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The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the

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2018, Vol. 20(1) 14–56
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John Heritage
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abstract
In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising
six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are
asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization.
Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless
somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements
of the critique: (a) my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal psychological analysis for the
classic conversation analytic (CA) focus on the normative accountability of social action, (b)
my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-
turn proof procedure’, (c) my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of
conflict and hostility into CA thinking, (d) various concepts that I have introduced involve the
invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field
and (e) that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that
much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute
all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and
reasoning that inhabit these papers.
Keywords
Epistemics, oh, question–answer sequences, epistemics, sequence organization, turn design
Corresponding author:
John Heritage, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 264 Haines Hall, Box 91551,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551, USA.
Email: heritage@ucla.edu
Heritage 15
In a recent special issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’,
a group of authors offered a coordinated attack on a position that they labeled as the
‘epistemics program’ (or EP). Most of the papers to which they took exception were
concerned with a range of practices that participants use to position themselves in rela-
tion to objects of knowledge, both in ordinary conversation and in medical and mass
media contexts. Most of the criticism was launched from the standpoint of post-analytic
ethnomethodology (Lynch, 1993), a perspective derived from some of Harold Garfinkel’s
later lectures and writings and pursued by some within the ethnomethodological field.
As it turned out, the papers making up the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ (EoE) collection
were primarily occupied with attacks on my research, both solo- and jointly authored,
reaching back more than 30 years. Although the papers are inconsistent, confusing and,
at times, self-contradictory, the following main lines of criticism can be discerned:
1. My work is ‘cognitivist’, resorting to the invocation of external knowledge to

account for the meanings of conversational actions when their meanings lie
before us without need of such explication. This so-called ‘cognitive’ analysis
amounts to a substitute for sequential analysis and attempts inappropriately and
incorrectly to substitute causal theorizing for the analysis of social practices.1
2. The approach to data in my research flouts elementary principles of CA practice,
such as the use of the ‘next-turn proof procedure’ for ascertaining the meaning of
an action, and substitutes an illegitimate ‘third-turn’ proof procedure in the ser-
vice of ‘cognitive’ analyses of turns in a manner reminiscent of the ‘literary’
techniques of speech act theory.
3. The analysis of oh-prefacing and other means for conveying epistemic stance is
false and unwarranted and introduces themes of agonistic conflict, domination
and subordination that are foreign to the traditions of CA.
4. The distinction between epistemic stance and epistemic status, the conception of
epistemic gradients and so on that I have pioneered amounts to a non-ethnometh-
odological introduction of ‘hidden orders’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016) of unwar-
ranted sociological and psychological claims into a field whose decisive successes
have emerged precisely in the avoidance of these kinds of conceptualizations.
This represents a regression to the outmoded communication theory of a bygone
era. Insofar as these concepts are directed to the topic of action formation, they
are directed to a non-problem that should be ‘dissolved’ rather than ‘solved’.
5. My research has also from the outset been ‘informationist’ in proposing that par-
ticipants’ actions are driven by a need to traffic in information when there are
many other and multiplex objectives that are prosecuted in interaction.
There is nothing in these critiques that has the least substantive merit. They offer no
new empirical perspectives, nor do they contribute to the corpus of CA findings. Instead,
the primary agenda appears to be wholesale demolition. The attempt is mainly imple-
mented through the construction of guilt by association (Goffman, speech act theory,
Levinson, psychology, cognitivism etc.) using highly selective fragments of my argu-
ments, and sometimes even of my sentences, as ‘proofs’ of faulty assumptions or defec-
tive reasoning.2 These are heavily laced with tendentious innuendo and juxtaposed with
16 Discourse Studies 20(1)
near theological invocations (Maynard and Clayman 2018) of statements or positions

associated with (mainly) Garfinkel or Schegloff. There are also attempts at ‘reanalysis’
of certain sequences that, unsurprisingly given the authors’ general ignorance of CA
methods and results, tend to turn out badly (Clift and Raymond, 2018; Raymond, 2018).
In this response, I shall be blunt. (a) There is no such thing as an ‘epistemic program’
(EP) within CA. Such a program has not been promulgated by me, nor as Steensig and
Heinemann (2016) note (pp. 604–605), is it recognized as such within the CA commu-
nity. Indeed, only someone profoundly ignorant of the state of the field, and indeed the
workings of interaction itself, could possibly assert that
the EP presents an alternative machinery to that of the ‘turn-taking machine’ (Sacks et al.,
1974), which has been the hallmark of CA for decades. (Lynch and Wong 2016: 527)
The so-called ‘epistemic program’ is a pure invention produced in the service of an

incorrect and tendentious misrepresentation of my research. It is fabricated by giving a
collection of materials a name and then inventing a backstory of intentional theorizing
designed to enable a critique of its so-called ‘cognitive’ and ‘formal analytic’ analyses.3
(b) None of the research on oh by me is ‘cognitivist’, nor is the growing body of research
by others on change-of-state tokens in other languages (e.g. Heinemann and Koivisto,
2016). In all cases, the research is guided by Goffman’s (1978) conception of response
cries, which treats expressions like oh and ouch as practices of other-directed social
actions, similar to other practices of action in conversation. (c) My research into ques-
tion–answer (Q-A) sequences, which is quite extensive, does not commit me to the
‘informationist’ position that interaction is exclusively driven by information imbalances
or information needs. This idea is well known to be naïve and absurd and was discredited
as far back as the 1960s. (d) So far from being a ‘non-problem’ to be “dissolved,” action
formation is a genuine and widely-recognized problem within CA (Schegloff, 1996a,
2007, 2008: xiv, 7–9). Indeed, as Lindwall et al. (2016: 503) correctly note, ‘the produc-
tion and recognition of social actions has been a central topic within CA since the time
of Sacks’ (1992 [1964-1972]) early lectures’. This is because social actions in conversa-
tion are methodically based on the production of words and embodied conduct situated
within sequential and ecological contexts. Since CA is the study of members’ methods
for producing and recognizing actions, then action formation is not a problem that can be
‘dissolved’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016: 529) through the next-turn proof procedure, no mat-
ter how useful the latter may be as one of CA’s methodological resources (Schegloff,
1996a). Moreover, as Raymond (2018) and Bolden (2018) document, conversational
practices associated with epistemics combine with practices from other domains of con-
versational organization in the creation of specific actions that are meaningful as actions,
and in particular and singular ways. (e) The recent expansion of research on turn design
within CA (Drew, 2013) does not involve any abrogation of CA’s traditional concerns,
let alone a slide in a ‘literary’ or ‘linguistic’ or ‘formal analytic’ direction. Rather, it
reflects a renewed emphasis on action formation, recipient design, the social relations of
interaction and variation within sequences as well as between them, all of which, as
noted by Lindwall et al. (2016), have been consequential topics for CA from Sacks’ lec-
tures onwards.
Heritage 17
I have not replied to the very few criticisms of my research of this type that have
appeared in the past. Rehashing and litigating claims and counter-claims about texts do not
advance our knowledge of social interaction and are likely to prove even more tedious to
the bystander than they are to the principals. I would add that these contributions, despite
their concerted and coordinated production, are so self-contradictory, so poorly argued
(and often not argued at all) and so at odds with one another as to represent particularly
unpromising candidates for an enlightening response. But while replying to critiques
almost certainly involves much wasted time, the extent of these attacks, the allocation to
them of a whole special issue of a reputable journal and the sheer density of their confla-
tions, confusions, misquotations and misrepresentations appear to warrant it. In what fol-
lows, I rebut the faulty argumentation and misleading claims presented in the EoE
collection. I begin with a general review of considerations that should lead toward a recog-
nition of the ubiquity of epistemic considerations for persons in talk-in-interaction, proceed
to a rebuttal of the EoE critiques of my research and conclude with some more general
comments on the methods of CA and on the development of CA over the past 20 years.
On the ubiquity of epistemics

There is a very large body of evidence that human beings have an interest in monitoring
absolute and relative knowledge states and in performing actions that are broadly con-
gruent with them:
1. Perhaps the most wide-ranging evidence of speakers’ epistemic orientations

arises from the fact that all the systematically studied languages of the world (902
out of c. 6000+ languages) have normatively institutionalized grammatical
resources for marking differences between the actions of asking for information
and asserting it (Dryer, 2016). Since grammar consists of nothing but norma-
tively enforced rules for the construction of social actions and the communication
of meaning, we might conclude that, since the languages of the world uniformly
make grammatical distinctions between interrogative and declarative utterances
and deploy them with enormous frequency, the entire human race is inclined to
take an interest in who has knowledge of what and when and to treat it with care.4
2. In the domain of yes/no, or polar, questions, it turns out that approximately 82%
of the 955 languages surveyed by Dryer (2017) deploy some combination of
syntax and/or morphology to discriminate questions (‘Is he going to the mov-
ies’), from assertions (‘He’s going to the movies’), thereby manifesting a similar
normatively institutionalized commitment to the relationship between knowl-
edge states and their congruently appropriate linguistic expression.
3. Epistemic markings of assertions, that index the provenance of what is asserted,
and/or the speaker’s confidence in the assertion are widespread among the world’s
languages. These markings come in two broad forms. (a) Evidentiality is concerned
primarily with the provenance or source of the information and is grammatically
obligatory in approximately a quarter of the world’s languages (Aikhenvald, 2004).
Grammatically obligatory here means that every assertion must have a grammati-
cal marking that indicates that it arises, for example, from direct observation, or
hearsay, or inference, or from sensation. Languages like English that do not have a
grammaticalized evidential system nonetheless deploy a wide variety of phrases to
perform the same function: I hear that, I see that, I understand that, I was told that
etc. Failure to deploy these phrases can readily lead to misunderstanding. If I say
that Turkey is a great place for a vacation, without a phrase such as I hear that, I
will be understood to be talking about first-hand experience.5 (b) Epistemic modal-
ity (Palmer, 2001), by contrast, indexes the speaker’s confidence in what is asserted,
for example, I know he’s coming, He might be coming, Perhaps he’s coming, I
believe he’s coming etc. In a number of the world’s languages, epistemic modality,
like evidentiality, is also grammaticalized and obligatory. The extent to which evi-
dentiality and epistemic modality are deployed in the world’s languages again
speaks to speakers’ interests in information, its management and its relative charac-
ter. For example, in (1), a questioning repeat following a first speaker’s assertion is
sufficient to induce an evidentialized backdown:
(1) [Travel Agency:10:ST]
l A: Derek we have no hea::t.

2 D: Yih have no hea:t?
3 A: -> We, can’t feel any.
And in (2), epistemic modality is deployed to similar effect:
(2) [NB:I:1:17]
l E: They charge too much Guy,

2 G: Oh do they?
3 E: -> Yeh I think so,
4 G: What do they cha:rge.
These simple epistemic maneuvers are only one of many hundreds of uses for these
practices.
4. An orientation to the knowledge of others penetrates language practices to some

depth. For example, if I tell a colleague that ‘I’m going to a meeting’, she will
rightly assume that I believe that she doesn’t know about the meeting I’m refer-
ring to (even if in fact she does). However, if I tell her that ‘I’m going to the
meeting’, she will assume that I believe that she does know about the meeting
(even if in fact she doesn’t). Thus, a choice on such a minutia as the selection
between the definite and indefinite article is shaped by parties’ beliefs about the
knowledge of their interlocutors, knowledge that they can be held accountable
for, and will tend to track accordingly (Clark and Marshall 1992).6
In the openings of my papers on epistemics, I noted the contributions of Sacks,

Terasaki and Goodwin (and I could add Button (Button and Casey 1984, 1985)) in elu-
cidating the relevance of news in conversational organization, including dedicated
Heritage 19
structures for initiating its delivery in the context of a preference for not telling people
things they already know (Maynard, 2003; Sacks, 1992 [1964-1972]; Terasaki, 2004
[1976]). However, a wide range of CA studies, some dating back to the origins of the
field, have also recognized the importance of knowledge domains in the formation of
actions and sequences outside the area of ‘news’ per se.
Consider how we refer to persons, places and times. As Sacks and Schegloff (1979) were
the first to show, references to persons are constructed by reference to what we take others
to know (see also Enfield and Stivers, 2007; Heritage, 2007; Kitzinger and Mandelbaum,
2013; Schegloff, 1996b). So the choices between referring to ‘Mary’, ‘Mary Williams’, ‘Ms.
Williams’, ‘my friend Mary’, ‘Cousin Mary’, ‘Bill’s daughter’, ‘Mary the TA’, ‘the woman
who TAs 124’, ‘the woman that TAs this class I’m taking’, ‘that TA of ours’ and so on will
depend in substantial part on who is being talked to and the knowledge of Mary that is attrib-
uted to them. Some of the issues can be glimpsed in the following case in which Lottie
makes several attempts to secure her sister’s recognition of a doctor who is treating her:
(3) [NB IV:14:10]
1 Lot: hhhh God I don’know, he doesn’ know either

