We live in a time of divergent realities. In one version of world events, a heroic mobilization of science appears to have delivered pandemic-stemming vaccines; in other versions, these injections are means to inject computer chips into a docile populous, with, for some, these efforts being driven by shape-shifting reptiles from other dimensions. People who insist upon the latter scenarios, we are told, are not necessarily ‘mad’, and yet these are precisely the types of stories that people who are diagnosably delusional might tell with a conviction that seems to transcend mere belief.

In this article, we discuss a conversation analytic approach to schizophrenic¹ interaction which has generated and utilized a model of a five-world manifold to frame analyses of talk-in-interaction. It is born out of such questions as how it might be that people come to inhabit such differing versions of reality and, to the extent that they do inhabit them, how it is they might keep one foot sufficiently in a common reality to navigate social organizations with radically different underlying world-structure. Perhaps most bafflingly, we have been driven to enquire how it is that some people who perform this feat are deemed diagnosably delusional, while others are not.

We have not, by any stretch of the imagination, answered any of these motivating questions; rather, the process of enquiry has led us, ultimately, to question how ‘normal’ social members come to inhabit common realities in the first place.

The Oxford neuroscientist Anil Seth (2021) presents one version of this question: Current models of brain function suggest that the fundamental task of the brain is prediction, and the brain does this by generating plausible models that are then measured against external input and tweaked according to this feedback. The predictive models in themselves are our experience of the world, progressively shaped by the external input. In effect, our experience of ‘reality’ is active, projective hallucination. There is no ‘light’ beneath the skull, no ‘sound’, no ‘touch’, only neuro-electric activity. Our experiences of ‘light’, ‘sound’, and ‘touch’ are grounded in, but distinct from, these patterns of neural impulse within the silent darkness of the perpetually solipsistic skull. The world, as we hallucinate it, is an extremely private affair—so how is it that we come to ‘share’ a world in the first place? How do we come to coordinate and mutually inhabit our world hallucinations so effectively?

Putting the question in this way, of course, puts the riddle of hallucination in schizophrenia – most commonly, the hearing of voices that other people do not hear – entirely on the other foot. It is suddenly not so strange that people hallucinate voices – this is a fundamental mechanism of audition – but now other questions arise, such as: When I (a non-schizophrenic) hallucinate the voice of my interlocutor, how can I be confident that another nearby auditor will be hallucinating the same thing?

In the end, our strategic response to such questions has been to say: Ok, rather than bringing schizophrenia to account against common-sense world conceptions (to justify it in other words, as words are justified against the straight edge of a page), let us instead adjust our world-conceptions to accommodate reports of schizophrenic experience, and accept whatever alienating strangeness that might bring us to.

This brief consideration of hallucination exposes ‘common-sense’ as having two faces: ‘sense-as-perception’ (held in common) and ‘sense-as-meaning’. Certain approaches to phenomenological psychiatry conceptualize schizophrenia as a pathology of common-sense or a disturbance in the ground of ‘self’ in micro-social intersubjectivity (Blankenburg and Mishara, 2001; Stanghellini, 2004; Phillips, 2019). The motivating question for this study has been whether any such disturbance of common sense organization might be evidenced through analysis of schizophrenic talk-in-interaction. The intended audience for the study includes language and interactional researchers, but also, importantly, psychiatric researchers and clinicians, who, while probably unfamiliar with interactional language research, might nonetheless find its methods relevant and hopefully useful within their own fields.

