The use of conversational co-remembering to corroborate contentious claims

Abstract

Memory is a central epistemic resource, yet the interactional organization of shared remembering is largely unexplored. Drawing on a large corpus of video- and audio-recorded interactions in English and Russian, we examine a collection of over 50 cases in which participants are engaged in the activity of co-remembering. We show that memory formulations are commonly used as an evidential method to legitimize or support a claim or point of view in contexts of challenges, objections, disagreements, skepticism, resistance and when alternative positions are on the floor. Our study indicates that in deploying memory formulations, interactants rely on the robust character of excavatable shared past experiences to provide an upgraded epistemic claim to support a contentious stance toward an alternative position.