Individuals and Discourses

When anyone speaks or writes there are always two “authors”.  One “author” is an individual who always speaks or writes as part of a social network of other individuals.  This fact follows from the fact that there can be no “private languages” (following Wittgenstein).  The other author is a (“big D”) Discourse that speaks and writes as an historical entity using human individuals as “carriers”.  Discourses give (transformable) meaning to what individuals say, write, and do and individuals continually produce, reproduce, and transform Discourses.

Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) can be seen as operating at three interacting levels: (a) the ways in which individual contributions gain meaning in an interactive social network of individuals; (b) the ways in which Discourses gain meaning in an interactive network of Discourses; and (c) how the two levels reciprocally interact to produce “specific universals”.  What ties these three levels together are processes of “mind/society” recognition of socially situated identities and activities mediated by grammar (code) and situation (context).