Introductory remarks

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate discursive psychology and its methodology by examining some extracts from the interview materials. “Discursive psychology” studies the relationships between mind and world, as psychology generally does, but as a discourse topic, that is, as a participants' concern, a matter of talk's business, talk's categories, talk's rhetoric, and talk's current interactional concerns. This contrasts with most other psychological approaches, in which talk is treated as the expression and communication of thoughts and communicative intentions. Among various inspirational sources for the discursive approach taken here, I would list Harvey Sacks' (1992) lectures on conversation, Melvyn Pollner (1987) on reality disjunctures, Dorothy Smith (1990) on factual discourse, Jeff Coulter (1990) on language and mind, Michael Billig (1987) on rhetoric, and Potter and Wetherell (1987) on the relevance of discourse studies to social psychology (see also Harré and Gillett 1994; Smith, Harré, and Langenhove 1995). Examples of my own work include various books and articles (Edwards 1991, 1995, 1997; Edwards and Potter 1992, 1993) that investigate how common-sense conceptions of mind and world are deployed in everyday talk and text.

One basic theme in all of this work is the way that mind and world are generally played against each other, in a conceptual and rhetorical trade-off between the world “out there” and the mental world “within,” including whatever characteristics or “dispositions” may be claimed by, or assigned to, people.