10 - Discourse markers: Contextual coordinates of talk

Summary

The philosopher Abraham Kaplan suggests that scholary inquiry is guided by two divergent logics: a logic in use and a reconstructed logic. According to Kaplan (1964): ‘A great deal hinges on whether science is viewed as a body of propositions or as the enterprise in which they are generated, as product or as process. An account of the norms bearing on the finished report of an investigation might well be expected to differ from one concerned with the conduct of the investigation itself’ (p. 7). Kaplan suggests that ‘science as process’ is guided by a logic in use, and ‘science as product’ is guided by a reconstructed logic. And there is a crucial difference between them: ‘we can no more take them to be identical or even assume an exact correspondence between them, than we can in the case of the decline of Rome and Gibbon's account of it, a patient's fever and his physician's explanation of it’ (p. 8).

Most academic reports are written according to a reconstructed logic, but much of the work which underlies such reports is the product of a logic in use. Although I have followed a reconstructed logic in most of this book, I think it would be helpful to recount briefly my logic in use – for it not only explains why I included what I did, but it motivates the questions that my inquiry into discourse markers sought to answer, as well as the answers which I present in this concluding chapter.