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Both conversation analysis (inspired by ethnomethodology) and discourse analysis (of the kind proposed and practised by Potter and Wetherell) are usually treated as self-sufficient approaches to studying the social world, rather than as mere methods that can be combined with others. And there are two areas where their conflict with other approaches is clearest. First, they reject the attribution of substantive and distinctive psychosocial features to particular categories of actor as a means of explaining human behaviour. Second, they reject use of what the people they study say about the world as a source of information that can ever be relied on for analytic purposes. These two negative commitments mark conversation analysis and discourse analysis off from almost all other kinds of social scientific research. In this article, I consider how sound the justifications are for these commitments. I conclude that they are not convincing and that neither approach should be treated as a self-sufficient paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on sociologist Jonathan Potter's response to his article. Potter thinks the author is confused, but the author suggests that even if this is true, it arises at least in part from the character of approaches to research he was discussing and how they present themselves. Potter is right to baulk at the choice between paradigm and method which the author's title seems to offer. There are different ways of interpreting each of these options and this means that simple dichotomy is involved. So the author accepts all what Potter says about the diversity of discourse analysis and that it is not a paradigm in full Kuhnian sense. The focus of the author's article was more specific, it related to whether conversation analysis and discourse analysis can be justified as self-contained approaches to social research and whether claims about their methodological superiority can be sustained. Potter questions the author's attribution to constructionism of the idea that social phenomena do not have the kind of objective reality normally ascribed to them by social actors and most social scientists.

The article presents comments of the author to "Practical Scepticism," by sociologist Jonathan Potter. It seems to the author that this phrase carries with it the very equivocation that he claimed characterized Potter's work. In places, what Potter seems to be proposing is the bracketing of assumptions about whether or not the discourse being analysed accurately represents the world or indeed refers to anything beyond itself. Yet in other places Potter clearly wants to go further, in that the study of rhetoric is to replace or redefine philosophy and the social sciences. Phenomenological bracketing is not a form of scepticism, it is a methodological device which is designed to allow explication of the manner in which phenomena are constituted. The equivocation that the author was concerned with in his article is implicit in the concept of practical scepticism. If what is meant by that term is a methodological stance adopted for the pursuit of discourse analysis or discursive psychology, what is involved is not strictly speaking scepticism, it is temporary suspension of ordinary concerns for a particular purpose. Moreover, the usefulness of this stance cannot represent a challenge to philosophical or other social scientific work whose focus is different.