Producing a ‘cognition’

Abstract

Many professional assessment devices (questionnaires, interview schedules and so on) are designed to harvest informants’ cognitions as stable, internally-represented, information-processed conceptions of the world. If one dissents from this notion of what beliefs, knowledge and opinions are, then one is freer to see how they are produced, in interaction, as artefacts that serve some interactional (and, in the case of the interview I consider here) institutional purpose. I give an example from the recording of the ‘cognitions’ of a person with a learning disability, and try to show how they are shaped by institutional requirements as to what is to count as recordable in the circumstances. ‘In the circumstances’ is an analyst’s stance: for the members involved, the cognitions are rock-solid discoveries, and will remain so until challenged.