a more restricted, but at the same time much more 'theorized', account is to be advanced. For H&G: "Many psychological phenomena are to be interpreted as properties or features of discourse." (p. 27). Note the restriction here upon the widely ramifying domains of praxis and circumstance which Wittgenstein argued extensively are involved in the constitution of the 'mental' attributes of persons. (This restriction being shared by all of the discursivist scholars under consideration in this essay). It is not that "discourse" is unimportant: far from it. But to exclude by (theoretical) stipulation the gamut of other practices, expressions (facial, gestural, etc), visual orientations, relationships, circumstances of varying kinds, constitutive of mentality is to ignore whole dimensions of our social being relevant to the dissolution of the Cartesian and cognitivist problematics. "The workings of each other's minds are available to us in what we jointly create conversationally . . ." say H&G (p. 27), again oddly delimiting the domains of praxis and circumstance relevant to recollection, perception, comprehension, thought, belief, expectation and the rest. For H&G, we must allow for the "privacy or internality of the mind" insofar as "the meanings that inform our subjectivity [which] arise in public discourse ... may not be expressed or even named by the subject." (pp. 35?36). Although This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 174 JEFF COULTER it may be true that my conduct expresses a mental, perceptual, experiential or affective concept known to you but not known to me (although certainly know able to me, provided that I am a normally functioning agent), in what sense does this fact license generic talk about "privacy" and "internality"?, And if the mental, the experiential, etc., are now being construed as comprising a "subjectivity", what has happened to the Wittgensteinian insight into the intersubjective, grammatical constitution of mental attributes and properties? What has happened to the Wittgensteinian conception of 'outward criteria' and their contextual satisfaction? Is the 'mental' now being construed, along Cartesian lines, as 'subjective' in a sense other than that non-Cartesian (and unproblematic) sense in which it is, of course, subjects (i.e., persons) who are the loci of their avowal, ascription and display? From the text alone, it is hard to say. However, we encounter an even stronger concession to Cartesian ways of construing the mind-body relationship in the following: "The way a person thinks about objects informs and guides his or her behavior." (p. 41 ). But much of what I do, I do non-ratiocinatively, without prior reflection, although not thereby 'thoughtlessly', and on those occasions when it genuinely makes sense to say that the way he or she thought about something was related to what he or she subsequently did or said, the connection is not necessarily (nor even empirically generally) one of a prior action guiding a consequent one. It is in and through the exhibited conduct toward or with the object that one can tell in what way it was 'thought about', only if 'thought about' is here taken to mean something like: 'construed', 'understood', etc, and not as signifying a prior spate of reflection or of interpretation. The conduct-with-the-object, in other words, displays the way(s) in which the object was construed. Invoking the expression 'thinks about' here only misleads us into falsely postulating antecedent, undisclosed 'thoughts' as omnirelevant in understanding conduct. H&G appear to follow Vygotsky, not Wittgenstein (despite their occasional appeals to the latter) nor ethnomethodology, in portraying the links between the public and social spheres and the mental attributes of persons, and they find themselves having to allow a logical space to arise for inner, internal 'realms' within which the 'private discourses' and private 'symbol manipulations' can take place. 'Thinking' is still construed as an inner process on occasion, only now one facilitated by the mastery of a system of socially-shared symbols. 'Thinking', however, is zpolymorph and is not the name for a particular, identifiable process with specific ingredients, such as, e.g., masticating or digesting. I can, for example, on the basis of my words/deeds, be correctly said to "think that it is Tuesday" (when in fact it is Wednesday) without my ever having entertained such a discursive expression to myself. Note as well that, context apart, being informed simply that someone is "thinking" does not yet specify what he is doing: he may be trying to recall where he left his cigarettes or how to spell a word, figuring out his tax bill, wondering if it will rain, and a myriad of other possibilities. We are told by H&G that: This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 175 "... thought is not an overt operation on the world [sic]... the contents of one's thoughts can be hidden from other people. In this sense, thoughts are potentially private. Thoughts, then, are not objects in the mind but the activity and essence of mind . . ."