From Smith, 1978: 29 discourse analysis a comparative and critical introduction by robin wooffitt
reported a loud bang, which they first thought to be a car backfiring, but which they then realised was gunfire. The following example comes from
Sacks’ 1984b initial identification of the phenomenon, and comes from the report of a witness to an aeroplane hijacking.
I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and I saw by the cabin, the stewardess standing facing the cabin, and a fellow standing with a gun
in her back. And my first thought was he’s showing her the gun, and then
I realized that couldn’t be, and then it turned out he was hi-jacking the plane. Sacks, 1984b: 419; emphasis added
‘First thought’ formulations are invariably incorrect, and so Jefferson was puzzled: why would people present incorrect assumptions about the events
they have seen? Her analysis revealed that people use the ‘first thought’ part of the device to present, as their normal first assumption, an innocuous reading of
the state of affairs on which they are reporting. Through their ‘first thought’ formulations they display that they did not immediately assume that anything
untoward was happening. They saw the world as any normal person might see it. Through this device, the perspective of the person telling the story is con-
structed so as to demonstrate their normality; in Sacks’ 1984b term, they are doing ‘being ordinary’: orienting to the world in a non-exceptional way.
In the following sections we will explore the way in which Sacks’ observations on doing ’being ordinary’ have implications for research projects in a range of
academic disciplines: parapsychology, cognitive psychology and psychiatry.
Implications for parapsychology: the study of accounts of spontaneous experiences
Parapsychology is the scientific investigation of the possibility that communication can occur between people without the use of the normal
five senses. Although in part stimulated by anecdotal reports of precognition, ghosts and apparitions, telepathy and contact with spirits, it has modelled itself
on the natural sciences. Thus the vast majority of parapsychological studies have been conducted in laboratories, involving thousands of experimental
trials with undistinguished or ordinary subjects, the results of which are analysed using rigorous statistical techniques. The objective of these experi-
ments was, first, to find evidence for psi, the mental facility which is taken to underpin various forms of ostensible parapsychological phenomena, such as
mind-to-mind communication or the ability of the mind to influence the exter- nal physical environment. The second objective was to examine the physical
and psychological factors that influenced the operation of psi Broughton, 1991; Edge
et al, 1986; Irwin, 1999; Radin, 1997. Reports of spontaneous psychic experiences which happened to people in
their everyday lives motivated the earliest serious investigation of paranormal phenomena Gurney
et al, 1886. But as parapsychology developed as a laboratory-based discipline, the study of reports of spontaneous experiences
104 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
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.