The initial intention to perform simple bottom-up analysis of conversational data, however, hit methodological hurdles that necessitated familiarization with theory, most notably, in an attempt to forge connections between the theoretical frames of Conversation Analysis (CA) and phenomenological psychiatry. It was found that the simplest way to do this was to conceptualize schizophrenia as a ‘world disturbance’ rather than a ‘self-disturbance’. In CA terms, this might be seen as a disturbance in the coordination of settings. This generated the model of a world manifold, with the idea of a ‘manifold’ suggesting independent domains of meaning-organization that coordinate within the common-sense world as a unified domain. The use of such models within Conversation Analysis is, of course, discouraged, yet we suggest it might have implications for psychiatry (or related fields), where understanding the micro-design of talk-in-interaction presents less as an end-in-itself but might nonetheless prove of instrumental interest. Within those interpretive traditions of clinical psychiatry which emphasize ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) over ‘explanation’ (Erklären)², for instance, effective interpretive models might help facilitate therapeutic engagement and dialogue with patients. In addition, we suggest that the model might hold implications for studying interaction in other atypical populations.

Based on the methodological hurdles this particular study faced and the responses adopted to overcome them, a more general argument is proposed that a dialectic approach might be recommended between domain-specific processes of model construction and bottom-up processes of observation that would otherwise hope to avoid theoretical incursion.

Data for our study of schizophrenic talk-in-interaction were drawn from seven audio recordings (no video) of interviews between two interviewers and three female and four male patients who had received a DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) diagnosis on the schizophrenia spectrum (diagnoses ranged across schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder). These interviews were conducted for an earlier independent study, and the data were made available for the current research. The primary interviewer was a non-treating clinical psychiatrist hoping to pursue language research on schizophrenia within a cognitivist frame, and the second interviewer was a psychologist who performed a series of standardized cognitive tests on participants. Interview subjects were recruited from community teams where patients receive treatment under minimal restriction and also from a psychiatric inpatient ward where patient movement is more restricted. All subjects, either in ‘recovery’ or ‘chronic’ phase of psychosis, were receiving regular psychiatric treatment and had English as their first language. All were deemed by regular treating clinicians and the principal psychiatric researcher as competent to consent to participation at the time of the interview, and ethics approval was additionally obtained for the current data analysis. Interviews were conducted in private rooms in either the community or inpatient mental health settings. The interview recordings made available for this study ranged between 21 and 62 min and were all transcribed for the current study following Du Bois (2006) transcription conventions, with local additions.³

In this article, in addition to outlining the five-world model that allowed us to get a foothold on the data, we describe a process whereby we came to reflect upon the methodological challenges of applying Conversation Analytic methods to these data and the tactical choices that were required to respond to these challenges.

In performing Conversation Analysis, we work a field that was cleared to a significant extent by Harold Garfinkel. But Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology owes an intellectual debt to Alfred Schutz (Heritage, 1984), who himself developed his phenomenological sociology in response and as a complement to the early 20th-century work of Edmund Husserl (Schutz, 1962a). Garfinkel rejected any suggestion that ethnomethodology was a phenomenological method (Garfinkel et al., 1977), but we do not have to agree with him on that – and later, it will be explained why. Certainly, the anti-positivist tenor of the ethnomethodological attitude can be at least partly traced back to Husserl’s critique of scientific objectivism (Moran, 2012). When we get to methods of Conversation Analysis, the pathway back to Husserlian phenomenology is even more overgrown with weeds, and the Husserlian critique of science that lies in CA’s DNA has been largely forgotten.

