Inaugural lectures
Wednesday November 25, 2009 at 5.00pm - Lecture Theatre SMB.0.14 - Stewart Mason Building
The uses of intentionality and other psychological concepts in conversation
Professor Derek Edwards, Department of Social Sciences
Professor Edwards demonstrates how ‘discursive psychology’ (DP) provides a way of understanding the commonsense reasoning that people use in ordinary conversation. He introduces DP, and draws on his recent and current research into how mental and other psychological concepts are used in the service of the practical actions that language performs.
Illustrations are taken from a variety of audio-recorded sources including ordinary conversations, telephone complaint lines, counselling and police interrogations. In contrast to mainstream psychology, whose task is often characterized as that of replacing common sense with a scientific alternative, DP studies how common sense actually works – in particular, concepts such as thinking, knowing, intending, forgetting, believing, feeling angry, and so on. The key is not to approach common sense psychology as potentially erroneous descriptions of mental life, but rather to examine empirically how psychological concepts are actually used, and what they are used to do.
Both empirically and theoretically, DP approaches everyday psychological concepts as parts of a culture, grounded in the practices of social interaction, in activities such as accusing, complaining, complimenting or receiving compliments, making or rejecting offers and invitations, and so on. As Wittgenstein observed, psychological expressions do not exist by reference to private mental experiences, but in terms of their public uses.