2 -> I mean, hhh if it-uh, we talk’tuh Doctor Nelson
3 -> yihknow this, s-doct-
4 -> yihknow from uh Glendale?
5 (0.2)
6 Lot: -> This friend’v a:rs,=
7 Emm: =Mm hm,
Lottie begins by referring to ‘Doctor Nelson’ (line 2), thus assuming that her sister can
recognize the individual from the name alone. Subsequently she expands the reference to
include a try-marked phrase ‘from Glendale?’ (line 4). Finally, still encountering no
uptake (line 5), she abandons her attempt at recognitional reference, settling instead for
a non-recognitional reference: ‘this friend of ours’. Here, across successive tries, Lottie
revises the epistemic assumptions on which her reference form is based. Similar consid-
erations hold for place (Schegloff, 1972) and time (Raymond and White, 2017) formula-
tions, and all of these issues fall under the rubric of ‘recipient design’ (Sacks et al., 1974:
727). Indeed, of all the topics in CA that implicate the careful navigation of epistemic
territories, ‘recipient design’ itself is the most wide-ranging and significant.
How a person is named is consequential for how relations between persons get con-
structed. For example, in the following case, Lesley names her lunch companion as
‘Missiz Baker’ (line 1) thus implying either that her relationship with the person in ques-
tion is non-intimate, or, alternatively, that her recipient (Joyce) has a less intimate rela-
tionship with the woman than she does:
(4) [Holt 5/88:1:2:174-180]
1 Les: -> iYes:: .hh An’ I met Missiz Baker ‘n we had

2 ↑lunch together which wz very ni:[ce,.hhh
3 Joy: [Oh did you
4 => with Di:a:nne, °Ba[ker.°

5 Les: [ih-ye:s ‘n then: she wz
6 going an’I suddenly re’mbered she’d paid f’the
7 lo:t fortunately I managed to ↑catch her.
However, Joyce responds by naming the companion as Di:a:nne, °Baker.° thus inti-
mating a closer relationship with ‘Missiz Baker’ than was indexed by Lesley in line 1 –
an intimation reinforced by the fact that ‘Di:a:nne’ is produced within its own intonation
contour and lengthened, and is thus productionally separated from the subsequent repeat
of ‘Baker’, which itself is uttered with reduced amplitude.
Related issues inhabit references involving technical knowledge. In the following
case, the reference to a ‘cephalic presentation’ is revised, following a repair initiation
(line 2), to ‘the baby’s head down’ with the implication that the caller may not have
understood the term ‘cephalic presentation’ (Kitzinger and Mandelbaum, 2013):
(5) [Kitzinger and Mandelbaum 2013: 10]
1 Hlp: -> [·hhh But- but- ] i- it’s a cephalic presentation i:sn’t i:t.
2 Clr: Sorry¿
3 Hlp: -> ·hh uh the baby’s head down¿
4 Clr: => Yes he’s cephalic, y[es ( )
5 Hlp: [·hh Yes, ·hhh a::nd u::m not
6 posterior.
7 (0.9)
8 Clr: No:t that I’m aware of.=
9 Hlp: =No
At line 4, the caller’s (Clr) re-use of the term ‘cephalic’ in a confirming response lays
claim to knowledge and competence in the use of this terminology, retroactively imply-
ing that the ‘open class’ repair initiation (Drew, 1997) at line 2 was in fact the product of
a hearing problem, rather than an understanding problem and, by implication, that she is
cognizant of the medical terminology associated with the birth process.
As Drew (2018) and Clift and Raymond (2018) note, epistemic caution and its under-
lying preoccupations are also readily visible in repair sequences (Drew, 2013). In the
following case, Lesley describes an earlier occasion when she called Hal:
(6) [Field SO(II):1:3:1-9]
1 Les: .tch.hhh Oh is ↑that you Ha[l

2 Hal: [Ye:s?
3 Les: Oh hello it’s Leslie he:re,
4 Hal: Oh ’el[lo Lesl[ie?
5 Les: [‘hhhh [I RANG you up- (.) ah think it wz la:s’
6 -> night. But you were- (.) u-were you ↑ou:t? or: was it
7 the night be↓fore per[↓haps.
8 Hal: [Uh:m night before I expect we w’r
9 dancing Tuesdee ni:ght.
Heritage 21
In the middle of saying ‘but you were- [out]’, Lesley checks the turn in progress and
revises its construction to a more cautious interrogative form ‘u-were you ↑ou:t?’ that is
more closely aligned to her evident epistemic status with respect to the event in question
– she doesn’t know for sure whether Hal was out or just failing to answer the phone for
some reason. Here, and elsewhere (Drew, 2018), participants evince a clear concern with
maintaining congruence between epistemic stance and status (see Clift and Raymond,
2018; Drew, 2018, for further discussion).
If epistemics is of widespread significance in relation to grammar and lexis, it would
be strange indeed if it was without significance for interaction more generally. The EoE
representation of my research on epistemics clearly suggests that my handling of the
topic is the overblown product of excessive emphasis on a less significant dimension of
human social life. But as Raymond (2018) makes clear, the true significance of epistemic
status and stance lies in its intricate association with other practices of talk-in-interaction
to create recognizable actions and hence to set a direction for subsequent talk. Following
is a sampling of some of these associations drawn solely from the Anglophone CA litera-
ture and not including my own research or research that focuses on institutional activities
(which are redolent with the issue):
• Turn-taking: Next speaker selection can be managed solely on the basis that one
speaker is knowledgeable, whereas another speaker is not (Lerner, 2003); the
dynamics of collaborative turn completions are sensitive to who ‘owns’ (Sacks,
1984b; Sharrock, 1974) particular knowledge or experiences (Lerner, 1992, 1993;
1996); other-than-selected-next-speaker interventions may be driven by epistemic
considerations (Bolden, 2018; Lerner, 2004; Stivers and Robinson, 2006); next-
turn responses are rendered faster and more reliably when remarks are directed to
respondents who are known to possess the relevant knowledge (Stivers et al., 2009;
Stivers and Rossano, 2010); increments to turns may be the product of considering
the epistemic statuses of recipients (Goodwin, 1979).
• News delivery, storytelling and topic organization: Sacks (1992 [1964-1972]) lectures
on tellability of news and experiences (especially from Winter 1970; Spring 1970)
stressed a variety of resources and considerations that a speaker might take into
account when determining the tellability of some information. The dedicated pre-
announcement sequence for checking if something is ‘news’ for the recipient
(Maynard, 2003; Sacks, 1974; Terasaki, 2004 [1976]); recipient ‘newsmark’ responses
(Jefferson, 1981); the avoidance of ‘bad news’ (Maynard, 2003; Schegloff, 1988b);
premonitoring bad news (Jefferson, 1980); delivering ‘extraordinary’ news (Jefferson,
2004); ‘new’ topics (Button, 1987; Button and Casey 1984, 1985).
• Repair and correction: The preference for self correction (Schegloff et al., 1977);
exposed and embedded correction (Jefferson, 1987), understanding, misunder-
standing and correction (Schegloff, 1984, 1987, 1991a, 1992b); repair initiation
and management (Bolden, 2011, 2013, 2014; Bolden et al., 2012; Lerner and
Kitzinger, 2007; Robinson, 2013; Schegloff, 1997).
• Recipient design in the selection of terms for persons (Enfield and Stivers, 2007;
Lerner and Kitzinger, 2007; Sacks and Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1996b), places
(Drew, 1978; Schegloff, 1972) and time (Button, 1990; Raymond and White, 2017).
• Confirming (as opposed to agreeing): Schegloff (1996); Raymond (2003); Stivers

(2005).
• Questions and answers: Raymond (2016); Raymond (2003, 2010).
• General discussions of directly epistemic issues: Pomerantz (1980) on ‘telling my
side’; formulations (Bolden, 2010; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970); morality (Mikesell
et al., 2017; Stivers et al., 2011).
As noted above, this is a highly restricted sampling of CA research on English, but it

surely indicates that orientations to states of knowledge are a significant component of the
construction and recognition of numerous orders of social action. Given that many of
these are endemic and ubiquitous in conversation, this fact alone points to the relevant
ubiquity of epistemic relevancies in the management of interaction. What is summarized
above are a few of the many published works on the intersection between the epistemic
order and other orders of conversational organization in English. These works could be
multiplied many times over by reference to other languages: for example, Sun-Young
Oh’s (2010) demonstration that when referring to persons, Korean speakers deploy a dis-
tinction between proximal and distal demonstrative quasi-pronouns to display their own
and their co-interactant’s category membership in relation to the referred to person (see
also Raymond, 2016), or Marja-Leena Sorjonen’s (in press) analysis of distinctive epis-
temic stances taken up via different Finnish prefaces to turns showing understanding of
what another said, or Kaoru Hayano’s (2011, 2013) description of the role of the Japanese
turn-final particles yo, ne and yone in the management of epistemic rights.
The literature on institutional talk is just as formidable, ranging from the epistemic
order of 911 calls (Raymond, 2018; Raymond and Zimmerman, 2007), the management
of epistemic status in doctor–patient interactions, most visible around patients’ caution in
relation to self-diagnosis and medical terminology (Gill, 1998; Gill et al., 2009), news
media personnel’s avoidance of flat assertions in news interviews (Clayman and Heritage,
2002), through to the exquisite management of epistemic rights in the ‘live’ coverage of
an incident from a helicopter, so as to epistemically privilege the ‘helicopter view’ of the
scene, even when the news anchors in the studio may have a more comprehensive view
of the incident (Raymond, 2000).
I believe that these observations provide a prima facie warrant for treating epistemic
concerns as having ubiquitous significance. I now turn to rebut the specific criticisms
leveled against my previous research by the EoE group.
The EoE critique

Oh and ‘cognitivism’
From the point of view of interaction studies, cognitivism generally involves using sub-
jective aspects of individual cognition, such as perceiving, remembering, learning, prob-
lem solving and decision-making, as part of a causal explanation of action. In this view,
Everyday actions are regarded as surface behaviours which are caused by underlying mental
and neurological processes; processes that are often masked by the contingencies of everyday
situations and the referential ambiguities of ordinary language. (Lynch and Bogen, 2005: 226)
Heritage 23
Although cognitivism emerged in the 1950s as a replacement for behaviorism in psy-

