Coulter1994

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Coulter1994
BibType ARTICLE
Key Coulter1994
Author(s) Jeff Coulter
Title Is contextualizing necessarily interpretive?
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Context, Ethnomethodology
Publisher
Year 1994
Language
City
Month
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 21
Number 6
Pages 689–698
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/0378-2166(94)90104-X
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Ethnomethodology's treatments of ‘context’ and ‘contextualisation’ are contrasted to those inspired by post-structuralist theorists such as Derrida, Fish and Culler. In particular, by noting the mundane absence of explicit contextualisation as a routine feature of sense-making, and by emphasising the occasionality and purposefulness of ‘contextualisation’ as a form of problem-solving, discursive practice in its own right, it becomes possible to allay several contemporary misconceptions of contextualisation as involving ‘boundless’ interpretive assumptions and ‘indeterminacies’ at every turn. Any minimally intelligible text is argued to possess certain self-explicating features due to the inter-articulation of its conceptual devices, a parallel to the gestalt-contexture character of situations, rules and conduct in everyday life. Moreover, when ‘understanding’ and ‘interpreting’ are no longer conflated as properties of reading/hearing human communication, the ‘deconstructionist’ argument about contextuality evaporates.

Notes