Mutual orientation in and through “skills”: Outline of a problem

Abstract

This paper is concerned with practical skills as a resource and as an object of deictic procedures in interaction and communication. It is well known that, as a rule, practical skills are not based on knowledge that is formulated—or that can be formulated—in language, nor that practical skills can be described completely and explicitly in language for purposes of learning and teaching. If we examine the activity of speaking, we see that it constitutes itself a practical skill, constrained by the same limits that apply to other practical skills: on the one hand, speaking serves the practical purpose of orienting participants in a discourse, drawing attention to and focussing on what it is used to refer to in the speaking situation, and, on the other hand, its representational function is based on the sub-skills of phonetic, grammatical and semantic articulation, the workings of which cannot be described completely and explicitly by the average speaker. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a broadly conceived notion of deixis and indexicality allows us, in accordance with the multiple reflexivity of language, to begin to make language tractable as a practical skill.