Malcolm Ashmore

Death and Furniture: the rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism

and participants in the 15th Discourse and Reflexivity Workshop (University of Sheffield, September 1992) for making helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In this version pages are counted according to the published numbers with breaks following the published version.

It's a scream: professional hearing and tape fetishism☆

Abstract This paper addresses the roles of taping and tapes in the arenas of academic Conversation and Discourse Analysis, and in a recent American trial of therapists which constituted a major development in the Recovered Memory/False Memory debate. Our argument is that two seemingly opposed features of the practice of hearing tapes—tape fetishism and professional hearing—are in fact interdependent. By tape fetishism we mean the treatment of the tape as a direct and evidential record of a past event, and thus as a quasi-magical time machine. Professional hearing is a trained method of hearing—as developed, for example, in conversation analysis. The joint operation of these features prevents us from seeing that all hearings are mediated, and that their reports are interpretative. The paper sets out to analyze modes of mediation: the analytic glossing of voiced but non-linguistic sounds (laughing, crying, screaming) and the use of rhetorical descriptions in media reports of taped sounds.

Regulating Criticism: Some Comments on an Argumentative Complex

This commentary identifies a range of flaws and contradictions in Parker’s critical realist position and his critique of relativism. In particular we highlight: (1) a range of basic errors in formulating the nature of relativism; (2) contradictions in the understanding and use of rhetoric; (3) problematic recruitment of the oppressed to support his argument; (4) tensions arising from the distinction between working in and against psychology. We conclude that critical realism is used to avoid doing empirical work, on the one hand, and to avoid scholarly interdisciplinary engagement, on the other.

Lost in the Mall with Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcations and Demonstrations in the Psychologies

This article analyzes the demarcations made within psychology as a feature of the “memory wars”—the current controversy around “recovered” or “false” memory. As it is played out inside professional psychology, the dispute features clinical practitioners acting largely as proponents of recovered memory and experimentalists as proponents of false memory. Tracing a genealogy of this dispute back to a pair of original sites (Mesmer’s salon and Wundt’s laboratory), we show how the traditions’engagement in three modes of scientific demonstration varies systematically in terms of the modes of social relation inherent in their epistemic practices and the kinds of “reliable witness” these practices produce. We conclude that whereas the experimentalist tradition is able to transporttheir produced witnesses from oneto anothersite of demonstration with relative ease, the clinical tradition has much greater difficulty in doing so and thus has to engage in a variety of compensatory demonstrative strategies.

Social epistemology and reflexivity: Two versions of how to be really useful

This essay argues that the really useful character of reflexivity is that it enables a radical critique of representation and its conventional material and rhetorical practices. It is uniquely able to produce paradox and thus disrupt discourses by undermining authorial privilege. Because Fullers social epistemology is insensitive to its own reflexive implications, and limits itself to normative questions about knowledge policy, it is too limited — and limiting — to provide a context that can nurture reflexivity.

Reflexivity in Science and Technology Studies

This article looks at the history, varieties, influences on, and criticisms of reflexivity in science and technology studies (STS). It deals with the epistemic, aesthetic, practical, and political aspects of reflexivity in this context. First, the meanings of ‘reflexivity,’ as this term has been understood in STS, are set out. A brief history of the varieties of reflexive concerns in this field is presented, from Bloors explicit, yet limited, endorsement, to the full-blooded treatments of ‘the reflexivists’ (Mulkay, Woolgar, Ashmore) and beyond. Criticisms of reflexive writing from within STS (especially from Collins and Latour) are dealt with and responded to. A consideration of the internal role and status of reflexive work in STS and an assessment of the current state and future prospects of reflexivity are undertaken.