The preoccupation with problems of understanding in communication research

This essay appraises investigations into social interaction that display a preoccupation with problems of understanding. This critique is rendered fro m a conversation analytic perspective. Inquiries into interactants' methods for "doing" understanding demonstrate the stable and recurrent character o f intersubjective understandings and thus indicate that bypassing these fin dings and giving priority to problems of understanding are problematic. Thi s preoccupation with understanding problems is viewed as grounded in premat urely theorized idealizations and privileged perspectives that deepen skept icism concerning the extent to which interactants understand each other. Al though this skepticism treats understanding problems as worthy of attention to the extent they produce dysfunctional effects on interactions, relation ships, and institutions, work on doing understanding argues that a central problem for analysis is how interactants repair troubles of understanding i n a way that minimizes their consequentiality for subsequent interaction Pr oposals for explicitness, as in active listening techniques, and vigilance in employing existing interpretive and actional resources are critiqued as superfluous and violative of a moral-interactional order in which the presu med intelligibility of contributions to talk-in-interaction is enacted, ren ewed, and maintained. The essay underscores the primacy of interactants' me thods for doing understanding and their implications for communication rese arch and instruction.