chology, two strands of thought were already emerging in opposition to it. The first was
Wittgensteinian, which offered systemic opposition to the attribution of such processes
in accounting for ordinary actions (Coulter, 1983b, 1989, 2005). The second was socio-
logical and derived from C. Wright Mills (1940). Mills argued that ascriptions of per-
sonal motives, although framed in terms of personal or psychological origins, are drawn
from socially organized ‘vocabularies’ and are accompanying features of the actions they
enable and purportedly explain.7 This position found its way into sociology through the
work of Goffman (1955, 1959) and into discursive social psychology through the work
of Potter and Wetherell (1987). Ethnomethodologists took an anti-cognitivist position
from the very beginning: As Garfinkel (1963) famously observed, ‘there is no reason to
look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains’ (p. 190).
It is clear that CA, as we know it, could not have been successful if it were operating
under cognitivist assumptions. Not only would too many ‘explanations’ for actions in terms
of cognition, perception, emotion and so on have been available for ad hoc deployment,
vitiating any hope of systematic findings, but also and more importantly the intersubjective
verstehende basis of human action would have been sacrificed to a form of meaningless
psychological reductionism. This position was forcefully presented by Goffman (1964),
who argued that little would be accomplished without proper attention to the structure and
processes of face-to-face interaction itself. In my own discussions of this topic (Heritage
1984b, 1990/1991, 2005, 2008), I have consistently argued for precisely this point of view.
Two of the four primary EoE papers were devoted to a critique of my papers on oh
(Heritage, 1984a, 1998, 2002a). The first of these (Heritage, 1984a) is argued to be cog-
nitivistic and thence as part of a ‘revisionist’ arc of development in which the founda-
tions of the so-called ‘epistemics program’ were laid. It is also argued that a theory of
‘information’ as an ‘extra-situational’ driver of action was already immanent in the paper
(Macbeth et al. 2016: 552). This warrants a detailed rebuttal.
My original oh paper was written about 35 years ago. It was my first solo-authored
paper in CA and among the earliest ever to be produced by a British researcher. I was first
prompted to look at oh in the context of repair by a passing remark by Jefferson that it
could be used as a signal of ‘prior trouble now resolved’.8 With Jefferson’s guidance, the
initial repair context of the oh analysis was rapidly expanded to encompass Q-A
sequences, then subsequently what I termed ‘informing’ sequences, and thence to the
papers on oh-prefacing that were not published for another decade or so (Heritage, 1998,
2002a). Later, the paper formed the basis for a didactic discussion of CA methodology
(Wootton, 1989) and, later again, for several studies of prosody and sound production
primarily in relation to action-projection and emotional aspects of oh’s deployment by a
range of investigators (Couper-Kuhlen, 2009; Local, 1996; Reber, 2012; Thompson Fox
and Couper-Kuhlen, 2015: 64–75; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2006). Finally, a substantial
literature has developed which contrasts English oh with resources for conveying
‘changes-of-state’ in a number of other languages such as Danish, Finnish, German,
Mandarin, Korean and Japanese (see Heinemann and Koivisto, 2016; Heritage and
Sorjonen, in press; Kim and Kuroshima, 2013, for a selection of papers and references).
My argument that oh is used to indicate a ‘change of state of knowledge, information,
orientation or awareness’ (Heritage, 1984a; 299) and, in particular, that it is frequently
used for the prompt and public acknowledgment of having been informed of something,
raises the question of whether oh is some kind of direct portal through which cognitive
states enter conversation (Macbeth et al., 2016: 552). In such a cognitivist conception, a
psychological ‘change of state’ would, in and of itself generate an oh. However, there are
empirical reasons to be cautious about such an idea (Heritage, 2005). If it were true, the
incidence of oh might be more frequent than it appears to be. Moreover, it is clear that oh
may be withheld by a speaker who wants to avoid communicating that they learned
something, or offered by a speaker who, knowing something full well, nonetheless
wishes to convey that they just learned it. Speakers may also defer the production of oh
until an opportune moment, as in the example below. Here, Alan tells Mary about a sur-
prise party (lines 5–6), using a well-constructed news announcement (Maynard, 2003;
Terasaki, 2004 [1976]) that presents it as the reason for the call (line 1). Although a
response that would treat his announcement as ‘news’ is due at line 7, Mary rather trans-
parently defers her acknowledgment of it until line 9, after it has become clear that she
is invited to the party (line 8):
(7) [Kamunsky 3:2]
1 ALA: ˙hhh Okay Well the reason I’m calling=

2 ALA: =There[is a reason b’hind my madness.
3 MRY: [°( )
4 MRY: Uh-huh,
5 ALA: Uh nex’Saturday night’s a s’prize party here
6 fer p- Kevin.
7 (0.2)
8 ALA: ˙p! Egnd if you c’n make it.
9 MRY: -> OH RILLY:::: =
10 ALA: =Yeah.
11 MRY: Izzit iz bir’da:y?
In this case, there is clearly a separation between the news that is conveyed at lines
5–6, and Mary’s enthusiastic response and subsequent questioning about it at line 9 and
beyond. Cases of this kind hardly support a primitive cognitivist treatment of oh. Other
reasons for caution include the fact that changes in cognitive state (e.g. ‘realization’) may
emerge gradually while the production of oh is a point event, and that its production may
be shaped by interactional and turn-organizational issues (see also Bolden, 2006; Potter
and Te Molder, 2005: 45–46).
Beyond these empirical reservations, it is important to register the clear conceptual
distinction between ‘cognition’ as an object of participants’ orientations and communica-
tions and ‘cognition’ in the sense of an underlying process that can be used to explain
behavior (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Lynch and Bogen, 2005; Middleton and Edwards,
1990; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Te Molder and Potter, 2005). In this context, it is note-
worthy that in his discussion of the expression of subjective feeling in ‘Response Cries’
and addressing such utterances as ‘brrr’ and ‘ouch’, Goffman (1978) was at pains to situ-
ate them, not as ‘direct’ or unmediated products of subjective states, but rather as com-
municative events normally intended by speakers to portray such states for the benefit of
Heritage 25
co-present others.9 Goffman handled the fine line between the unmediated expression of
subjective states and communicative action designed to present their unmediated expres-
sion with a very careful definition of response cries as ‘signs meant to be taken to index
directly the state of the transmitter’ (Goffman, 1978:811). The expression ‘signs meant
to be taken’ is crucial here because it places response cries unambiguously within the
category of conventional signs, or in Grice’s (1957) terms meaningnn, rather than natural
signs that directly express feelings or communicate other ‘mental events’ after the fash-
ion discussed by Darwin (2009 [1872]).10
I adopted this definition for oh at the very beginning of my paper (Heritage, 1984a:
300), specifically to maintain this carefully constructed barrier to naïve cognitivism and
have repeatedly reasserted it since (e.g. Heritage, 2005, 2010a, 2016, in press; see also
Heritage, 1990/1991). Others have also explicitly cited Goffman in taking up the same
position (e.g. Bolden, 2006). I also, in a further sustained effort to avoid cognitivist inter-
pretations, very consistently (in fact 96% of the time) referred to ‘change-of-state pro-
posals’ or described speakers as ‘proposing’ to have undergone some change-of-state
– both formulations being designed to focus on the action dimension of the particle’s
usage. None of this, as Steensig and Heinemann (2016: 603) also note, was registered by
Macbeth et al. (2016). At an early stage in their paper, Macbeth and his co-authors imme-
diately proceeded to ‘cognitivize’ Goffman’s carefully constructed definition: the initial
Goffman quotation from my paper is followed a few sentences later with a re-character-
ization of ohs as a ‘signs that index directly the state of the transmitter (emphasis added
[by authors])’ (Macbeth et al., 2016: 554). It is, of course, the deleted expression ‘meant
to be taken’ that makes Goffman’s treatment of ouch and brr a matter of communicative
expression rather than one of cognitive causation. In my adoption of Goffman’s defini-
tion, I took an identical stance in my treatment of oh. Apparently, it’s just that easy to
make your case that someone is a ‘cognitivist’: simply delete the core of a carefully
constructed conceptualization, italicize the most misleading aspect of what you’ve falsi-
fied, and, hey presto, it’s done!
In fact, I was not much concerned with cognition in the oh paper, nor with whether oh
is a veridical or reliable expression of actual ‘changes of state’. Instead, the paper was
squarely focused on what the sequential implications of such an expression were in con-
texts of volunteered informings, Q-A sequences, repair and so on. My efforts to focus on
the sequential commitments in play come in for some fairly rough treatment:
So, one who initiates repair may be ‘committed by the repair to have undergone a change of
state’, and ‘may [then] be required to propose just that’. It’s a curious locution, as though a
repair initiation were a ‘pre–commitment’ to a change of state, whose actual commitment–
proposal is due upon the repair. It creates the sense of tension between alternatives – perhaps
you’re ’committed/required’, perhaps not – and entails the insertion of unseen processes in the
repair sequence. Having thus established the ‘problem’ – the tension of these possible motivated
courses–of–action – ‘Oh’ then resolves them by ‘achieving the proposal’, and this ‘in turn’,
‘permits a mutually ratified exit from repair sequences’. (Macbeth et al., 2016: 560)11
But my ‘curious locution’ was an attempt to get at the sequential obligations that are
publicly mobilized in sequences of other-initiated repair, and it was these and other
sequential obligations that were the general focus of the paper. And, as I later observed,
the production of oh is ‘likely driven by the external demands of interaction rather than
the internal pressures of cognitive expression’ (Heritage, 2005: 191). The oh paper was
designed to demonstrate just that.
A similar problem of wholesale misrepresentation inhabits Macbeth et al.’s charac-
terization of my initial discussion of oh (see Note 5 and Raymond, 2018, for discussion
of similar misrepresentations elsewhere in the EoE corpus). In the opening paragraphs of
the paper, I introduce the particle with what I describe as a ‘preliminary’ example of oh
framing a noticing (Heritage, 1984a: 299–300):
(8) (Jefferson 1978: 222)
((Three people are walking together: someone passes them

wearing a photograph teeshirt))
1 N: -> Oh that teeshirt reminded me [STORY]
I then commented by reference to this and a second example:
In these cases, the speaker volunteers his production of ‘oh’ and thereby injects an
extraconversational contingency, adumbrated by the particle and subsequently elaborated upon,
into the talk. (Heritage, 1984a: 300)
Despite the fact that what follows is an analysis exclusively focused on the roles
played by oh in a variety of conversational sequences, Macbeth et al. (2016: 3) misrep-
resent the upshot of the paper as the following:
‘Oh’ is understood as an expression that ‘injects an extraconversational contingency, adumbrated

by the particle and subsequently elaborated upon [in] the talk’ (Heritage, 1984a: 300) The
passage occurs early on, and provides a faithful account of a program not yet in evidence.
However, to get to this point, they had to ignore the very next sentence in my paper:
However, the particle is also produced as a response to a variety of conversational actions, and
it is these other occasions of its production that will be the central focus of this chapter.
(Heritage, 1984a: 300)
So far from providing a ‘faithful account’ of a ‘program’ that would take 35 years to
unfold, the quote that Macbeth et al. find fault with is an introductory and explicitly pre-
liminary characterization designed to provide an almost lay sense of what I meant by the
term ‘change-of-state’.
With representations like this, we are soon headed for denunciation. The authors suggest
that the account of oh is minimal and ‘constrained’. It would be better to consider it as an
‘indexical expression’ that can convey ‘surprise, recognition, appreciation, playfulness, dis-
appointment, delight, discovery or disputation’ (Macbeth et al., 2016: 554). Indeed so, and
one could add more, much more, than that (Heritage, 2016). But my considered objective,
as noted by Steensig and Heinemann (2016: 603), was a minimal one. In a context where
little was known or published about oh, my objective was to get at some of the most
Heritage 27
defensible basics of what oh can achieve as a component of action in interaction and to

specify some of the sequential contexts in which its work is particularized. This contextual
particularization is surely part, at least, of what is intended by the term ‘indexical’.12
As it turned out, it has proved quite difficult to provide for the affective qualities listed in
the quote above from Macbeth et al. (Couper-Kuhlen, 2009; Wilkinson and Kitzinger,
2006), and I was probably right not to press my luck. My critics seem to have no such inhibi-
tions. Referring to an example involving other-initiated repair, they comment,
Ivy’s ‘Oh’ seems to reveal surprise that Derek is home, a surprise that continues to be dealt with
throughout the sequence. Indeed, her surprise seems to drive the sequence. That she is surprised
isn’t opaque at all. (Macbeth et al., 2016: 558)
This claim – so blithely asserted, and surely representing a truly cognitive ‘animation’ of
the transcript – is entirely without empirical foundation or even a gesture toward one. And
this is with the advantage of good later research, none of which was available to me in 1984.
The analysis of oh that I offered was conventionally sequential. In brief, following
Jefferson (1978), I observed that it could be used to preface the introduction of new
observations and/or topics into conversation, as in (8) above. I argued as well that it was
frequently used to acknowledge answers to questions, and generally proposed that those
answers had been informative in the ways that the questions sought. This is clearly illus-
trated in (9) below, in which the conversation is about an absent boyfriend:
(9) (HG:II:25)
1 Nan: .hhh Dz he ‘av ‘iz own apa:rt[mint?]