(p. 49). In the latter, the regress to Cartesianism is virtually complete. One does not have to deny the occasions on which one or more thoughts remain undisclosed in order to reject these essentially theoretical assertions. ' Thoughts ' are neither the activity of mind (because 'thoughts' are not activities) nor the essence of mind (because it is people who think, not their 'minds'), and 'thinking' is not the name of any particular activity either, whether public or undisclosed as such, but is a polymorph in our language. The lessons of logical grammar have been left behind in these passages in the service of theorising. But theorising is driven out by grammar in this domain, if Wittgenstein's arguments are right. In their discussion of cognitive psychology, H&G observe that "slips and slides" occur between appeals to "brain processes" and appeals to "thought processes", but argue that: "... the danger of misinterpretation must be run, because it is just those ambiguities that make cognitive models fruitful", (p. 54). Yet it remains unclear exactly why we should tolerate the slips and slides of neural Cartesian model-construction, especially if, as these authors inform us, 'mental' phenomena are essentially discursive, not neurological, in nature. Invoking some work by the cognitivist theorist Zenon Pylyshyn, H&G claim that his results are "exactly what one would expect if discourse and signification were pervasive in representation". (p. 57). In the context of Pylyshyn's commitment to a 'representational theory of mind', this would appear to concede to cognitivism, its central notion: that of "representation" (in the (hybrid) mind/brain), only now apparently rendered acceptable if the 'representation' is something 'discursive'. In this way, H&G allow through the backdoor the Cartesian Lockean doctrine of'meanings in the head'. . . .6 Everything that Wittgenstein had to teach us about the nature of 'meaning' (as rules of use in language-games) is forgotten: the allure of cognitivism finally vanquishes even the residues of discursivism as a social theory, and the latent Cartesianism it permits comes fully to the foreground, although in its contemporary newra/-Cartesian form, according to which the phenomena Descartes had attributed to the met? aphysical res cogitans are now transposed in theorising to the central nervous system. Thence, the chapter becomes dense with uncritical (and largely unargued-for) allusions to "cognitive operations" and "information pro? cessing" . . . (p. 58). The rampant eclecticism of H&G's work might, in some circles, be acclaimed as the beginning of a productive synthesis: the authors themselves proclaim the "possibility of a link between this contemporary work in cognitive science and discursive psychology . . ." (p. 75). All analytical nerve now sacrificed to the gods of cognitive 'modeling', H&G display sharply something This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 176 JEFF COULTER I have often thought but seldom discussed: permitting Mead and Vygotsky such great play in the context of the mind-body-conduct problem only facilitates a sort of creeping neo-Cartesianism, when the whole point is to vanquish the beast, entrails and all. Ethnomethodology, Grammar and the Nature of Mentality There are so many points of convergence between what I am arguing here and ethnomethodological studies of human practices that it may appear otiose to many to reiterate them. On pain of repetition, permit me to elaborate. Ethnomethodological studies of in situ human practices have demonstrated, beyond question, the failures of both behaviorist and cognitivist approaches to the analysis of human activities. These (ethno.) studies focus upon the intersubjective, logical constitution/accomplishment of social order, and their detailed analytical achievements clearly exhibit the implementation of such a programme, notwithstanding the (normally) variable quality of work actually done under its auspices. This point holds as well for the major achievements of Sacks's programme for the analysis of conversation and other speech exchange systems in social life. There once was a time, lo those many years ago, when analytical endeavors pertaining to human actions were thought of as either (1) metaphorically inclined (Goffman), (2) behavioristic (Skinner, Homans, et al.) or, more usually, (3) cognitivistic-mentalistic (e.g., Blumer, and the symbolic interactionist, post-Mead program). Other than these, versions (barring the more ludicrous idealizations of "exchange theory" (and much of contemporary 'Rational Choice Theory'), according to which virtually all of human conduct was to be constmed along the lines of purely economic behavior), the coast was clear: and Garfinkel's major work inhabited the void vis-a-vis the serious logical analysis of human conduct in all of its contextual dimensions. There was simply nothing to contend with it, notwithstanding contemporaneous and latter-day protestations to the contrary. What, then, is the relationship that I am positing between ethnomethodology and logico-grammatical inquiries? The first thing to consider is this: my own preoccupation for many years has been the issue of human mentality and its relationship to conduct (among other things). Garfinkel's programmatic declaration that: ". .. there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains. Indeed questions will be confined to the operations that can be performed upon events that are 'scenic' to the person" (Garfinkel in Coulter, 1990: 6) posed a challenge: was this merely a methodological injunction, or could it have been/be more than that? Did it leave open a space for "interiorising" speculation, or was there a way of ruling that out, decisively, once and for all? I took the latter route, and still do. And I maintain that the dissolution of mentalistic and cognitivistic issues does This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 177 ethnomethodology (and related logical inquiries into human praxis) a real service - provided that we get the arguments right. First of all, there is the issue of theorising, upon which both Wittgensteinians and ethnomethodologists find common ground. Wittgenstein disparaged the constmction of 'theories' as ways to solve our philosophical problems, and Garfinkel (1967: viii) disparaged what he termed the "permissive discussion of theory" in sociological work. Analysis was to drive out theory: the ethnomethodological insight on this issue was simply this: our ordinary language and practical, commonsense reasoning, never having been subject to serious empirical-analytical inquiry, comprises methods and resources so dense and so rich for producing social orders of all stripes that 'theorising' was redundant. It could only and ever idealise, abstract from, restrict the appeal to, select from, distort and, thereby, stipulatively circumvent, the real issues that actually, in their rich integrity, arise within our ordinary affairs, including issues pertaining to the putatively 'mental' attributes and features of persons. 'Theorising', within ethnomethodology, as within Wittgensteinian grammar, had a bad name. And rightly so. It conjured up constructions like "synechdoche", "partiality", "extrapolation", "idealization" with reference to domains and issues for which such devices offered nothing but regimented and tmncated versions, ignorant of the complexities of actual usage and quotidian cir? cumstances, anxious to strip away the contextual features of real-world cases -as in Garfinkel's and Sacks' famous dictum, it was as if one needed to remove the walls of a house in order better to see what held the roof up! However, this commitment meant opposing a whole academic tradition, especially, but not only, the positivistic tradition. Positivism was itself already 'under the gun', but other traditions were still alive and well, traditions which encouraged theorising as a route to solving intellectual problems in the human sciences. Ethnomethodology and Wittgensteinian grammar stood together in opposing this appeal to 'Theorising' and still do. And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanations, and description alone must take its place. (Wittgenstein, 1968: para. 109). Now, I want to take (modest) issue with this remark as a blanket programmatic statement. For, as well we all know, ethnomethodologists posit procedural explanations ? they explicate how social order is accomplished in situ. But this enterprise is a far cry from inductive (or, especially, deductive nomological) forms of explanation familiar in the social sciences. Indeed, procedural explanations are coeval with precise descriptions of how members' practices actually work, operate, are do-able, account-able, intelligible, and so on. There is no significant, conceptual, conflict here. Discourse analysts of various kinds, however, especially in linguistics, often seek a wholly different kind of account: they tend to sustain an interest in issues This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 178 JEFF COULTER such as -why do folks speak in those ways rather than others? what motivates their speaking in such ways? what are their intentions and strategies and how are these realised in and through the deployment of various discursive devices and designs? and so on. It is no cause of wonder, therefore, that such analysts are sometimes (theoretically) driven to postulate "mental" causes or sources for such discourse fragments as they inspect. Conversation analysis, in the hands of Harvey Sacks, however, is a wholly different animal, necessitating no appeal whatsoever to interior, 'mental', 