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Discourse and Uncertainty: Postmodern Variations

University Of Lancaster

This paper has two broad themes. The first concerns two approaches that discourse analysis might take toward the understanding of `uncertainty'. First, the study of `discursive uncertainty' can trace the ways that people linguistically convey and deploy their relative uncertainty in social interaction. Second, the examination of `discourse of uncertainty' can show how discourses represent certain physical, social and institutional loci as containing or generating uncertainty. Both of these are illustrated with examples drawn from the sociology of scientific knowledge. After a summary introduction to the postmodern condition which emphasizes, in particular, the historically specific `decentring' of the individual, the second broad theme is addressed, namely the impact of postmodernity upon these relations of discourse to uncertainty. With regard to discursive uncertainty, it is suggested that, with the postmodern fragmentation of the individual, uncertainty cannot fulfil its traditional social functions of mediating consensus or persuasion. Postmoderns are likely to represent uncertainty as shifting from specific external loci to the self. A possible consequence of this is the disabling of political action.

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, 383-404 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354394043006


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