Epistemic Stance
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Epistemic Stance | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | John Heritage (UCLA, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8603-6447) |
| To cite: | Heritage, John. (2026). Epistemic Stance. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ] |
In all social actions, participants take up a stance. This stance comprises a public display of attitudes towards the situation of action, their co-participants and themselves (Du Bois 2007; Goffman 1955; Wu, Heritage & Raymond 2026). Stance can embrace displays of emotion (Goodwin, Cekaite & Goodwin 2012; Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2014), together with deontic (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012), epistemic (Heritage 2012a, 2012b, 2013) and benefactive (Clayman & Heritage 2014) aspects, among many others. Within conversation analysis, epistemic stance refers to the displayed claim of knowledge or ignorance relative to others concerning some matter at hand. In general, the epistemic stance adopted by a person is shaped by a normative expectation that this stance should be congruent with the person’s epistemic status, though this norm may be departed from on occasion.
Epistemic stance is conveyed via a very large and differentiated set of practices. One major axis involves the distinction between making assertions about states of affairs, thus conveying a knowledgeable or K+ stance on the matter at hand, as opposed to asking questions about some matter, thus conveying an ignorant or K- stance. In general, participants tend to exhibit some care in the epistemic stances they present in conversation. This can easily be observed in cases of repair (Drew et al. 2013). For example, in the following case Lesley reports having phoned Hal the previous night (lines 1-2), and begins to make an assertion about Hal’s whereabouts for which she lacks the relevant K+ status: “But you were-”. Cutting off this turn-in-progress, she revises the action from one of asserting to one of asking “u-were you ↑ou:t? which is more congruent with her K- status:
(1) [Field SO88(II):1:3:1] [Telephone call; Leslie is caller] (Drew et al. 2013: 76) 1 Hal: Oh ‘el[lo Lesl[ie? 2 Les: [.hhhh [I RANG you up- (.) ah: think it wz 3 la:s’ night. But you were- (.) u-were you ↑ou:t? 4 or: was it the night before per[↓haps. 5 Hal: [Uh:m night be↓fore I 6 expect we w’r dancing Tuesdee ni:ght.
Similarly, in the following a bystander is reporting a traffic accident to 911 emergency:
(2) [Call to 911: Caller is reporting a traffic accident] 1 911: Okay but they’re not injured ri:ght? 2 (.) 3 CLR: No they’re not injured.=They don’t look injured.=They say 4 they’re fine right [now you know but it always happens after. 5 911: [Okay
Across lines 3-4, the caller successively revises his response to 911’s (line 1) question about the possibility of injuries, from a flat declarative assertion (“No they’re not injured”), to an evidentialized assertion based on direct perception (“They don’t look injured”), to a hearsay report (“They say they’re fine right now”). As these cases illustrate, interactants tend to handle the matter of epistemic stance with some care.
It is perhaps for this reason that most languages contain multiple resources for managing and shading epistemic claims. A majority of the world’s languages (de Haan 2013) deploy evidentials to distinguish, for instance, what is directly observed, from what is merely inferred, or known from hearsay (Aikhenvald 2004, 2021). Similarly epistemic modality (Palmer 2001) is a resource deployed in many languages to adjust epistemic claims in terms of greater or lesser likelihood (van der Auwera & Ammann 2013; see also Bolden et al. 2023; Heritage 2010; Levinson 2012), and a related resource is the use of negative polarity items and other forms of negation to indicate the improbability of some state of affairs (Heritage & Raymond 2021; Raymond & Heritage 2021). Some of these distinctions are indicated in Figure 1 below (from Levinson 2012), though this merely gestures at the range of variation involved.
Figure 1: Bolinger’s question-to-assertion cline (Levinson 2012: 16)
Relative epistemic claims are also, of course, lodged in sequences of action where variations in within-sequence actions are likewise used to adjust epistemic stance in terms of distinctive underlying epistemic statuses (Heritage & Raymond 2005; Raymond & Heritage 2006). It may be added that epistemic stances (and associated epistemic statuses) are straightforwardly consolidated across sequences, as in the following pair of cases:
[Sequence 1] A: What's the time? B: Three fifteen. A: Oh thank you.
[Sequence 2] A: What's the time? B: Three fifteen. A: That's right. Well done!
In Sequence 1, A’s third turn oh-receipt treats B’s response to his question as ‘news’ and the question as having embodied a genuinely K- stance (Heritage 1984). In Sequence 2, by contrast, A’s third turn confirmation treats the information in B’s response as already known to the questioner and, together with the praise of the answerer, treats the question as having been an ‘exam’ or ‘known answer’ question.
As previously noted, participants are generally careful to maintain congruence between epistemic stance and status concerning objects of knowledge, and may be held accountable for failures in this regard. It is possible that this congruence is a central resource in the early ascription of action to in-coming utterances which in turn permits rapid turn-transition in conversation (Levinson & Torreira 2015).
Additional Related Entries:
Cited References:
Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford University Press.
Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2021). The web of knowledge: Evidentiality at the cross-roads. In The Web of Knowledge (pp. 1-139). Brill.
Bolden, G. B., Heritage, J., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2023). Introduction: Polar questions and their responses. In G. Bolden, J. Heritage, & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Responding to Polar Questions across Languages and Contexts (pp. 1-39). Benjamins.
Clayman, S. E., & Heritage, J. (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in offers and requests. In P. Drew & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Requesting in Social Interaction (pp. 55-86). John Benjamins.
de Haan, F. (2013). Coding of Evidentiality. In: M.S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.4) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13950591 (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/78, Accessed on 2025-12-02.)
Drew, P., Walker, T., & Ogden, R. (2013). Self repair and action construction. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (pp. 71-94). Cambridge University Press.
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139-182). John Benjamins.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face work. Psychiatry, 18, 213-231.
Goodwin, M. H., Cekaite, A., & Goodwin, C. (2012). Emotion as stance. In A. Peräkylä & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Emotion in Interaction (pp. 16-41). Oxford University Press.
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of Its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action (pp. 299-345). Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (2010). Questioning in medicine. In A. F. Freed & S. Ehrlich (Eds.), Why Do you Ask?: The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse (pp. 42-68). Oxford University Press.
Heritage, J. (2012a). Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45, 1-25.
Heritage, J. (2012b). The Epistemic Engine: Sequence Organization and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45, 25-50.
Heritage, J. (2013). Epistemics in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Wiley-Blackwell.
Heritage, J., & Raymond, C. W. (2021). Preference and Polarity: Epistemic Stance in Question Design. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 54, 39-59.
Heritage, J., & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in assessment sequences. Social Psychology Quarterly, 68(1), 15-38.
Levinson, S. C. (2012). Interrogative intimations: On a possible social economics of interrogatives. In J.-P. De Ruiter (Ed.), Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives (pp. 11-32). Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. C., & Torreira, F. (2015). Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 731.
Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and Modality. Cambridge University Press.
Raymond, G., & Heritage, J. (2006). The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren. Language in Society, 35, 677-705.
Stevanovic, M., & Perakyla, A. (2012). Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 45(3), 297-321.
Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2014). Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations. Language in Society, 43(2), 185-207.
van der Auwera, J. & Ammann. A. (201. Epistemic Possibility. In M.S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.4) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13950591 (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/75, Accessed on 2025-12-02.)
Wu, R.-J., Heritage, J., & Raymond, C. W. (2026). Stance in interaction. In M. Burdelski & T. Greer (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 109-124). Routledge.
