‘Who decided this?’: Negotiating epistemic and deontic authority in systemic family therapy training

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.

Deontic authority and the maintenance of lay and expert identities during joint decision making: Balancing resistance and compliance

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke (1) a past decision of their own, (2) a future decision of their own, or (3) a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks (1) procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and (2) access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities.

Children’s demands for parental action

Theory and research on parent–child interaction generally make a priori assumptions of asymmetry in authority between parent and child. Rather than investigating how children exercise autonomy by resisting parental authority, I examine their methods for exercising deontic authority in interaction with their parents. Using conversation analysis and drawing on Stevanovic and Peräkylä’s distinction between deontic status and stance, I analyse video-recorded naturally occurring interactions in which children issue demands to their parents, thus claiming a high deontic stance. Parents may choose to comply and reinforce the claim or not. Domains of deontic authority are (re)negotiated when children pursue compliance; though children can test the boundaries of their authority, parental responses reinforce them, reifying their own authority.

Reference without anaphora: on agency through grammar

In this article, we investigate a puzzle for standard accounts of reference in natural language processing, psycholinguistics and pragmatics: occasions where, following an initial reference (e.g., the ice), a subsequent reference is achieved using the same noun phrase (i.e., the ice), as opposed to an anaphoric form (i.e., it). We argue that such non-anaphoric reference can be understood as motivated by a central principle: the expression of agency in interaction. In developing this claim, we draw upon research in what may initially appear a wholly unconnected domain: the marking of epistemic and deontic stance, standardly investigated in linguistics as turn-level grammatical phenomena. Examination of naturally-occurring talk reveals that to analyze such stances solely though the lens of turn-level resources (e.g., modals) is to address only partially the means by which participants make epistemic and deontic claims in everyday discourse. Speakers’ use of referential expressions illustrates a normative dimension of grammar that incorporates both form and position, thereby affording speakers the ability to actively depart from this form-position norm through the use of a repeated NP, a grammatical practice that we show is associated with the expression of epistemic and deontic authority. It is argued that interactants can thus be seen to be agentively mobilizing the resources of grammar to accommodate the inescapable temporality of interaction.

Constructing young citizens’ deontic authority in participatory democracy meetings

Young citizens are increasingly being invited to take part in participatory democracy meetings as joint decision-making has grown popular in public administration. The backbone of participatory democracy is that some authority is granted to the citizenry and by drawing on video data (38 hours) from a year-long participatory project, this conversation analytic study shows that the adolescents are instructed to a deontic role rooted in epistemics, benefactive considerations, as well as temporal aspects relating to future citizenship and hope. The institutional representatives perform actions that determine how the adolescents should, in their turn, perform actions of influence. In this way, authority is ascribed through an ambivalent configuration in which compliance with the directives is supposed to establish a strengthened deontic position.

Epistemic and deontic authority in the argumentum ad verecundiam

The aim of this paper is to elaborate tools that would allow us to analyse arguments from authority and guard against fallacious uses of them. To accomplish this aim, we extend the list of existing argumentation schemes representing arguments from authority. For this purpose, we formulate a new argumentation scheme for argument from deontic authority along with a matching set of critical questions used to evaluate it. We argue that clarifying the ambiguity between arguments from epistemic and deontic authority helps building a better explanation of the informal fallacy of appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam).

Deontic authority in intervention discourse: Insights from bystander intervention

Our study offers a linguistic–pragmatic examination of instances of bystander intervention, a social action that takes place when a bystander or a group of bystanders intervenes when a wrongdoer abuses a victim or behaves outside socially acceptable norms. We approach this social phenomenon by analyzing data drawn from a database of 11 video-recordings that all involve naturally occurring interactions in public settings in China. The notion of intervention discourse is tentatively introduced in this study to distinguish it from those used to achieve other communicative purposes and to disclose some recurrent patterns of language use in bystander intervention. The data analysis summarizes six categories of intervention discourse along the continuum of strong to weak intervention: terminating, consequence-stating, advising, judging, appealing and stance-taking. Our study demonstrates that the skillful exercise of deontic authority embodied in intervention discourse might have a tangible influence on the outcome of the intervention.

The Conferralist Framework

In this chapter, the author offers a framework for conferralism about any property and then argues that social properties of individuals are conferred properties. Institutional and communal properties are distinguished, where institutional properties are conferred by someone (or something) having (deontic) authority and communal properties by someone (or something) with non-deontic standing. Institutional acts of conferring are acts of classifying individuals and communal acts are acts of placing individuals. The author compares acts of conferral to Austinean and Searlean speech acts such as verdictives, exercitives, and declarations. The author argues that conferralism is a better account of social properties of individuals than a constitution account such as John Searle’s and a response-dependence account. The use of the conferralist framework to account for other social properties is discussed.