Readings MONDAY July 15

ASSIGNMENT: The reflections should 1) demonstrate that you have critically read the assigned readings; 2) raise questions that you would like us to discuss in class; 3) provide any update on your final paper focus.

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Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. Sage Publications. p. 1-76.

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     Today's readings consisted of the introduction and chapters 1-3 of Edwards and Potter's book referenced above. The introduction and chapter 1 offer an explanation of discursive psychology (DP) and how the author's will use the model throughout the rest of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 are examples of using discourse to learn about memory. 

 

     Highlights from the intro and chapter 1 include the following:

• When people report, or describe, "factual" events, they are "performing delicate and psychologically problematic actions" (p. 3) and that others receive reports as such. DP is charged with figuring out how people tend to these actions. Although, I get frustrated with some of the reading (see last Wednesday's blog), I actually relate to this kind of work. I know that DP research isn't concerned with the applicability of DP, but I see the use of understanding how people construct meaning in social situations by what they say and how they say it. I see this being used in my everyday life working with teachers. 
• DP, using the discursive action model, takes Chomsky's mess (language is "simply too messy and disorderly to be addressed" p. 5) and scrutinizes each detail as "crucially important for the sense of the activities being performed in the talk" (p. 6). In class last week, a lot of us felt overwhelmed at the thought of analyzing every little thing that people say within a conversation. However, the authors actually just take the pieces of the conversation that they would like to investigate and use the rest of the conversation for background knowledge.
• The authors remark that "there is no single, definitive version of everyday events" (p. 9). There was a lot of conversation in the case study class I just took about how researchers see the world and how that perspective (and belief system) influences what they research and how. In that class, we focused on positivism, post-positivism, and constructivism. (We also briefly discussed postmodernism.) Would DP be an entirely new category for epistemology? Are there hybrids of DP and constructivist, or is DP too specific to allow that?
• Speaking of epistemology, I am probably more of a "proponent of cognitivism"(p. 18) due to its interest in the individual, but I'll try to bracket (p. 19) that for the semester and dive in to DP.

     I enjoyed reading Chapters 2 and 3, because they were less about what DP is and the argument for using DP instead of traditional methodologies, and more about using DP in contexts. In chapter 2, the authors reviewed Neisser's study of John Dean's testimony during the Watergate scandal. The author's liked that Neisser used large pieces of text in his study making his interpretation of the events more explicit. What the authors did not like was Neisser's idea that accurate recall is possible. The author's do not think that there is one truth, so people studying memory should not be concerned about how accurate the person is, mostly because there is usually no way to tell anyway! The author's go on to cite Schegloff (1972), "A verbal remembering of events is a description. Descriptions can vary in a range of significant ways without their being merely...true or false" (p. 51).

 

     Chapter 3 reviews an argument between 10 newspaper journalists and a politician. The journalists claimed that the politician said x. The politician at first denied saying x. The quote was off the record and no one had a recording or full transcription of the events. Then, the politician said, actually you quoted me correctly, but interpreted what I said incorrectly. Finally, the journalists said well, we interpreted you this way because of the other stuff you said. "And thus the interpretations became indistinguishable from the facts of that was actually said" (p. 67). What the entire "conversation" boils down to is this... From each perspective, the participant believes themselves as the realist, truth-teller and the other person, who is obviously wrong, must be just constructing their own reality. (This goes back to last Wednesday's reading- Gilbert and Mulkey- when scientists justified their right or wrong hypothesis.)