Epistemics in social interaction

Abstract

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of (the relevance of) epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other (1) are embedded in turns and sequences, (2) inform the design of turns at talk, (3) are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another (e.g. from K+ to K−), and (4) are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction (i.e. embedding, turn design, correction and contesting) it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis.