Evaluating Cognitive Competences in Interaction

245 Pages·2012·4.607 MB·English

by  Gitte Rasmussen (ed.), Catherine E. Brouwer (ed.), Dennis Day (ed.)

Evaluating Cognitive Competences in Interaction
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
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Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
John C. Heritage
University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson
Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at
University of Athens Santa Barbara
Susan C. Herring
Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk
Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Masako K. Hiraga
Barcelona
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà
University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 225
Evaluating Cognitive Competences in Interaction
Edited by Gitte Rasmussen, Catherine E. Brouwer and Dennis Day
Evaluating Cognitive
Competences in Interaction
Edited by
Gitte Rasmussen
Catherine E. Brouwer
Dennis Day
University of Southern Denmark
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evaluating cognitive competences in interaction / edited by Gitte Rasmussen,
Catherine E. Brouwer, Dennis Day.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 225)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Communicative competence. 2. Competence and performance (Linguistics) 3.
Conversation analysis. 4. Psycholinguistics. I. Rasmussen, Gitte. II. Brouwer,
Catherine E. III. Day, Dennis.
P37.5.C64E93 2012
401’.4--dc23 2012023973
isbn 978 90 272 5630 0 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7333 8 (Eb)
© 2012 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
Gitte Rasmussen
The embedded evaluations in air traffic control training 15
Inka Koskela & Ilkka Arminen
Teacher evaluations: Assessing ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘doing’ 43
Tom Koole
Treating student contributions as displays of understanding
in group supervision 67
Dennis Day & Susanne Kjærbeck
Good reasons for seemingly bad performance: Competences
at the blackboard and the accountability of a lesson 89
Junko Mori & Timothy Koschmann
Mutual negotiation of the interviewee’s competence
in interview interaction 119
Mika Simonen
Evaluating by feeling: The rhetorical design of emotions in the practice
of mirroring 145
Thomas Wiben Jensen
Interactive evaluation of cognitive functioning 169
Ann-Christin Månsson
Talking ‘cognition’ in the audiology clinic 189
Catherine E. Brouwer
Triumphing: When ‘mental state’ evaluations become insults 211
Gitte Rasmussen
Index 235

