Time to talk

This chapter is concerned with the temporal nature of talk within conversation and its relationship with interpreting and understanding what is said. Within the field of conversation analysis analysts are not concerned with how fast interlocutors are thinking as they talk with one another, but instead focus on the ways that procedural issues are attended to. This aversion to inferring mental processes has been taken up by analysts interested in examining discursive psychology through the ways in which discourse is produced in talk in terms of its orientation to psychological concerns. Such an approach shares with conversational analysis an agnostic stance with respect to underlying mental processes as the modus operandi of conversational exchanges.

Whilst discursive psychology had adopted conversation analysis as a methodology for its programme, it has strayed away from its focus on procedural possibilities, and instead has treated interlocutors as engaged in operations such as designing and interpreting what is said. In other words, it treats discourse as involving a tacit process which takes time to operate between interlocutors. This, in effect, leaves the conceptual door ajar for a mentalist construal of what people are engaged in doing when the talk to one another.

The chapter argues against this approach and instead suggests that much of our communicative conduct does not involve thinking before speaking, or interpreting what another person has said.