Evaluating Cognitive Competences in Interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Evaluation is a part of everyday life. Competences, knowledge and skills are assessed in ordinary as well as in institutional settings like hospitals, clinics and schools. This volume investigates how evaluations are being carried out interactionally. More specifically, it explores how people evaluate each others’ cognitive competences as they deal with each others’ understandings, knowings, feelings, doings, hearings and learnings face-to-face. The contributions focus on different evaluation activities in a variety of institutional settings in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Holland and the United States of America. All the contributions approach the theme by use of Ethnomethodology (EM) and/or Conversation Analysis (CA). Thus, the analytic interests concern how participants organize activities of evaluating cognitive competences by means of recognizable interactional methods. This approach differs from other approaches and research interests within cognitive science as it concentrates on how people in interaction orient towards cognitive competence irrespective of scientific theories. This paper presents a study of how teenage boys with learning disabilities evaluate co-participants' 'cognitive' or 'mental' state competences in interaction ("you are sick in the head"). The evaluations emerge out of disputes and disagreements about social experiences and end these disputes by excluding the co-participant from further talk on current topics. The study shows thus how 'mental' state evaluations become insults: In and through the use of 'mental' state evaluations in actions in which the boys triumph over, or 'win' the dispute as they exclude others from participation in on-going Explores how people evaluate each others' cognitive competences as they deal with each others' understandings, knowings, feelings, doings, hearings and learnings face-to-face. This title focuses on different evaluation activities in a variety of institutional settings in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Holland and the United States of America.