Discursive psychology: A non-cognitivist approach to practices of knowing

This chapter focuses on two emerging themes in discursive psychology. The first is the practical use of psychological terms such as ‘know’ in ascriptions and avowals, and in particular their epistemic significance. The second is the way a psychological ‘state’ is displayed and responded to in talk and embodied conduct. The chapter shows how epistemic terms can operate as parts of particular practices, the way that parties may claim or display knowledge or understanding, and most importantly the way the epistemic practices operate for the parties themselves. Contemporary discursive psychology offers an approach to epistemic matters that is distinct from much of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, on the one hand, and from much critical discourse analysis, on the other. Discursive psychology was born in the early 1990s out of a broader discourse analytic approach to social psychology that was stimulated, in turn, by a critical engagement with work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, poststructuralism, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.