'unconscious' or 'cognitive' processes, mechanisms or operations. The crucial difference is this: whereas most discourse analysts concern themselves with the putative 'cognitive' competences of 'speakers' and 'hearers', inferring complex mechanisms of disambiguation, inference, interpretation, and the like, thus courting the "intellectualist legend" against which Ryle warned nearly half a century ago, CA (at its best) disparages all such talk, being preoccupied with the logical properties of actually produced utterances, sequences, etc., construed as sui generis properties, i.e., as in significant respects, analyseably "cohort-independent".7 Where, then, do the properties of speakers/hearers, so to speak, re-arise within Conversation Analysis? Sacks's brilliant insights into Membership Categories and Devices supplies our answer: persons (speaker-hearers) are construed as assemblies of occasioned features,8 contingent upon how local cohorts' practices constitute them. And the practices whereby such properties are constituted consist in (ratified/ratifiable) avowals, (ratified/ratifiable) attributions, detectable presuppositions of conduct, observable displays-in conduct, and warrantable inferences. These contingencies hold true also for each and every constituting aspect of the "mental" in my view. But that is an argument I have made elsewhere, and I shall not repeat it here. Having made such arguments, we must immediately take stock of two distinct (although related) issues: (1) the policy of "ethnomethodological indifference" to whatever truth-values may be inherent in members' practices (where so relevantly predicable), and (2) the apparently empiricist character of ethnomethodological studies. I shall consider these problems seriatim, and these will comprise my concluding remarks. A paradox apparently looms large for folks such as myself: on the one hand, we are appealing to mies of human practices in order to defeat lay as well as professional misconceptions of the 'mental', 'mind' and 'cognition' inhuman affairs. However, within ethnomethodology, a major study policy has been to refrain from analytical commitments to the truth or falsity of whatever practice might be so assessed. Nonetheless, despite such an apparent (and wholly superficial) divergence, "ethnomethodological indifference" taken broadly was always and exclusively intended (as I understand it) to refer to a principled indifference to the methods of analysis of the constructive-analytic, positivistic social sciences, and this is a far cry from denying that any results of such This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 179 ethnomethodological analyses can be utilised for other 'philosophical' (in Wittgenstein's sense) purposes. Insofar as one is interested in dissolving the mind-body-conduct problem for the human sciences, this constraint does not debar us from employing ethno methodologically-researched and analysed examples for our purposes. The difference is in the purposes being pursued, the issues being addressed, and not in any ontological or methodological barriers per se. As I noted above, I am concerned to liberate ethnomethodological work (and all of the behavioral sciences) fromanyand all vestiges of Cartesianism and 'modem cognitive science' theorising.9 Now, as we know full well, most ethnomethodological studies are of practices, not (or, at least, not in the first instance) of people. Nonetheless, the apparently empiricist appeal of ethnomethodology can be appealed to in order to blind us to the fact that, in principle, it is an enterprise wedded to the position that "there is nothing in the head of interest to us but brains ..." Our enterprises are so close, that it may seem pedantic to stress the point of connection (as well as to eschew the apparent divergencies). Nonetheless, I want to finish with a major, albeit contentious, point. It is this. In my view, ethnomethodological studies do not, when best accomplished, simply result in inductive, empirical, quasi-statistical, distributional generalities. They have, when well-argued and documented, a 'theorem-like' status. They reveal to us the "superficial essences" (to quote Gordon Beam yet again) of our ways of living together, ways of living within which we naturally deploy the ordinary language resources of motive, intention, hope, thought, recollection, forgetting, understanding, and the rest of what Descartes erroneously took to be the "invisible actions" of mankind. . . . Herein lies the connection, as I see it, between the apparently disparate endeavors of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Harold Garfinkel. Conjoined, they have a world to win. Notes 1. This of course, means that a 'cognitive process' would be a 'knowledge process' ? and that construction makes no sense. 