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Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Epistemic calibration

Achieving affiliation through access claims and generalizations

| University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland
| Tampere University , Tampere, Finland
Sometimes a division has been made between expressions of knowledge and expressions of emotion, but in the actual instances of interaction, they are deeply intertwined. In this paper we investigate the relationship between these expressions through the notions of affiliation and epistemics. More specifically, we analyze the phenomenon of ‘epistemic calibration’ in response to tellings of personal experience, where recipients fine-tune the strength of their access claims and the degree of their generalizations to be in line with their epistemic statuses in relation to those of the tellers. Drawing on a dataset of Finnish quasi-natural conversations with neurotypical participants and participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, we explore how such calibration is done in practice. Our analysis points to different challenges in epistemic calibration, which, we argue, play an important role in influencing the hearing of these responses as less than fully affiliative.
Keywords: conversation analysis, storytelling, affiliation, epistemic access, atypical interaction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Access claims and affiliation
    • 1.2Generalizations and affiliation
    • 1.3Autism spectrum disorder, affiliation, and epistemics
  • 2.Materials and methods
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Epistemic calibration: Fine-tuning the strength of access claim
    • 3.2Epistemic calibration: Fine-tuning the degree of generalization
    • 3.3Epistemic miscalibrations
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20036.kos
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