2 Hyl: [.hhhh] Yea:h,=
3 Nan: =Oh:,
4 (1.0)
5 Nan: How didju git ‘iz number,
Here, the oh treats the question as appropriately answered and the answer itself as
complete. This is evidenced by the fact that the questioner does not invite, nor does the
answerer volunteer, any form of immediate subsequent elaboration.13 I also argued that
oh performs a similar role in other-initiated repair sequences, although its placement
within those sequences could also index different degrees of uncertainty by the repair
initiator about the repairable. I argued too that oh is used to acknowledge volunteered
information as informative, and, finally, that, beyond its very abstract ‘change of state’
semantics, free-standing oh was relatively opaque and backward-looking and was gener-
ally not used as a resource for the promotion of sequence expansion.
Toward the end of their discussion of the oh paper, after a lengthy and deeply con-
fused and confusing account of free-standing oh (Macbeth et al., 2016: 552–556), the
authors observe that
in fairness, one could imagine other uses for the description ‘free-standing’, as in Schegloff’s
(2007: 117) larger discussion of ‘sequence closing thirds’. For Schegloff, ‘Oh’ is an utterance
doing sequential work, and is heard that way. (Macbeth et al., 2016: 558)
Indeed, my paper argued exactly that. Schegloff’s (2007) discussion (which actually
occurs on p.118) proceeds quite rapidly to a discussion of oh as a backward-looking object
that does not invite sequence expansion when it appears in free-standing form. Schegloff
references this sequential account to Heritage (1984a) and helpfully includes a footnote
on p. 119 with a concise description of the difference between turn-initial and free-stand-
ing forms of oh, which he also attributes to Heritage (1984a, 1998). Perhaps Macbeth and
his colleagues failed to notice these pages or to grasp their import as a demolition of the
case they had been struggling to make. But if oh is doing sequential work for Schegloff,
and Schegloff references the analysis to Heritage, then a fair-minded reader might be
inclined to conclude that oh is doing sequential work for Heritage as well.
Behind the various critiques of the oh paper offered by the EoE participants lie funda-
mental errors in the group’s understanding of CA techniques and of its analytic armamen-
tarium. For example, Macbeth et al. seem to think that an analysis of free-standing oh is
decided from whether the oh is placed on its own separate transcript line or not – a deci-
sion that they seem to view as arbitrary and misleading (Macbeth et al., 2016: 555–557).
Yet, for the past 40 years, CA transcripts have followed Jefferson’s initiative in assigning
a new line to pauses following complete-turn constructional units (or TCUs). Complete
turn constructional units are units that have come to syntactic, pragmatic and intonational
completion (Ford and Thompson, 1996) and that therefore give no immediate indication
of continuation. ‘Oh’ (within its own intonation contour) is certainly such a unit and, if
and when it is followed by a pause, the pause will be correctly placed on a new line.
The reason for this convention is that, by the rules of the turn-taking system, as
specified by Sacks et al. (1974) and validated by an enormous range of subsequent
empirical research (see Clayman, 2013, for a review), any completed turn construc-
tional unit is a potential candidate for a response involving a change of speaker. The
transcript convention instituted by Jefferson (see Hepburn and Bolden, 2013, 2017, for
review) highlights that possibility, but, and this is the important point, no transcription
convention will alter the fact that a completed TCU establishes the relevance of possible
turn transfer. A transcript can make that possibility more or less visible, but it cannot
alter the fact that an oh with its own encapsulating intonation contour can never be other
than a free-standing TCU (Heritage, 1998; Raymond, 2010; Reed and Raymond, 2013;
Schegloff, 2007)
Second- and third-turn proof procedures

At several points, the EoE authors become preoccupied with the idea that I have ‘little
use for CA’s “proof procedure”’ (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 586) – the practice of look-
ing to responsive turns to determine the recipient’s understanding of the prior turn (Sacks
et al., 1974: 728). In fact, I have plenty of use for it. In one of the papers reviewed by the
EoE, I comment that next turn ‘will certainly help us understand that a prior turn was, or
was not, understood as a request for information’ (Heritage, 2012c: 80; see also Steensig
and Heinemann, 2016: 599). Indeed, the next-turn proof procedure is a highly valuable,
but not the only, means by which analyses can be anchored (Clayman and Gill, 2012). At
the same time, as Jeff Coulter (1983a) was perhaps the first to note, the next-turn proof
procedure is not infallible and cannot be dispositive in all cases (see also Lynch 2011:
Heritage 29
555). Take the following case, in which a doctor is reviewing a patient’s medical history,
including a family history of cancer:
(10) [Midwest 3.4]
1 DOC: -> Whe[re was her cancer.

2 PAT: [( -)
3 PAT: -> .hhh Well:- she lived in Arizona an:’- she::
4 wouldn’t go tuh doctor much. She only went
5 to uh chiropracter. (h[u-)
6 DOC: [Mm [hm,
7 PAT: [An:d she had(:)/(‘t)
8 like- in her stomach somewhere I guess but (.)
9 thuh- even- that guy had told her tuh go (into)
10 uh medical doctor.
In this case, the doctor makes no attempt to correct the patient’s initial response (lines
3–5) to his question, and his acknowledgment (line 6) treats it as unproblematic. But we
may not conclude that the patient’s response defines how the doctor’s action at line 1 is
to be understood. Plainly, the patient is launching a different course of action – a narra-
tive (see Stivers and Heritage, 2001, for details) – than the one projected by the doctor’s
question. And although she does later articulate a response to the doctor’s question (lines
7–8), this response is subordinated to her subsequent development of the narrative (lines
9–10). The point here is that while the doctor aligns with the patient’s response and
makes no attempt to correct or redirect the patient in line 6 (Schegloff, 1992a), this does
not mean that analysts should rely on the patient’s response as the authoritative source
for either party’s understanding of what his question was doing.14
In other cases, recipients mishear or misunderstand actions that are directed to them
for response, although prior speakers forbear from correcting them (see Jefferson, 2007,
for a range of cases). In the following case, for example, a recipient responds to a ques-
tion in a way that seems to reflect a mishearing, but the questioner once again makes no
effort to correct her (at line 9):
(11) [NB:II:1:256076]
1 Emm: yihknow ah u-she gets ↓awful depressed over these

2 things ↓yihknow she’s rea:1 (0.2) p’litical mi:nded ’n,
3 (0.3)
4 Lot: Ye:ah:
5 Emm: wo[r k- ]
6 Lot: -> [She a] Democra:t?
7 Emm: -> .t.hhhh I vote eether wa:y.h
8 (.)
9 Lot: Yeah,
10 Emm: .hmhh.t.h I didn’git tuh vote I decline’tuh state this
11 ti:me when I registered so: I jst uh,h didn’git tuh vote
12 fer pre:s’dent so:
In yet other cases, we can see from a next turn how a previous turn was understood,
but we may feel that the understanding exhibited was insensitive or sub-optimal in some
way. For these reasons, Atkinson and I noted in 1984 that
it should not be concluded that the way in which a speaker responds to a prior utterance can, in
every case, be treated as criterial in determining how the utterance should be viewed analytically.
Obviously, speakers may respond to earlier talk so as to avoid taking up and dealing with what
they perfectly well know it accomplishes or implicates and, by these means, may negotiate the
direction of the talk away from an undesired outcome or toward a desired one. Such occasions
are common in talk, and they may be varyingly transparent to analytic inspection. (Heritage and
Atkinson, 1984: 11)
The Goodwins (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987) arrived at a similar point of view, and
indeed, as they note, the nature of inter-digitated multimodal response makes the proof
procedure considerably more complicated in practice (see also Goodwin, 2000, 2010). In
a parallel discussion, noted by both Lindwall et al. (2016: 503) and Steensig and
Heinemann (2016: 599), Schegloff arrived at a similar conclusion in a footnoted com-
mentary on the
Misunderstanding … according to which a recipient’s understanding of some utterance is

definitive of its import and the utterance itself has no ‘objective’ import. This view (and its
attribution to conversation analysis) is mistaken on many counts, not least of which is its total
subversion of the possibility of analytically specifiable ‘misunderstanding’; for if a recipient’s
understanding is definitive, what leverage is there for claiming it to be a misunderstanding?
What basis is there for the claim that a recipient failed to understand the import of an utterance?
Care must be taken, then, to distinguish between, on the one hand, the professional analyst’s
undertaking to establish the understanding of some utterance in some interaction-which should
indeed seek to ground itself in the recipient’s displayed understanding, if possible, and on the
other hand the recipient’s undertaking to understand the import of some utterance, which clearly
cannot be so grounded, for that would presume its own outcome. The recipient’s conduct requires
engagement with the methods or practices that inform the production of the talk being ‘analyzed’,
and the professional analyst’s undertaking must make reference to these as well if it is to address
both the speaker’s and the recipient’s parts in bringing off an accomplished, recognizable action.
These considerations are critical to an empirical account of action. (Schegloff, 1996a: 173f)
The EoE authors also worry that I am substituting a third-turn proof procedure for a
second-turn one (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 587) – as if these were alternatives! But
Schegloff’s (1992a) paper ‘Repair after next turn’ demonstrated that ‘third position’ is a
standard location for the defense of intersubjectivity. That is, when A produces an action,
and B produces a response that displays an understanding of it, A will have evidence that
B understood correctly or not, but B will not yet have evidence that her response is
appropriate, adequate or ‘correct’. This is normally clarified for B in third position,
where A may choose either to build on B’s response, thus treating it as adequate, or alter-
natively to correct it (cf. the section on ‘the architecture of intersubjectivity’ in Heritage
(1984b: 254–260)). It is thus only after a third turn that both A and B converge on an
understanding of the first turn and converge as well on the sense that they jointly know
that their understandings are in alignment (or not). Intersubjective recognition of actions
Heritage 31
and understandings of their import, as Schegloff (1992a) showed, are thus the objects of
temporally extended courses of action, comprising three basic positions and the inter-
locking of actions in a process of successive confirmation and specification, in which the
third turn is a proof procedure for the second turn just as the second is for the first. It is
in this sense that free-standing ‘oh’ following a bona fide response to a request for infor-
mation, normally and among other things reconfirms that information was indeed what
was sought in the first place. Of course, oh is not the only such resource: Schegloff
(2007) itemizes other forms of sequence-closing thirds. But oh is a highly frequent com-
ponent of sequence-closing thirds that complete Q-A sequences.
Notwithstanding the evidence supplied in Heritage (1984a) and Schegloff (2007),
Macbeth and Wong (2016) can’t believe it, or choose not to:
There is no evidence that natural conversation could actually ever go on this way, in a regime
of third turn confirmations. (p. 587)
But that was the evidence supplied for Q-A sequences in Heritage (1984a) (and dis-
cussed in Heritage (1984b: 254–260) under the heading of the ‘architecture of intersub-
jectivity’) and endorsed in Sequence Organization (Schegloff, 2007). The original basis
for this argument is, as previously noted, Schegloff’s (1992a) work on repair after next
turn.
According to Norrick (2009), oh is the second most common turn-initial object in
English conversation (after yeah) and the third most common free-standing object (after
yeah and okay). A substantial number (c. 20%) of these instances of oh (whether free-
standing or turn-initial) are in third position, operating as responsive acknowledgments
of answers to questions, and mainly having sequence-closing import. And the sequence-
closing aspect matters! If I ask you a question, you may find it useful to get some sign of
when you have said enough or whether you should say more and, as a recipient, it may
be in my interest to convey such a sign. Oh (and oh + assessments) generally convey that
enough has been said (Heritage, 1984a; Schegloff, 2007), and this usage is one element
contributing to the frequency with which oh appears in conversational corpora.
More generally, oh sits among an array of third positioned objects – including con-
tinuers, confirmations, agreements, newsmarks, assessments and many others – that take
up a variety of stances toward responses to questions. Among these alternative possibili-
ties, oh frequently treats answers-to-questions as adequately informative and not requir-
ing elaboration, while also treating the answer’s information content (rather than, say, its
implications for future action (Seuren, forthcoming)) as a primary focus.15
At a more general level, and this was one of my primary interests in oh in the 1980s, the
fact that oh embodies third-turn re-confirmation of a question as seeking information is one
of the things that helps to distinguish the social contexts of questioning (Heritage, 1984b,
1985; Heritage and Clayman, 2010: 20–33). Consider the following pair of sequences:
Sequence 1 Sequence 2
A: What’s the time? A: What’s the time?

B: Three fifteen. B: Three fifteen.
A: Oh thank you. A: That’s right. Well done!
In Sequence 1, the initial third-turn component (oh) treats the response to the question
as new information and generally, and by implication, as believed to be true (Heritage,
1984a), whereas the second third-turn component (thank you) treats the response as hav-
ing fulfilled a genuine information request. In Sequence 2, the initial third-turn compo-
nent (That’s right) confirms the response as correct information, and by implication as
already known to the questioner (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975), whereas
the second third-turn component praises the answerer’s achievement in answering cor-
rectly. Here, then, two distinct turns in third position (after a Q-A sequence) retroactively
reconfirm (or, in some circumstances, constitute) the prior two-turn exchange in terms of
different activities and objectives. That they normally reconfirm assumptions already ‘in
play’ about the activities and their contexts involved does not in any way detract from
these facts. Formats for the closure of Q-A sequences generally are consistent with their
social contexts and provide a further overlay of confirmation for those contexts. If oh
were produced in a Q-A sequence in a classroom lesson, or that’s right in a similar
sequence at the breakfast table, assumptions about the activities in play before their pro-
duction would likely be revised.
As these examples illustrate, each element in a sequence, including the last, exerts
influence over the overall understanding of the actions performed and the social roles of
the participants in performing them. The absence of third-turn oh is also significant in
contexts such as news interviews (Clayman and Heritage, 2002; Heritage, 1985) and
primary care (Heritage and Clayman, 2010; Ten Have, 1991). Third turns matter for
participants. They are not alternatives to, or substitutes for, second-turn proof proce-
dures. Rather, both are important elements within an integrated complex of resources for
doing well-grounded and defensible analysis.
In sum, the fact that a word like oh can be used to communicate a ‘change of state’
proposal is not a ‘cognitivist’ claim, any more than a discursive psychologist’s discussion
of participants’ claims about memory is ‘cognitivist’ (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Lynch
and Bogen, 2005; Middleton and Edwards, 1990; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Te Molder
and Potter, 2005). Rather, oh is a consequential action in a sequence and should be exam-
ined as such.
Epistemic stance and the terms of agreement

The papers on oh-prefacing (Heritage, 1998) and epistemic positioning in agreement
sequences (Heritage, 2002a; Heritage and Raymond, 2005; Raymond and Heritage,
2006) also meet with the EoE authors’ uniform disapproval. My argument that oh-pref-
aced responses to questions
treat the inquiries to which they respond as inapposite by virtue of relevant information about
the physical, social, cultural or personal context of the interaction – information that the
questioner could or should have taken into account … (Heritage, 1998: 304)
is misrepresented by Macbeth et al. (2016: 561) as if it were a narrow argument about

information redundancy, presumably in line with my alleged ‘informationist’ leanings. In
fact, ‘Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry’ simply followed the evidence provided by the
Heritage 33
sequences involved. And, in a good number of cases, it was clear from that evidence that
oh-prefaced responses quite frequently emerge in circumstances where the thing that is
questioned has indeed already been clearly stated or very strongly implied. But that
hardly exhausts the scope of the term ‘inapposite’. For example, take the case where a
man who taught Chinese students at Beijing University to translate T.S. Eliot’s poetry is
asked whether he ‘speaks Chinese’ (Heritage, 1998: 294). It’s not that he has already
stated that he speaks the language. He has not. Rather, there is the more general question
of how – imaginably – he could have performed this training without knowledge of
Chinese.16 Or take the case where, in the context of a discussion about a man whose fam-
ily was murdered at Auschwitz, a participant asks if he is Jewish, attracting an oh-pref-
aced confirmation (Heritage 1998: 300). These are surely not matters of information
‘redundancy’. They involve much more general issues of identity, cultural knowledge
and competence that are being treated, at least by the answering party, as so obvious that
they hardly need to be asked about.
The EoE group also entirely overlooks my discussion of the substantial number of
cases where oh-prefaced responses are not in any way associated with redundant ques-
tioning but rather are used to discourage or resist topics that previous questions launched.
They also ignore the discussion of other more specific cases where oh-prefacing is used
to implement ‘troubles-resistant’ responses to ‘how are you’ questions at the openings of
conversations (cf. Jefferson, 1980). In sum, the EoE critique does not really address ‘Oh-
prefaced responses to inquiry’ in full but rather fabricates a one-dimensional caricature
of the paper’s topics and argument. The group’s representation of the paper is directly
contradicted by the paper’s introduction and by its range of empirical cases.
Turning to the analysis of oh-prefaced second assessments (Heritage, 2002a), simi-
larly based on an accumulation of empirical cases, I was concerned with the situation
faced by persons who wanted to avoid a ‘pallid’ or ‘going along with’ second assessment
when more than that might be looked for, or even required. Oh-prefacing second assess-
ments, I argued, imply or index that the assessment is grounded in experiences of the
assessable that are independent of the here-and-now assertions of the interlocutor. This
conveyed independence can be a way of increasing the emphasis or assertiveness of the
agreement, and communicating that it is whole hearted, and not merely a matter of ‘going
along to get along’. This is, obviously, an important aspect of solidary and supportive
social relations, and not the ‘invidious or agonistic’ ones suggested by Macbeth and
Wong (2016: 591). Of course, in some instances, an oh-prefaced second assessment can
additionally index the superior access, knowledge and rights to evaluate the assessable
possessed by the second speaker, who owns knowledge and/or special rights to deploy it
(cf. Sharrock, 1974). These issues can become especially prominent and fraught when a
second assessor has massive social rights to the last word on a topic. This was something
we explored in analyzing a conversation about her grandchildren between a grandmother
and an acquaintance of hers (Raymond and Heritage, 2006), where practices of agree-
ment were central in defining where the two women stood in relation to the children and
their identities vis-à-vis one another.
It should by now be obvious that, far from ignoring the fact that oh is an ‘indexical
expression’, these papers attempt to describe a variety of ways in which the ‘change-of-
state’ meaning of oh is particularized in a variety of sequential positions and sequence
types. These particularizations have real and significant implications for sequence organ-
ization, for a variety of institutional contexts, and for the membership categorizations
and social identities that are enacted in talk. Far from ignoring recipient design and
preference organization (Macbeth et al., 2016: 565), the analysis of these sequences goes
some considerable distance in their specification.
The arguments of the oh papers were systematized in ‘The terms of agreement’ (Heritage
and Raymond, 2005), which combined my work on oh-prefacing and negative interroga-
tives (Heritage, 2002b) with Raymond’s (2003) work on type conformity in responses to
questions. It had become clear to us that, in addition to the activities of agreement and disa-
greement described by Pomerantz (1984) and Sacks (1987) in relation to assessment
sequences, the participants were adjusting the assertiveness with which they advanced their
evaluations. Put simply, the empirical phenomena we encountered were (a) that first assess-
ments are rarely upgraded in assertiveness (e.g. by means of negative interrogatives) but
frequently downgraded by tag questions and evidentials, while (b) second assessments are
frequently upgraded through a variety of practices but rarely downgraded.
These observations are compatible with the notion that going first with an assessment
is inherently more assertive than going second. This idea is plausible because a first
assessment sets an evaluative context with which a second must come to terms. If this is
the case, we would expect downward adjustments in assertiveness by first speakers who
have fewer or more attenuated rights to assess an assessable and/or upward adjustments
by second speakers who have more rights. For the same reason, upgraded first position
and downgraded second position assessments would be less common. This turned out to
be the case. It was easy to locate downgraded first assessments and upgraded second
assessments, while their opposites – upgraded first assessments and downgraded second
assessments – were quite difficult to find. At this point, to be clear, we were arguing that
orientations to socially sanctioned rights to assess are entering into sequences of interac-
tion through practices of turn design. This is a point of view that the EoE group appar-
ently wish to invalidate by a priori theoretical fiat. However, we were forced to our
conclusions by the evidence we encountered.
What is at stake in the set of practices described here? Most importantly, there are
some senses in which persons are, at least in social terms, what they know: their memo-
ries, likes and dislikes, expectations, hopes and fears, networks of people and things that
they know well and so on. To give up on primary rights to this knowledge is close to
giving up control over identity and selfhood. The logical grammar of how persons
address mental predicates (both their own and others) is exquisitely attuned to this fact
(Coulter, 1983b, 1989). What we were not concerned with is the notion, alleged by the
EoE group, that interaction is a site of constant agonistic struggles over epistemic turf.
Such struggles can emerge, of course, but rarely. The sequences we described were, not-
withstanding the stances we identified, overwhelmingly occupied with agreement, some-
times of a heartfelt kind. Moreover, we also argued that the practices we identified and
the stances they enact are rarely the objects of consistent, conscious participant orienta-
tion. Indeed, we concluded (Heritage and Raymond, 2005: 36) that
Persons deploy these practices with remarkable frequency in the context of conversational
agreement. One might think that interactants’ insistence on the assertion of relative epistemic
Heritage 35
rights is an ugly contaminant of courses of action which otherwise are the essence of consensus
building. One also might think that in this paper we make much ado about nothing: the
negotiations and conflicts that we observe are simply made salient, as Labov and Fanshel
(1977: 346) noted, as a product of looking closely at activities which probably were not
experienced consciously, much less recollected by the parties at this level of detail. Yet one also
may observe that relative epistemic rights to describe and evaluate objects within different
knowledge domains are part of our basic human rights to experience and its expression. The
regulation and sanctioning of such rights is no trivial matter, but is rather a part of the
interactional ‘housekeeping’ that is a condition of personhood and even sanity (Goffman, 1983)
That the means by which this housekeeping is managed are lost in a Leibnitzian ‘surf’ is, in this
context, all to the good.
The stances being taken up in these sequences struck us as primarily having to do with
identity: who a person is in the world, where they stand in relation to others concerning
some particular item of information, knowledge and expertise and where they stand in
relation to rights to those things. Morality, as Steensig and Heinemann (2016: 606) note,
is frequently implicated here (see also Stivers et al., 2011). What our paper on grandchil-
dren (Raymond and Heritage, 2006) attempted to develop is an understanding of how
those stances are part of the methods through which persons manage identities, across
different vicissitudes of interaction that can change from moment or moment, occasion-
ing the artful deployment of the resources we described to co-maintain different forms of
knowledge and rights to that knowledge. Of course, these methods apply in the construc-
tion of identities other than grandparents (e.g. Mondada, 2013).
‘Hidden orders’, ‘extraconversational contingencies’ and action

formation
In the 1968 Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology, Sacks
remarked that most philosophers and social scientists begin their teachings from a posi-
tion that he represents as follows:
About the things I am going to talk about, people think they know but they don’t. Furthermore
if you tell them it doesn’t change anything. They still walk round like they know although they
are walking in a dream world. Darwin begins this way, Freud begins in a similar way.
Bloomfield’s analysis of language begins in a similar way, and I could provide a much larger
list. What we are interested in is, what is it that people seem to know and use. (Hill and
Crittenden, 1968: 13)
This quotation aptly illustrates an important distinction that animates much of CA.
The distinction was formulated by Livingston (2008: 124) in a contrast between sociolo-
gies of the ‘hidden’ and ‘witnessable’ orders:
In sociologies of the hidden order, the workings of society are believed to underlie, or be hidden
within, the visible actions and behaviors of members of society … In contrast, sociologies of
the witnessable order examine how members of society produce and sustain the observable
orderlinesses of their own actions.
Although the precise terms of the EoE critique are often unclear, or simply presup-
posed, some of the EoE papers suggest that my work ‘regresses’ to the notion that a ‘hid-
den order’ shapes conversational contributions. For example, Macbeth and Wong (2016:
575) argue that
Perhaps central to the Epistemic Program’s (EP) distinctive programmatic identity is the
introduction of contested fields of greater and lesser epistemic agency (Heritage, 2002a,
passim), revealing asymmetric claims and endowments operating in the background, shaping
our ways of speaking (and hearing) by shaping our authorizations to do so. (Italics added)
And Lynch and Wong (2016: 542) decry
the use of ad hoc interpretations, attributions of motive, coding schemes, and abstract gradients
that supposedly access a hidden driver of surface actions.
If these attributions were correct, they would constitute a significant strike against
some of the arguments I have made because they describe approaches to data that are not
CA. Indeed, they would represent an abrogation of the views and teachings of my men-
tors – Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Pollner and Zimmerman – some of whom
have been my friends and co-teachers at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) and elsewhere for a quarter century. However, these attributions are not correct.
Who is this order ‘hidden’ from? The participants are surely more likely to know and rely
on aspects of epistemic status than the overhearing analyst, so the ‘order’ I describe is
surely not ‘hidden’ from them. Moreover, there is a fundamental distinction between the
claim that there are ‘asymmetric claims and endowments operating in the background,
shaping our ways of speaking (and hearing)’, on the one hand, and that particular aspects
of conduct (e.g. turn design) communicate certain ‘asymmetric claims and endowments’,
on the other hand. The distinction turns on whether the objective is to describe a causal
(cognitive) process (‘shaping’ etc.) or a communicative one.17 My focus in all the papers
addressed by the EoE group is throughout on communicative actions and on the facets of
turn design and sequence organization that bear on them.18
While Lynch and Wong worry about epistemics as a ‘hidden order’, Lindwall et al.
(2016: 507 et seq.) take up a seemingly contradictory position that epistemics is not
‘hidden’ at all but is already ‘out there’ in preceding sequences. Their concern is that I
resort to a ‘hidden order’ of shared understandings when such understandings are
already publicly established. Of course, Lindwall et al. are correct to point out that in
several cases that I use, and that they comment on, relative epistemic status is indeed
‘out there’ in the preceding sequence. In fact, the cases were chosen with just that in
mind. In circumstances where the participants may have a much more secure and
nuanced grasp of relative epistemic status than external analysts with their ‘thinner
biographical grounding’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016: 532), I tried to select cases that would
allow readers to infer what was the case from the details of the interaction. This does not
mean, however, that underlying epistemic issues can be abandoned in favor of particu-
lar lexemes, for example, ‘tell’. When someone calls and says ‘I’ve just rung to tell you
…’, she is evidently assuming a K+ position, but not always, unambiguously or inde-
feasibly (Clift and Raymond, 2018).
Heritage 37
In responding to Lindwall et al., I would simply reiterate, first, that my sole interest in
‘Epistemics in Action’ (Heritage 2012a) was to build support for the claim that epistemic
status would ‘trump’ other facets of turn design in participants’ determinations of whether
an utterance was designed to give or seek information. Focused on that issue, I was less
interested in how the investigator could know what the recipients would surely know
about epistemic status, topic by topic, turn by turn. In general, of course, I have abso-
lutely no problem with the notion that epistemic status is established and managed
sequentially. For example, as Stivers (2010) shows, in practice, large numbers of declara-
tive questions emerge as requests for confirmation for something already asserted and
where, therefore, epistemic status is already established. I am more than happy to
acknowledge this. Epistemic status should not be a big mystery, and generally it isn’t.
I would add, however, that there remain two major problems with Lindwall et al.’s posi-
tion. The first is a problem of ‘origins’. By this I mean that, granted that in a preceding
sequence relative epistemic status was staked out and acknowledged, there still have to be
means by which the stances and statuses of the preceding sequence were achieved. Thus,
the issue tends to be preserved and pushed back to an earlier point in the interaction. If
preceding sequences were the only resources by which epistemic status in a current turn is
established, we (and the participants) would be faced with a problem of infinite regress.
Furthermore, second, even immediately prior turns (or indeed preliminary turn com-
ponents, Clift and Raymond, 2018) may not be reliable guides to epistemic status. In the
following sequence, focusing on a trip to Palm Springs, the topic is introduced as
follows:
(12) [NB IV:10: 14-18]
1 Emm: .h ↑How wz yer tri:p.

2 Lot: Oh:: Go:d wonderful Emm[a,
3 Emm: [Oh idn’it beautiful do:wn the:re,
4 Lot: Oh:: Jeeziz ih wz go:rgeous::.
5 Emm: Wh’t a ni:ce ↑wut time’djih git i:n.
At line 1, with the question about the trip, Emma is clearly the less knowledgeable
party (both in terms of status and stance): she was not on the trip, and the interrogative
syntax of her question takes up a stance that is congruent with that. But her second inter-
rogatively formed utterance at line 3, with its shift from the past tense (addressing
Lottie’s trip) to the present tense (targeting the contemporary charms of Palm Springs
more generally), evokes a potentially more egalitarian epistemic situation. Similarly, its
framing as a negative interrogative takes a distinctly more knowledgeable stance than
her question at line 1.19 Thus, across two turns on aspects of ostensibly the ‘same topic’,
there is a shift in relative epistemic stance and status. Given the enormously elaborate
indexicality of language and action in interaction, it should come as no surprise that pre-
vious turns or sequences may not be entirely reliable guides to current ones.
Of course, interaction is in fact permeated with ‘hidden’ and ‘extraconversational’
stuff. In his well-known ‘conversation clarification experiment’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 25–31,
38–42), Garfinkel invited subjects to write down a simple fragment of their everyday
conversation with partners or friends on the left-hand side of a page and then to explicate
the meanings that were conveyed in the fragment on the right-hand side. Garfinkel’s
analysis showed that among other things,
(a) There were many matters that the partners understood they were talking about that they did
not mention. (b) Many matters that the partners understood were understood on the basis not
only of what was actually said but what was left unspoken. (c) Many matters were understood
through a process of attending to the temporal series of utterances as documentary evidences of
a developing conversation rather than as a string of terms. (d) Matters that the two understood
in common were understood only in and through a course of understanding work that consisted
of treating an actual linguistic event as ‘the document of’, as ‘pointing to’, as standing on behalf
of an underlying pattern of matters that each already supposed to be the matters that the person,
by his speaking, could be telling the other about. (Garfinkel, 1967: 39–40)
A paragraph or so later, Garfinkel (1967: 40) adds that
The colloquy reveals additional features … Many of its expressions are such that their sense
cannot be decided by an auditor unless he knows or assumes something about the biography
and purposes of the speaker, the circumstances of the utterance, the previous course of the
conversation, or the particular relationship of actual or potential interaction that exists between
user and auditor.
This set of observations (and there are more that are equally cogent) seem to me to be
undeniable. They set an agenda for analysis infinitely more complex than issues of epis-
temic stance and status – an agenda that we are far indeed from addressing in a meaning-
ful way at the present time.
Information, ‘informationism’ and action formation

According to the EoE group my approach to interaction is ‘informationist’ and represents
a regression to earlier approaches to talk based on information transmission and propo-
sitional content which were displaced by J.L. Austin’s (and CA’s) action-oriented focus
(Lynch and Wong, 2016: 533–534). According to the older view, sentences express prop-
ositions about the world, and utterances communicate those propositions as messages.
This view was roundly rejected by Austin (and the speech act theorists who followed),
who argued that utterances in the first place deliver actions. CA was, from the outset,
premised on this view although the analytic stance taken to social actions and their analy-
sis was very different from that presented by speech act theory and practice (Schegloff,
1984, 1992b, 1996a). One effect of CA’s stance was greatly to enlarge the range and
variety of actions to be examined: even brief turns composed of words like mm hm and
oh constitute actions (Heritage, 1984a; Schegloff, 1982); in relevant contexts, silence is
also action (Schegloff, 2007) and, in yet other contexts, various sequentially conditioned
forms of repetition constitute distinctive actions (Schegloff, 1996a). The rejection of this
‘proposition and message’ view of interaction does not, however, entail that interaction
does not involve actions that solicit and assert information. It does. There is a lot of it.
In responding to the ‘informationist’ critique, I want to begin with Lindwall et al.’s
(2016: 504) observations about ambiguity. Drawing on Schegloff’s (1984) discussion,
Heritage 39
they suggest that I am entangled in old arguments about the need to ‘disambiguate’ utter-
ances that are inherently indeterminate. This so-called need for disambiguation is an ‘old
chestnut’ from isolated sentence approaches to discourse and has been long discredited
within all branches of ethnomethodology and CA (Garfinkel, 1967: 1–34; see also
Heritage, 1978, 1984b: 135–178). I absolutely reject the false and misleading claim that
I think utterances are inherently ambiguous. My question concerned how sequences and
other background information inform the recognizability of actions in such a way that
‘ambiguity’ specifically does not arise. Focusing on participants’ abilities to distinguish
between the actions of giving and requesting information, my claim was, and remains,
that joint recognition of relative epistemic status – however achieved – is the primary
vehicle for this. However, this claim has an important corollary. If epistemic status is so
important, then participants must keep track of it quite carefully, not because actions are
inherently ambiguous, but because epistemic status can trump the surface features of
utterances and ‘flip’ their import as actions. I supported this with several cases in which
such a ‘flip’ in fact occurred.
There are two further aspects to the ‘informationist’ critique. First, I am supposedly an
‘informationist’ because I think that discerning whether one is being asked something or
told something is an important thing to get right. It should be noted right away that such a
claim is not ‘informationist’ or even about ‘information’ per se. Persons may need to make
this determination fundamentally because they need to produce an action and take up a
stance (with its associated rights and obligations) in response to what has just been said
(Raymond, 2018). Furthermore, this claim is not ‘cognitivist’ or focused on propositions.
Rather, the proposal is that insofar as this determination is used and relied upon as part of
the method by which a speaker can produce a recognizable action, then it will also be used
and relied upon as part of the method by which a recipient will come to recognize the
action and frame a response. This position is closely congruent with Raymond’s (2018)
discussion of the intermeshing of practices of interaction from a variety of domains in the
formation of an action that has a distinctive signature or gestalt. In other words, I am pro-
posing that the recognition of whether one is being asked or told something is part of the
process by which one produces and understands a wide variety of action types (e.g. ques-
tions, answers, offers, invitations, requests, assessments, stories and gossip) prior to fram-
ing a response. It is no part of my claim that conversationalists are interested in, concerned
by, or preoccupied with ‘information transfer’ to the exclusion of all else. This would be
patently absurd. At the same time, it is well to remember that, as Steensig and Drew
(2008: 6) have observed, ‘so many other actions can be managed or performed through
questioning, including suggesting (why don’t we …), inviting (why don’t you come over
…), requesting (would you pass me …) and complaining (why don’t you ever …)’ and not
to mention those listed in Raymond (2003) (see Note 4).
If it is correct that epistemic status can always trump other aspects of turn design in
deciding whether someone as asking for or giving information, and if this latter distinc-
tion is a common aspect of both framing and coming to recognize a wide variety of social
actions, then participants must orient to epistemic status in environments that extend far
beyond questioning and answering per se. This is because part of the recognition of an
action will arise from deciding how what is being talked about is positioned relative to
the epistemic domains of the speakers.
A second part of the ‘informationist’ critique emerges from considerations of turn

design, which has recently undergone an accelerating renewal of interest (Drew, 2013;
Schegloff, 2007). Pretty much all the EoE authors expressed a dislike for my deploy-
ment of terms such as epistemic gradient, epistemic modality and evidential as a way
into turn design, and yet these resources of turn design are demonstrably consequential
for action formation and response. Lynch and Wong (2016: 534) object that my treat-
ments of ‘indexing and sentence grammar in specific cases deploys [sic] analytical
language that is characteristic of long-standing traditions in cognitive science and ana-
lytical philosophy’ – another case of guilt by association. However, these language
features are nonetheless fundamental elements of action construction. They cannot be
ignored because when persons take turns at talk, they design them in terms of choices
among ways of building turns that include grammar, evidentials and so on that are
socially accountable. An orientation to these features of turn construction is very much
a part of the ‘why that now?’ issue that is pervasive for conversational interactants and
consequently for analysts as well.
‘Epistemics in action’ was addressed to a basic aspect of the action formation prob-
lem: how participants distinguish between asserting something and asking about it.
Asserting and asking are two different types of social actions that participants need to
distinguish for the reasons given above. Addressing how they might be distinguished is
not ‘informationist’ (or ‘cognitivist’ for that matter). Nor is it a problem to be ‘dissolved’.
It is rather a means of getting at one aspect of the methods that speakers use and rely on
to produce recognizable actions and that hearers use and rely on to recognize them. For
years, linguists of many different persuasions – perhaps reluctant to move outside of the
sentence as an object of analysis – have focused on syntax and intonation as solutions to
this problem. I think it is fair to say that this focus has been a failure: neither syntax nor
intonation, either separately or together, has proved adequate to the task. My proposal
was to point to a known-in-common aspect of the context of the talk beyond the sentence
– epistemic status – as something that speakers rely upon to be heard as asserting or
questioning, and that hearers, correspondingly, might use in recognizing those actions.
To this end, I attempted to show that epistemic status could always override or
‘trump’ syntax and intonation as a basis for producing and recognizing assertions and
questions. Whether this claim is true or not, and how much it might need to be refined,
will probably take quite some time to sort out. The EoE group seems to be uninterested
in the truth or otherwise of the claim, preferring to argue a priori that it is based on
outmoded, un-ethnomethodological and non-CA thinking. In this context, it is simply
mystifying to find ethnomethodologists, of all people, in an apparently unanimous
denial of the role of known-in-common context as an aspect of action production and
recognition. And all this is at a point where there has hardly ever been broader schol-
arly awareness of the indexical properties of action, in large part stimulated by the
impact of ethnomethodology itself.
The final step in my argument was a logical, and not an empirical, one. It was to pro-
pose that if epistemic status can always trump syntactic and intonational resources in the
recognition of actions, then, for many forms of turn construction, persons must unavoid-
ably monitor epistemic status as a potential factor in action production and recognition.
This is a fairly radical claim, it may or may not turn out to be true and we may not know
Heritage 41
whether it is true for quite a long time.20 However, as described above, it is certainly
compatible with what we already know about orientations to knowledge and knowledge
domains in a variety of activity contexts.
Information and motivation: the epistemic engine

I have so far strenuously resisted the idea that an interest in Q-A sequences commits
me to a view of interaction that identifies it with an exclusive or overwhelming inter-
est in information exchange. I certainly do not take that view. While it still may be
objected that the ‘Epistemic Engine’ paper’s claims nonetheless conduce to such a
view, this does not comport with the opening remarks of that paper. There I observe,
building on Schegloff’s (2007) observation that multiple principles inform sequence
organization, that
This article is conceived as a contribution to understanding [these] alternative principles of

sequence organization, with the suggestion that information imbalance is one of these principles.
(Heritage, 2012b: 32; emphasis added)
I fully reiterate the claim that ‘expressions of epistemic imbalance drive sequences’
(Heritage, 2012b: 32), but I also believe that they are very far from being the only
sequential drivers out there. Moreover, as noted by Steensig and Heinemann (2016: 5),
an ‘expression of epistemic imbalance’ is hardly a ‘hidden order of motivation’: on the
contrary, it is right out there on the surface of interaction. I would add that the proposal
that such expressions have sequential consequences is not formally different from the
idea that adjacency pair first actions have sequential consequences.
The ‘Engine’ paper emerged in dialog with Schegloff’s discussion of non-minimal
post-expansion sequences (Schegloff, 2007:142–168). These sequences lack the simplic-
ity and clarity of definition that one finds in pre-expansion, insert and base adjacency
pair sequences. Most importantly, they lack the sequence initiating actions (most often
questions of some sort) that create a prospective social and moral obligation for the sec-
ond speaker. As Schegloff (2007) notes,
As with turns, sequences – however apparently ‘over’ – can turn out not to have been over if
the next thing that happens adds to them. (p. 142)
In Schegloff’s view, non-minimal post-expansions, rather than being prospectively

organized, can only be seen in retrospect as having added to the prior sequence.
Schegloff’s discussion addressed several types of post-expansions (musings, other-initi-
ated repair, topicalization, disagreement etc.), and yet others could easily be added.
My own interest focused on Q-A sequences and on how post-expansions could be
presented as accountably motivated, unit by unit, in terms of continuing epistemic imbal-
ance. In particular, I was interested in, and attempted to illustrate, how Q-A sequences
could undergo post-expansion through quite slight and apparently insignificant epistemic
‘nudges’. For example, I showed a case in which a Q-A sequence about ‘garlic tablets’ is
brought to a conclusion by the questioner’s sequence closing third at line 5 and then re-
opened at line 6:
(13) [Field 1:1:89-94]
1 Les: Uh didyuh get yer garlic tablets.

2 Mum: Yes I’ve got them,
3 Les: Have yuh t- started tak[ing th’m
4 Mum: [I started taking th’m t’da:y
5 Les: Oh well do:n[e
6 Mum: -> [Garlic’n parsley.
7 Les: ↑THAT’S RI:ght.[BY hhoh-u-Whole Food?
8 Mum: [( )
9 (0.3)
10 Mum: Whole Foo:ds ye[s,
11 Les: [YES well done,
12 (0.3)
13 Mum: ( )
14 (0.6)
15 Les: ‘s I’ve got Katharine on: th’m too: now,
Mum’s post-expansion at line 6 vividly illustrates Schegloff’s point that even