'Knowing' is not a process at all. 2. See, e.g., Edwards, 1997: 316: "The first reductionist step is hardly even noticed, being the adoption of the standard psychological paradigm ? the individualist, in-the-head conception of what everyday notions such as thinking, believing, and knowing 'refer to'. Having conceived them as actual internal, mental processes, rather than as ways of talking, the second step is a much shorter one, which is to assume that they can be specified and reduced to the step-by-step internal operations of mind, brain, or program." Emphases in the original. 3. E.g., Wittgenstein, (1968: para. 371): "Essence is expressed by grammar". 4. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1968: para. 97): ". . . of course, if the words 'language', 'experience', 'world', have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words 'table', 'lamp', 'door'." This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 180 JEFF COULTER 5. Derek Edwards, 1997: 167, note 4. I am then cited as one who might endorse such a formulation, although Edwards is careful to note that I use the term "ethnomethodology", not "discourse analysis", in most of my work on this topic. 6. Eventually, we arrive at the following amazing remark (amazing, given the prior discussions and Harr?'s own other published arguments): "The brain, for any individual human being, is the repository of meanings [sic] in that it serves as the physical medium in which mental content [sic] is realized and plays a part in the discursive activities of individuals." (p. 81). Further on, we read: ". . . the brain stores 'experiences in terms of the meanings' that have structured that experience [sic] and the responses made by the individual to aspects of the events experienced." 7. I made this argument some time ago in a paper entitled: "Contingent and A Priori Structures in Sequential Analysis". (Coulter, 1983). 8. On the occasioned character of settings ' features, including those of persons/participants, see the classic discussion by Zimmerman & Pollner, "The Everyday World as a Phenomenon", reproduced in J. Coulter 1990: 96-113. 9. For a first shot at this, in the context of the contributions of the late Harvey Sacks, see my "The Sacks Lectures". (Coulter, 1995). References Beam, G.C.F. (1997). Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein's Existential Investigations. New York: State University of New York Press. Bilmes, J. (1986). Discourse and Behavior. New York: Plenum Press. Bilmes, J. (1992). Referring to internal occurrences: A reply to Coulter. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22 (3): 253-263. Coulter, J. (1983). Contingent and a priori structures in sequential anaylsis. Human Studies 6 (4): 361-376. Coulter, J. (1989). Mind in Action. London: Polity Press. Coulter, J. (1992). Bilmes on 'Internal states': A critical commentary. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22 (3): 239?253. Coulter, J. (1995). The Sacks Lectures. Human Studies 18 (2): 327-336. Edwards, D. (1997). Discourse and Cognition. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications. Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage Publications. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (1990). A conception of, and experiments with, 'trust' as a condition of stable, concerted actions. In J. Coulter (Ed.), Ethnomethodological Sociology. Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Gergen, K.J. (1982). Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge. New York: Springer Verlag. Harr?, R. (1979). Social Being: A Theory for Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Harr?, R. (1983). Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Harr?, R and Gillett, G. (1994). The Discursive Mind. London: Sage Publications. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Polity Press. Hunter, J.F.M. (1985). Understanding Wittgenstein. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moscovici, S. (1984). The phenomenon of social representations. In R.M. Farr and S. Moscovici (Eds.), Social Representations. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Sampson, E.E. (1988). The deconstruction of self. In J. Shotter and K. Gergen (Eds.), Texts of Identity. Shotter, J. (1984). Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell. This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISCOURSE AND MIND 181 Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical Investigations, (trans. G.E.M.Anscombe),NewYork: Macmillan. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty. In G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Eds.), (trans. Dennis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe), Oxford: Blackwell. Zimmerman, D. and Pollner, P. (1990). The everyday world as a phenomenon. In J. Coulter (Ed.), Ethnomethodological Sociology. Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar. This content downloaded from 200.76.166.4 on Mon, 26 May 2014 19:52:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions