Fact and the narratives of war: Produced undecidability in accounts of armed conflict

This paper explores how providing the inferential basis to argue for a rang e of equally plausible interpretations features as a way of managing issues of accountability in talk about armed confrontation. We examine conversati on produced in open-ended interviews with diplomatic representatives of the United States and Great Britain in discussion about those countries' invol vement in the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91. By providing the inferentia l basis upon which to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretative scenarios, speakers attend to the potential for any one account to be priv ileged over another. Further, in speculating upon the relationship between interpretative particulars and the inferential outcome to be drawn for some specific version of events in question, speakers work to establish the par ameters of an admissible narrative trajectory with which to account for tho se events. In so doing, they manage the implications that excluded versions would otherwise make relevant.