Still a matter of dialogue: A response to Potter's, Augoustinos's, and Jovchelovitch's commentaries

Abstract

In their insightful and challenging commentaries, Potter, Augoustinos, and Jovchelovitch interestingly contributed to the debate we sought to promote. They allowed us to further reflect on our proposal of bringing together some strands of theory of social representations and discursive psychology for forging a stronger social psychology, that is, one more prepared to understand social change by better comprehending how meaning is constructed and transformed in discourse and communication. Through the present commentary, we attempt to better clarify this proposal in dialogue with their observations. Potter (2018) opens his commentary, the first of the three, by explaining how TSR let him down back in the 1980s, after failing to help him analyse how the UK crowd disturbances of the time were constructed in texts and talk. In this reply, we take the opposite direction; that is, we will start by stating how the idea that he and others brought to social psychology back in the 1980sthat it could and should analyse discoursedid not fail us. In fact, in our view, this idea made major contributions to the discipline, and we do not intend to give up on itbut we also do not expect it to not need to be complemented by other ideas. However, this idea of analysing discourse for doing social psychology has had since those years many iterations, originating many fragmentations, as Augoustinos, our second commentator, recalls. This means that a stable and fully accepted common denominator and name for those contributions do not exist. This is one-first aspect we will approach here, discussing what is in the name of discursive psychology (DP). Afterwards, we discuss the fact that across the three comments, and as highlighted by Jovchelovitch, the third commentator, the main aspects of theoretical contention and/or concern seem to (still) regard the relation between action and representation, and the ontological and epistemological status of cognition. Finally, another point of contention regards methods, and specifically the role of the researcher in research. We will now discuss these three points in more detail. What is DP: A matter of namesIn Batel and Castro (2018), we used DP as an umbrella word for the many flavours (Billig, 2009) of a social psychology concerned with language and discourse. It seems, however,