From Woolgar, 1980: 253 discourse analysis a comparative and critical introduction by robin wooffitt

became marginalised. They were felt to have a limited use, perhaps as a way of guiding experimental design J.B. Rhine, 1948, or as a way of indicating broad features of the way psi worked L. Rhine, 1981. The reluctance of parapsychologists to study reports of spontaneous experiences reflects a suspicion about their evidential value. Even if it is assumed that experients are not deliberately fabricating stories, there is still a sense that the value of accounts is diminished by the possibility of unconscious distortion, the vagaries of memory, the experient’s emotional involvement in the experience, and so on for example, see West, 1948: 265; and Pekala and Cardena, 2000. Ultimately, then, parapsychologists are wary of accounts of paranormal experiences, viewing them as broadly unreliable records of ‘what really happened’. A CA-informed perspective offers a very different kind of position alto- gether. Drawing from a range of arguments in philosophy and the social sciences, it is assumed that language does not operate like a mirror of reality: ‘[e]xperience does not and cannot determine its expression in language’ Yamane, 2000: 177; original italics. This in turn invites us to ask: if accounts are not determined by the experience, what communicative and pragmatic concerns do inform the ways accounts are organised? A CA-informed analysis reveals some recurrent features in the structure and design of accounts of spontaneous paranormal experiences. There is a descrip- tive device which can be used by speakers to demonstrate their ‘ordinariness’ Wooffitt, 1992. When describing the onset of a particular paranormal episode, speakers regularly report what they were doing at the time. These reports have similar properties, in that they take the form ‘I was just doing X … when Y’. In the following extract, for example, the speaker is reporting an apparition of her recently deceased husband, which occurred during his military funeral service.

5.6 From Wooffitt, 1992: 123–4

1 S: an’ I went in there . er:m w- with my mother in law 2 and uhm: .4 friends that were with me 3 1.3 4 X ·hhh . and I was just looking at the coffin 5 Y and there was David standing there .3 6 he was in Blues 7 1 8 ·hh he wasn’t wearing his hat 9 his hat was on the coffin 10 and he was there Here the ‘I was just doing X’ component is ‘I was just looking at the coffin’; and the ‘ … when Y’ component is the report of the apparition ‘and there was David standing there’. The ‘X’ component is constructed from a report of an utterly mundane activity: ‘just looking’. This is not unusual: ‘X’ component PERSUASION AND AUTHORITY 105