sequences that are closed and putatively ‘over’ can be re-opened. She does so, post
Lesley’s sequence closing third at line 5, by hearably revising Lesley’s earlier reference
to ‘garlic tablets’ (line 1) to ‘Garlic’n parsley’, whereupon her daughter Lesley overtly
confirms the revision (with ‘↑THAT’S RI:ght’.) and introduces the likely store at which
the tablets were bought (‘Whole Food?’). Mum treats this as a question in search of
information by confirming ‘Whole foods yes’, at line 10,21 and Lesley closes the sequence
with a response (‘YES’) that treats the confirmation as fully expected,22 and an assess-
ment of Mum’s reported action ‘well done,’.
Looking at a sequence like this, it is difficult not to be struck by the complexity of the
epistemic positionings managed by the two women as they expand a superficially banal
sequence. To develop this analysis is not to assert an occult ‘hidden order’ of motivation;
rather, it is to examine how turns that expand sequences can provide for their own
autochthonously accountable motivation. Although I used the metaphoric term ‘engine’
with its unfortunate implicit invocation of internal motivation for sequences, my focus
was, and is, on how a K+/K− imbalance can be a warrant for continuing, and account-
ably so, in sequence expansion.23 This conceptual stance pervades my case-by-case anal-
ysis and was also articulated explicitly:
I see the engine primarily in terms of accountability rather than motivation: A person, finding
some new thing to say, is warranted in saying it, and finds warrant from others in its saying, by
the fact that it is a ‘new thing’. If we restrict the engine to this layer of public accountability,
then, I believe, we remain on the relatively safe ground of finding evidence for its operation in
public displays of its relevance or relevant absence. (Heritage, 2012c: 80)
Once again, the aim was not to create a ‘theory of motivation’ – let alone a ‘hidden’
one – but rather to add a further type to the various forms of in situ accountable post-
expansion types already identified by Schegloff and, in the process, to note the delicacy
of some of the epistemic ‘nudges’ involved.
Heritage 43
Conclusion
According to Lynch (1993), CA has become professionalized and positivistic, subscrib-
ing to the use of logico-empirical methods, and deploying terms derived from linguistics
and cognitive science to perform ‘formal analysis’. In all these ways, CA is allegedly
apostate from the radical initiatives fostered by Garfinkel and his students.24
I beg to differ. Garfinkel (1967) proposed that the ‘central recommendation’ of eth-
nomethodological studies is that
the activities whereby members produce and manage settings or organized everyday affairs are
identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’. (p. 1)
The implication for those of us who followed Sacks into the analysis of social interac-
tion was, and is, that practices for producing talk-in-interaction, whether at the level of
turn or sequence organization, serve as the resources through which others make sense
of talk as action. As Sacks put it in an early lecture,
A culture is an apparatus for generating recognizable actions; if the same procedures are used for
generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability
as is formulatable. (Sacks Lectures, Fall, Appendix A, p. 226; emphasis in original)25
Across his many lectures and into his published writings, including those based on
single cases (e.g. Sacks, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1979), Sacks insisted that the practices he
was examining, regardless of whether they were practices of sense-making or of the
production and recognition of action, should be looked at as trans-situational ‘devices’
for performing certain tasks (Clayman et al., in press). As Sacks (1984a) put it in one of
his lectures,
Thus is it not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily interested in. Our
aim is to get into a position to transform … our sense of ‘what happened’, from a matter of a
particular interaction done by particular people, to a matter of interactions as products of a
machinery. (p. 26)
For example, while any in situ deployment of a practice (e.g. initiating repair on
another speaker’s talk) may have many different consequences for the parties’ under-
standings and in terms of repercussions for subsequent action, other-initiated repair is
nevertheless also a general practice (or set of practices) that can be robustly described
and is repeatedly and reliably identifiable in other contexts.
However, in the beginning, it was not clear how the procedures or practices that made
up this ‘machinery’ of action and intersubjectivity were to be identified and analyzed.
The decisive move in this regard was the shift from the interpretive analysis of single
cases, to collections of them, as a means of elucidating the scope and boundaries of par-
ticular practices, and their coordination with others. It is this method of working – so
effectively described in Clift and Raymond’s (2018) contribution – that has been key to
the development of CA from at least the turn-taking paper onwards.26 For example, as
previously noted, with the use of collections, the observation that oh-prefaced responses
to questions frequently occur in contexts where the answer has already been stated or
very strongly implied can lead to the noticing that it is also used when an answer should
be ‘obvious’ for common-sense cultural reasons. In addition, collections also allow one
to see that oh-prefaced productions of ‘non-obvious’ answers foreshadow a reluctance to
progress the conversational topic invoked by the question and, finally, in an inverse
manipulation of this last, that the practice can be used to implement ‘trouble-premoni-
tory’ (Jefferson, 1980) responses to ‘how are you?’ questions. Appropriately handled,
collections can allow one to see mutually reinforcing patterns in the use of practices that
might otherwise seem unrelated. It is this use of collections to array the interconnected
deployment of practices in the construction of actions that goes unacknowledged and
unaddressed in the EoE critiques (Clift and Raymond, 2018; Drew, 2018; Raymond,
2018) which, thereby, founder and miss their mark.
Similarly, a recognition of the interconnection and coordination of practices to pro-
duce turns-within-sequences that embody particular actions stressed by Drew (2018),
Raymond (2018) and Bolden (2018) can hardly be overestimated. This has increasingly
involved working with linguists and others, whose own interests and preoccupations
have generally moved in a more CA direction (Clift and Raymond, 2018). Although the
connection with linguists is a long-standing one (Clift and Raymond, 2018; Schegloff,
1991b; Raymond, 2018), it has been strengthened by an intensifying focus on turn design
(Drew, 2013) during the past decade, a focus based on the recognition that progress in
understanding the sequential organization of action will depend on delineating the struc-
ture, organization and recognizability of turns and actions in more precise ways than
heretofore.
Finally, the practices of social interaction can be examined for their participation in
orders of conversational organization, such a turn-taking, repair, sequencing and so on.
These orders concern fundamental aspects of human interaction and social relations
(Schegloff, 2006). Correspondingly, practices concerned with their management are
deployed with enormous frequency in interaction. I share with the other contributors to
this issue the belief that epistemics is such an order (Heritage, 2008), and that orienta-
tions to, and the management of, states of knowledge in both absolute and relative terms
are abiding and ubiquitous features of human interaction, as indeed was promulgated by
Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, the intellectual grandfathers of our field.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Galina Bolden, Steve Clayman, Rebecca Clift, Paul Drew, Eric
Livingston, Doug Maynard, Anita Pomerantz, Chase Raymond, Geoff Raymond, Jeff Robinson
and Lucas Seuren for comments and reactions to this paper in whole or in part. The author alone
remains entirely responsible for its contents.
Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Heritage 45
Notes
1. As noted by Te Molder (2016: 88),
One of the defining features of a traditional cognitive worldview is the idea that men-
tal states precede people’s talk and behaviour. Behaviour can be explained in terms of
motives, intentions, beliefs, etc. that drive, cause and predict that behaviour … The aim
or suggestion of causal explanation is a crucial difference with the framework of norma-
tive accountability that underlies CA and DP. (Edwards, 2006)
2. The paper by Lindwall et al. is an exception to these stipulations though, for reasons given
later, I believe that it is misguided.
3. Once created, this invention is then assumed as an intentional background in Button and
Sharrock’s (2016) observations that ‘However, the strong critical reaction of the articles in this
Special Issue against EP is not because of the dubiety of EP accounts of exemplary sequences
as such, but precisely because it is advanced as a Programme’ (Button and Sharrock, 2016:
612). Thus, the criticism is that all along and in the first place I have been ‘advancing’ a pro-
gram that these papers have only just given a name to; a program, moreover, that neither I nor
the community of scholars with whom I work recognizes.
4. As Raymond (2003: 940) also notes in stressing the ubiquity of the distinction, people make
widespread use of yes/no interrogatives (YNIs)
to organize the distribution of knowledge and information via questions and answers,
the transfer of labor and objects via offers and requests, and social gatherings via invita-
tions. Additionally, speakers in almost every setting or institutional context will be found
to rely on YNIs in some way: Survey researchers gathering data, doctors examining
patients, supermarket cashiers chatting with customers, ethnographers probing inform-
ants, mothers quizzing their children, congressional committees pursuing the downfall
of a president, instructors teaching students, journalists interviewing public figures,
attorneys cross-examining witnesses in court, and many others all rely heavily, if not
exclusively, on YNIs to accomplish much of their work.
5. Pomerantz (1984: 57) opens her discussion of second assessments, by commenting on the
relationship between first-hand access to an experience and rights to assess it. When speakers
want to assess something that they have not experienced, they will index their lack of access
as part of the assessment. Raymond and Heritage (2005: 17) illustrated this elementary phe-
nomenon with a sequence in which a woman, told about a beautiful house, responds with ‘I
bet it’s a dream’, thereby directly indexing her lack of first-hand access to the referent. We
referred to this utterance as a ‘simulacrum of agreement’ on the basis of Pomerantz’s remarks,
only to be criticized as creating a ‘metric of “kinds of agreements”’ (Macbeth and Wong,
2016: 579). We thought we had described something completely obvious and hence usable as
part of an introduction to the topic. See Raymond (2018) for a further account of a misleading
attack on an opening example.
6. See Loftus (1979) for some discussion of the significance of this distinction in forensic con-
texts. I am grateful to Chase Raymond for this observation.
7. The literary critic Kenneth Burke’s (1945) study A Grammar of Motives should also be
mentioned in this connection. Some of Garfinkel’s (1967) emphasis on the accountability of
action and the relationships between actions and accounts of them may have been influenced
by these writings which are referenced in his PhD dissertation (Garfinkel, 1952: 6 et seq.).
8. Nothing in the paper was taken, as falsely and misleadingly alleged by Macbeth et al. (2016: 553
et seq.), from James’ (1972) observations which, in the context of very little previous discussion
of oh, were introduced in a footnote in my paper solely to contrast with Charles Fries’ (1952)
earlier treatment of response particles as undifferentiated ‘signals of continued attention’.
9. This position is de rigueur within conversation analysis and has inspired studies demonstrat-
ing that even the expression of pain (Heath, 1989) and very strong emotions (Whalen and
Zimmerman, 1998) is strongly shaped by local interactional contingencies.
10. The EoE authors make a good deal of the relatively few references to Goffman contained in
my work. Both Macbeth et al and Lynch and Wong complain that when I mention Goffman,
I fail to note Schegloff’s (1988a) attack on him, as if that attack (of which I surely am aware)
is relevant to the issue. Macbeth et al. aver darkly (p. 522) about the ‘pride of place’ given to
Goffman in Heritage and Raymond (2005) and then comes the following: ‘there is a tenden-
tious history attached, and the suture is achieved, here as elsewhere, with no discussion of
Schegloff’s (1988a) devastating critique of Goffman’s program’. In fact, Schegloff’s attack
was methodological, focused on how Goffman collected and analyzed data and not focused
on Goffman’s program per se. It is relevant, perhaps, to note that both Sacks and Schegloff
were advanced graduate students of Goffman at Berkeley (Schegloff, 1992b: xxiii–xxiv), and
that in the very paper referenced by my critics, Schegloff lauds Goffman for habilitating the
domain of face-to-face interaction – surely Goffman’s fundamental ‘program’ – as a domain
of sociological study, ‘for CA can be seen, variously, as following that path, or further devel-
oping it, or exploring what it might entail and how, or transforming it’ (Schegloff, 1988a: 90).
One may further note the insinuating tone of the references to ‘tendentious history’ and the
achievement of a ‘suture’ that are entirely unsupported here, as elsewhere, by any form of
documentation or argumentation.
11. This quote reliably conveys a sense of the kinds of word games that Macbeth et al. substitute
for analysis across large sections of their paper.
12. In one of several bizarre misreadings of my paper, Macbeth et al. (2016: 555) treat my recita-
tion of what I’m attempting to achieve in terms of general meaning and its particularization
(Heritage, 1984a: 234) as if it were an (of course, faulty) representation of how oh works in
actual concrete sequences of interaction.
13. In fact, Nan waits for a complete second (line 5) – the ‘standard maximum’ (Jefferson, 1989)
period of time between turns – before initiating a new sequence.
14. Macbeth and Wong’s position is apparently at variance with Lynch, who writes that:
s I understand it, the ‘‘proof procedure’’ does not offer a guarantee that a conversation
A
analyst who uses a tape recording to get access to what co-participants’ ‘‘understand’’
from each other’s talk will get it right. Instead, a recorded sequence of conversational
moves provides a way for the outside analyst to narrow the field of relevancies, but it
does not entirely relieve the analyst of the burden of trying to understand what the co-
participants are doing. Unless the analyst can follow what the participants are doing
and saying, a current ‘‘turn’’ will provide little leverage for deciphering the sense and
pragmatic import of prior ‘‘turns’’. (Lynch 2011: 555).
15. For this reason, oh is a useful resource with which the analyst may argue that a first action
was designed to solicit information. This is not to be confused, as apparently Macbeth and
Wong do, with the way in which oh is a resource for speakers in this context. Persons are not
generally preoccupied with demonstrating that their previous utterance was a question, and
a ‘real’ one at that! Nonetheless, the use of oh does convey that as a by-product of its use in
sequence closure.
16. In their discussion section, Macbeth et al. (p. 567) insinuate with regard to this example that
invocations of ‘such persons’ and what is ‘conceivable’ about them are of course noto-
riously fugitive things. And we needn’t take them up to note how the interpretative
resources we find here stand at some distance from the inquiries of Sacks and Schegloff
and the kinds of evidences they produce.
Heritage 47
However, a major point of the article is the analytic leverage that oh-prefacing gives about
what persons are ready to treat as self-evident or not. This leverage emerges from the devel-
opment of collections of cases. Once one sees that oh-prefacing is associated with responses
to questions that have already been stated, it is not any great step to see that oh-prefacing is
also associated with responses to questions that are ‘obvious’ on other grounds. This is the
fundamental value of the collection method (see Raymond, 2018, and Clift and Raymond,
2018, for further elaboration). Once again, of course, the analysis is not about causality, but
about what is being communicated through a particular practice of talk-in-interaction.
17. The failure to distinguish between resources for communication and causal processes is
endemic in the EoE papers. My work aimed to establish relationships between communica-
tive practices and routine states of epistemic relations as a communicative matter, not as a
cause of behavior. I absolutely and emphatically reject the claim that my work is designed to
unearth findings that as ‘treated as causative of what order may be found on any actual occa-
sion’ (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 585).
18. I would also note that I am not describing ‘abstract gradients’ either. For example, the distinc-
tion between interrogative, tag and declarative questions (the epistemic gradient to which
Lynch and Wong are presumably referring) is hardly abstract, and speakers’ orientations to
the distinctions involved are manifest and obvious (Heritage, 2010b; Stivers, 2010) (see also
Enfield et al., 2010, for a range of other languages).
19. Since this is a first positioned assessment and it is upgraded with the use of a negative inter-
rogative, Emma’s turn design embodies the stance that she is more knowledgeable about
Palm Springs in general (Heritage and Raymond, 2005), although we do not know whether
this is congruent with her epistemic status or whether, indeed, there would be agreement
between the two women on this matter.
20. Toward the conclusion of their paper Steensig and Heinemann (2016: 606), apparently con-
vinced that my views on epistemics are overplayed, recommend a kind of ‘epistemics lite’.
The topic is good in the context of ‘morality and issues of affiliation and identity construc-
tion’, but the idea that it ramifies from recipient design into action formation is too extreme.
My difficulty with this position is that it is not easy to see how one can have the former with-
out the latter.
21. It is noticeable that this confirmation also indexes that the response is within Mum’s domain
of knowledge. Lesley’s candidate answer Whole Food? is the object of a confirmatory repeat
(and a minor correction from Whole Food to Whole Foods), prior to the agreement token yes.
This ordering is a classic feature of responses that index epistemic primacy (Heritage and
Raymond 2005, 2012; Raymond and Heritage, 2006).
22. By producing some other acknowledgment token than oh, in third position in a question–
answer (Q-A) sequence, questioners can indicate that a response was incomplete (e.g. mmhm,
Heritage, 1984a), or acceptable as an action proposal (e.g. okay, Seuren, frth), linked to some-
thing said earlier (e.g. right, Gardner, 2007), or expected (e.g. yeah). This latter was the focus
of an exercise created by Gail Jefferson some years ago: in the following case from that
exercise, Linda, at line 5, shows that the fact that Joan bought gifts for Linda’s children when
they were on sale is not ‘news’ for her! A possible implication of line 5 is that Linda expected
Joan’s gift buying to be done ‘on the cheap’.
[TCI(b):16:59:SO] ((Joan bought Linda’s kids some clothing for their dolls))
1 Linda: Where did you get the clothes at.
2 Joan: At uh Toy City,
3 Linda: Were they on sa:le?=
4 Joan: =Ah::, yeah.
5 Linda: Ye:ah.
6 Joan: I went with uh::m () Fay one day…
23. Much is made of the fact that the title of my paper resembles one produced by Churchland
and Churchland (two proponents of a form of cognitivism) many years ago (Lynch and Wong,
2016: 528). I have never read anything by these authors, and I was certainly entirely unaware
of this paper.
24. This also emerges in various other critiques of errors attributed, depending on the author, to
Sacks, Schegloff and others (see, for example, Anderson and Sharrock, 1984; Coulter, 2005;
Lynch, 1993; Lynch and Bogen, 1994).
25. Cited in Schegloff (1992b: xxxvi). See also Schegloff’s (2007: 7) closely related demand that
analysis must show how a specific action is ‘recognized by co-participants as that action by
virtue of the practices that produced it’ (emphasis added).
26. Lynch (1993: 297) is apparently opposed to this development, citing Garfinkel as his authority:
‘By calling a halt to the analytic movement from singular expressions to delocalized semiotic
schemas, Garfinkel suspends a preliminary requirement of virtually every established program
in the social sciences, including much of what rides under the banner of ethnomethodology’.
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Author biography
John Heritage is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, USA. His research focuses on
social interaction and its interface with social institutions, with particular reference to medicine
and mass communication. His publications include Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Polity
Press, 1984), Structures of Social Action (co-edited with Max Atkinson, Cambridge University
Press, 1984), Talk at Work (co-edited with Paul Drew, Cambridge University Press,1992), The
News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air (with Steven Clayman, Cambridge
University Press, 2002), Communication in Medical Care (co-edited with Douglas Maynard,
Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions
(with Steven Clayman, Wiley Blackwell, 2010).
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The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the

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1. My work is ‘cognitivist’, resorting to the invocation of external knowledge to

near theological invocations (Maynard and Clayman 2018) of statements or positions

The so-called ‘epistemic program’ is a pure invention produced in the service of an

On the ubiquity of epistemics

1. Perhaps the most wide-ranging evidence of speakers’ epistemic orientations

(1) [Travel Agency:10:ST]

l A: Derek we have no hea::t.

And in (2), epistemic modality is deployed to similar effect:

l E: They charge too much Guy,

4. An orientation to the knowledge of others penetrates language practices to some

In the openings of my papers on epistemics, I noted the contributions of Sacks,

(3) [NB IV:14:10]

1 Lot: hhhh God I don’know, he doesn’ know either

(4) [Holt 5/88:1:2:174-180]

1 Les: -> iYes:: .hh An’ I met Missiz Baker ‘n we had

4 => with Di:a:nne, °Ba[ker.°

(5) [Kitzinger and Mandelbaum 2013: 10]

(6) [Field SO(II):1:3:1-9]

1 Les: .tch.hhh Oh is ↑that you Ha[l

• Confirming (as opposed to agreeing): Schegloff (1996); Raymond (2003); Stivers

As noted above, this is a highly restricted sampling of CA research on English, but it

The EoE critique

Although cognitivism emerged in the 1950s as a replacement for behaviorism in psy-

(7) [Kamunsky 3:2]

1 ALA: ˙hhh Okay Well the reason I’m calling=

(8) (Jefferson 1978: 222)

((Three people are walking together: someone passes them

I then commented by reference to this and a second example:

‘Oh’ is understood as an expression that ‘injects an extraconversational contingency, adumbrated

defensible basics of what oh can achieve as a component of action in interaction and to

1 Nan: .hhh Dz he ‘av ‘iz own apa:rt[mint?]

Second- and third-turn proof procedures

(10) [Midwest 3.4]

1 DOC: -> Whe[re was her cancer.

1 Emm: yihknow ah u-she gets ↓awful depressed over these

Misunderstanding … according to which a recipient’s understanding of some utterance is

A: What’s the time? A: What’s the time?

Epistemic stance and the terms of agreement

is misrepresented by Macbeth et al. (2016: 561) as if it were a narrow argument about

‘Hidden orders’, ‘extraconversational contingencies’ and action

And Lynch and Wong (2016: 542) decry

(12) [NB IV:10: 14-18]

1 Emm: .h ↑How wz yer tri:p.

A paragraph or so later, Garfinkel (1967: 40) adds that

Information, ‘informationism’ and action formation

A second part of the ‘informationist’ critique emerges from considerations of turn

Information and motivation: the epistemic engine

This article is conceived as a contribution to understanding [these] alternative principles of

In Schegloff’s view, non-minimal post-expansions, rather than being prospectively

(13) [Field 1:1:89-94]

1 Les: Uh didyuh get yer garlic tablets.

Mum’s post-expansion at line 6 vividly illustrates Schegloff’s point that even

Declaration of conflicting interests

Jefferson G (1978) Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In: Schenkein J (ed.)

Stivers T and Robinson JD (2006) A preference for progressivity in interaction. Language in

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