Expertise in Interaction – Introduction

The articles selected for this Special Issue are based on presentations at the panel on Knowledge and Expertise in Interaction in IIEMCA, Mannheim, 2–5 July 2019, and in the Expertise workshop, Helsinki, 12–13 December 2019. The special issue is also a part of a long standing interest of Discourse Studies on Epistemic issues, started with a theme issue on Epistemic Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 2013), followed by Evidential and Epistemic Strategies (González, 2015), Epistemics of Epistemics (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016), and Epistemics – the Rebuttal (Drew, 2018). This theme issue deals with expertise in interaction, how parties orient to expertise, and also how expertise is procedurally relevant and consequential for interactants. Interest in expertise in interaction is not novel; orientations to skills, organizations and knowing-how have been a continuous topic of ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) studies since their beginning. However, mostly expertise has not been topicalized as such: it has remained a briefly mentioned undercurrent in studies of expert interactional practices, or more recently, a transient side topic of epistemics. In this theme issue the contributors try to tease out the role of expertise for interaction. We propose that we are seeing the first wobbly steps in the systematic study of expertise in interaction. At times, the contributions utilize purposefully the existing framework of epistemics to explore the ways in which parties in interaction adjust and reshape their actions and understandings according to their sense of what their expertise is and their orientations to other participants’ expertise. Sometimes they connect the studies to other existing fields, such as deontics; sometimes they just enter into new territories. To question the Cartesian body mind split Ryle (2009/1949) emphasized the interlinkage of body and mind and toward that end he launched his most famous concept “know-how”. Unlike the propositional knowledge, knowing something, procedural knowledge concerns how something is done, which has an inbuilt linkage between action and knowledge. For Ryle (1945) eventually all knowledge has a procedural basis, but know-how and know-that are distinguishable forms of knowledge. Arminen and Simonen (this issue) have taken the Rylean distinction between know-how and know-that as a starting point to explore, whether know-how, or its conventionalized form, expertise, is oriented to, relevant and consequential for the parties in interaction, and to what degree expertise and its distribution may have a distinctive implications for parties in interaction. In some environments, propositional and procedural knowledge are clearly 1015745 DIS0010.1177/14614456211015745Discourse StudiesEditorial research-article2021