McHoul2003

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McHoul2003
BibType ARTICLE
Key McHoul2003
Author(s) Alec McHoul, Mark Rapley
Title What can psychological terms actually do? (or: If Sigmund calls, tell him it didn't work)
Editor(s)
Tag(s) discourse and mind, mental predicates, intensional expressions, thinking, inference, psychology
Publisher
Year 2003
Language
City
Month
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 35
Number 4
Pages 507–522
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00103-0
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

In this paper we describe some counter-psychological approaches to psychological terms such as ‘thinking’, ‘understanding’, ‘intending’ and so on. We draw on the work of Coulter, Ryle, Sacks and Wittgenstein in order to do this and, initially, to sketch out some general convergences between pragmatics, conversation analysis and discursive psychology. From here we go on to rehearse two analyses by Harvey Sacks; the first focusing on a single utterance (“I just had a thought”) and the second on a more extensive case of “inference making”. Because this leads us to doubt the often-assumed view that psychological terms have meaning by referring to mental states, we end with the question of ordinary, everyday practices of ‘referring to mental states’—an issue marking a potential difference between some Wittgensteinian scholars and discursive psychology.

Notes