Introduction
Gitte Rasmussen
Center for Social Practices and Cognition, University of Southern Denmark
This collection of papers analyzes the phenomena of ‘cognition,’ ‘competences,’
and ‘evaluation’ with an ethnomethodological (EM) and/or conversation
analytic (CA) praxiological approach. Hence, the approach of this collection
differs from many approaches and research interests within cognitive science.
At  the same time, it ventures out into the investigation of a phenomenon
that the EM and/or CA tradition has historically been very critical of, namely
‘cognition’. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary ambition to unite insights
and theories from diverse research fields of human sense-making across
domains of human activity. Each research field has investigated and theorized
about specific aspects of sense-making processes – or rather processes of
meaning construction, – such as language competence, memory, perception,
and thinking. The study of meaning construction in cognitive science has,
roughly speaking, been conducted on the basis of two assumptions which run
contra each other.1 This has therefore occasioned discussions at length within
the field: (a) the brain and the ‘mind’ are two separate things. ‘Thinking’ – which
includes understanding and feeling – occurs in the mind which is observable
only to the individual who possesses the ‘mind’; (b) the ‘mind’ and the brain are
inseparable, implying any kind of “mental” event that occurs is a neuronal firing
within a person (Coulter 1991: 177). Both assumptions have been challenged by
different research paradigms and programs within different research fields such
as dynamic system theory (Kelso 1995; Port & van Gelder 1995), psychology
(Edwards & Potter 1992), cognitive linguistics (Fauconnier & Turner 2002)
semiotics (Brandt 2004; Hoffmeyer 2005), and sociology in the vein of EM
(Coulter 1991; Garfinkel 1967, 1996; Suchman 2002, 2007) including a specific
form of ethnomethodological work, namely CA (Atkinson & Heritage 1984;
Boden 1990; Goodwin & Heritage 1990; Heritage 1984; Levinson 1983;
Zimmerman 1988). Common to most of the critique is the understanding that
the explanatory force of models which conflate mind and brain fails in describing
sense-making since the description of ‘a thought’ in terms of neurological
activity in the brain does not capture what that activity (the thought) is about.
Or to put it in Coulter’s words: “Brain events, such as neuronal firings, are
1.  This presentation of cognitive science does not claim to be a thorough and detailed
description of cognitive science, nor of its developments.
2 Gitte Rasmussen
not grammatically connectable to any object-complements: one cannot have
a neuronal firing that, of, or about anything!” (1991: 178). The critique also
concerns the description of cognitive, or meaning construction, processes in
so-called computer models. Computer models treat cognition as a process of
symbolic transformations in which time is not a factor since they (the models)
connect series of events through logical operations. The critique contends that
time as a factor cannot be resolved through such logical operations. Time is
continuous, hence sense is made through processes in time rather than through
symbolic transformations and the processes are then organized “dynamically
rather than logically” (Hoffmeyer 2005: 386).
Common with parts of the critique is also the understanding that whatever
processes thoughts are, these are in most cases observable; that is “thinking
in one’s mind (silent thinking, pausing to think) is not the most fundamental
form of thinking, but instead presupposes thinking in play, work, or words”
(Malcolm 1978: 415).
Observable ‘thinking in play, work, or words’ is the focus of EM/CA
studies. The EM/CA approach to the study of such observable phenomena
differs dramatically from other, even similar studies, since it is praxiological and
procedural. By procedural EM (and CA) does not mean process. “Procedural
means labor” (Garfinkel 1996: 6). The EM/CA research interests concern
thus how phenomena which members of society and members of academic
research fields such as cognitive science manage to be given. How do ‘cognitive’
phenomenona like ‘thoughts,’ ‘understandings,’ ‘states of mind’ come to be
‘facts’? EM/CA is in other words concerned with descriptions of how “living
together” (Blum 1970: 30) is possible and, of particular relevance here how
human activities make the conception of phenomena (including ‘cognitive’
ones) possible. The description of these activities does not necessarily require
observations or speculation about what goes on ‘within the mind’ or ‘in the brain.’
(see for instance Lynch 2006). The research interests lie instead in how members
of society (including members of academia) organize their lives and activities so
that the existence of phenomena of every kind is recognizable to them. Following
Coulter (1991), the central issue in studies of ‘cognitive’ matters like – in our
case – ‘cognitive competence’ or ‘evaluating cognitive competence’ becomes then
“how can members tell, and how do they make tellable, inter alia¸ their beliefs,
memories, forgetting, dreams, understandings, thoughts, ‘states of mind’, the rules
they are following, and the knowledge they possess?” (ibid: 189).
Organized lives and activities – such as the ‘evaluation of cognitive
competences’ – exhibit ordered patterns which are achieved intersubjectively by
the members. That is, together members arrange and systematize their actions in
specific recurrent and recognizable methodical ways. It is a basic premise of
EM/CA that the activities produced by members are identical to the methods and
procedures used by them to make such activities understandable, – observable
and reportable. Thus, EM/CA studies analyze how members construct social and
Introduction 3
cultural reality locally, as they apply recognizable methods for doing so, and seek
to capture the logic of these methods.
EM is not a method in and of itself. It is rather a sociological program or
as Garfinkel puts it A Catalog of Ethnomethodological Investigations (1996: 7).2
CA or at least parts of CA (cf. Schegloff 1993) understands itself as a vein
of EM studies (Maynard & Clayman 1991; Heritage 1984; Sacks 1984),3 and
it understands itself as (a) method(s) for studying members’ sense-making
methods in interaction. CA interests concern how members arrange and
organize produced social actions in time, place, and space in and for interaction
(Psathas 1995: 3). The actions are produced methodically in systematic and
recurrent ways which makes them recognizable and understandable as actions
of a specific kind. CA describes how and what kind of specific ‘job’ the specific
action is doing; actions are then the methods in and through which sense is
achieved. CA seeks to understand the logic of participants’ methods in and for
interaction as CA describes participating members’ intersubjectively achieved
ordered patterns of actions.
1.  A short presentation of the papers in this volume
The papers in this collection aim at investigating how participants in interaction
organize the activity of ‘evaluating cognitive competences’ in a variety of settings
such as: in classrooms between students and teachers (Day and Kjærbeck, Koole,
Mori & Koschman), in hospitals between a patient (suffering from aphasia) and
a speech therapist (Månsson), in couples therapy (Wiben Jensen), in interview
interactions between an interviewer and an interviewee (Simonen), in air control
training between trainers and trainees (Koskela and Arminen), in consultations in
audiology between a hearing impaired person and an audiologist (Brouwer), and
in a school for children with special education needs between male adolescents in
their break (Rasmussen). The papers are united through their aim at describing
2.  Garfinkel describes “A Catalog of EM Investigations” as investigations “with Which to
Respectify Topics of Logic, Order, Meaning, Method, Reason, Structure, Science, and the Rest,
In, About, and As the Workings of Immortal, Ordinary Society Just in Any Actual Case. What
Did We Do? What Did We Learn?” (1996: 7, Note 4).
3.  For a discussion of whether CA studies are, do, or should (not) be considered part of the
Ethnomethodological Catalog or whether it should only be considered of interest to EM as an
object of study, namely the study of CA ethno-methods in and through which CA findings (or
objects) manage to be given, see for instance Garfinkel (2002), Heritage (1984), Maynard and
Clayman (1991), Rawl (2002), Sacks (1984), Schegloff (1993).