https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617734343 Discourse Studies 2018, Vol. 20(1) 57–89 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1461445617734343 journals.sagepub.com/home/dis Which epistemics? Whose conversation analysis? Geoffrey Raymond University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA Abstract In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of (rights to) knowledge in conversation. These authors claim (a) that the analytic framework Heritage (and I) developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and (b) rejects standard methods of conversation analysis (CA); (c) that (a) and (b) are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and (d) that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection (of occasions involving the pursuit of one party’s ‘suspicions’ about another’s alleged misdeeds) to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in- interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide. Keywords Background knowledge, epistemics, relative access and rights to knowledge, sequence organization, suspicion, trust Corresponding author: Geoffrey Raymond, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. Email: graymond@soc.ucsb.edu 734343DIS 0 0 10.1177/1461445617734343Discourse StudiesRaymond research-article 2018 Article