Talking History: Reflections on Discourse Analysis

is unsystematic and infrequently subjected to close examination, and it usually remains almost entirely hidden from the analyst and his audience. When we talked informally to historians about this, they often replied by referring to their own craft skills. One implication of this paper is that it may be necessary for historians to attend more explicitly to the way in which their craft is exercised in compiling histories from the interpretative work of participants. We believe that this suggestion will be found to be most convincing by those readers who are led to scrutinize their own current and not yet fully interpreted historical or sociological material in the light of our discussion and who are thereby made more sensitive to the highly variable interpretative work performed by their subjects. The pages above, then, are offered not as proving a case, but as identifying a series of issues worthy of consideration by historians as well as by sociologists of science. In summarizing the implications for sociology of material similar to that presented here, we have argued that sociologists should pay much more attention to the nature of scientists' discourse instead of trying, with but little success, to use that discourse as the empirical basis for their own supposedly definitive versions of what is going on in science. The conclusions of this paper suggest that a historian's account will remain merely one among many plausible accounts. We are not suggesting, of course, that historians should cease constructing their own historical accounts; but rather, that they should take up the supplementary goal of describing and documenting the various repertoires and interpretative devices used by participants and, perhaps, of trying to explain how different repertoires and devices come to be adopted in different social settings and in different historical periods.