Discourse and Cognition

By: Derek Edwards

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eText | 13 December 1996 | Edition Number 1

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`For those already familiar with discursive work it will be a joy - Edwards writes with enormous clarity and insight. For psychologists whose work involves an understanding of the relations between language and cognition this book will be essential reading.... This is a demanding book that will repay close attention. It can also be dipped into as a resource for the brilliant reworkings of traditional psychological topic areas, such as emotion, language, cognition, categories, AI, narrative, scripts and developmental psychology. If you want a glimpse into the future of psychology, get this book - the end of cognitivism starts here' - History and Philosophy of Psychology The central project of this multidisciplinary volume is a wholesale reappraisal of psychological concepts of human action, mental states, language and social interactions. Derek Edwards reviews a wide range of thought and research to demonstrate how the dominant cognitive approach to psychology has failed. He makes a compelling case for language to be best understood as a kind of activity, as discourse. The argument draws upon ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy and social studies of science. These influences underpin a fascinating intellectual survey ranging across cognitivism, discursive psychology, shared knowledge, categories and metaphor, emotion and narrative. The emphasis throughout is on the value of close empirical study of text and talk, through which the topics of mind, world and `who we are' are seen as `ways of talking'.