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.