Husserl provides the first distinction by which we tease apart the different worlds in our model. The broad outlines of his phenomenological method are quite well-known. In daily operations, as well as in most organized practices of science, it is reasonably assumed that the world is simply there, manifestly before us, objectively present. We orient to an external world and not to a world-as-perceived. Husserl describes this underlying assumption as the ‘natural attitude’. However, as we have just suggested, our experience of the world is a somewhat more ‘internal’ affair than this. To avoid what he sees as sterile metaphysical arguments along the lines of a mind/matter divide, Husserl’s first move was to ‘bracket’ questions of ‘external’ reality – to simply put them out of bounds – and to pursue an enquiry into ways the world is revealed within, before, and as consciousness. Because the external world (as well as any natural attitude presumptions) has been bracketed, Husserlian phenomenology continues as (world)-transcendent enquiry. There is an inherent critique of scientific objectivity involved here: in seeing the world as an object, the one thing that science cannot take account of is the eye peering down the microscope and the structures, either of consciousness or of mathematical translation, via which the world is revealed. In contrast to the world-as-object, Husserl foregrounded a world-as-experience(d). One inhabits, lives in, and moves through a world that is not a mere object but is shaded by relevance, value, and meaning, a world inherently organized as experience, including primordial experiences such as those of threat or danger, habit, habitat, and home, that blur the edges between ‘self’ and ‘world’. Husserl explores these themes of the experienced-world in terms of a ‘life-world’, which is never defined but rather presented as the title of a problem to stimulate enquiry (Moran, 2012, 297). It is not completely clear, for instance, to what extent the life-world represents a world of purely individual experience and to what extent life-world(s?) might be shared. In the case of schizophrenia, the distinction between a world that is revealed before the scientific gaze and an experience-imbued lifeworld is the difference between seeing a diagnosee through a lens of neurophysiological reduction or as the inhabiter of a lived-world of meanings and values.⁴ The vague outline of two and possibly three different world conceptions can be seen to be emerging here: A ‘world-as-object’, (life)-worlds of private experience, and perhaps (life)-worlds of shared experience.

The question that arose earlier in considering Seth’s model of predictive processing – how to overcome solipsism to arrive at a shared world-in-common – is the same issue that confronted Husserl’s transcendental inquiry. Both models require an account of intersubjectivity. It is at this point that Schutz (1970) diverted his sociological project away from the Husserlian program via an ‘epoché of the natural attitude’. Husserl described the transcendent ‘bracketing’ of the external world as the phenomenological ‘epoché’ – a form of Cartesian doubt or action-disabling suspension of conviction (Beyer, 2018). Schutz’s epoché represents a mirroring complement to Husserl’s. In short, if the phenomenological epoché suspends a natural attitude involvement in the world via doubting the world, then the epoché of the natural attitude invokes an impossibility of doubting the world, evidenced via in-the-world action. In shared action, participants to the action jointly signal conviction in a shared, undoubtable world, a conviction more foundational than mere belief. It is this grounding investment in a common reality that provides conditions for common-sense coordination of and in a world-in-common.⁵

In the context of this ‘grounding reality’, Schutz described ‘multiple realities’, such as dream-worlds, abstractions of science, and worlds of myth and religion that all need to defer ultimately to the one ‘common-sense’ world of the natural attitude. Schutz called this paramount reality of the common-sense world ‘the world of working’ (1962b, 226), but we suggest that it is better understood as the mundane world of coordinated action – sitting in chairs, drinking from coffee cups, catching busses, and giving and receiving objects – the whole gamut of social actions, including those carried out in talk: delivering greetings, offering descriptions, making requests, etc (Schutz, 1962b; Psathas, 2014). Sass (2014a) has suggested that it is the loss of grounding status of this ‘paramount reality’ that creates the conditions for certain of the phenomena in schizophrenia. For instance, it is the loss of a grounding reality that in turn distorts the status of imaginary domains, so that the distinction between the imagined and the real is lost.

Certainly, other writers have discussed different worlds or realities: William James prior to Schutz and Goffman after him (Psathas, 2014); and within the philosophy of science, Popper (1978) and Penrose (2006) have independently developed three-world ontologies that bear some resemblance to certain aspects of our model. We, however, are making no ontological claims, and instead, in accord with Schutz, look to worlds as ‘meaning domains’ or global settings that social participants might orient toward in interaction. Nonetheless, while our model has its genesis in Schutz’s discussion of multiple realities, it ends up diverging considerably in the details.

In our attempt to identify meaningful patterns in the records of interaction, we encountered a series of problems. The most obvious was the danger of simply re-describing diagnostic parameters. Schizophrenia diagnosis is enacted, to a large extent, on the grounds of clinical interview, which is to say, upon factors evidenced in an interactional setting. A naïve approach to data analysis risks ‘discovering’ those very factors that were used to select the interview subjects in the first place. This presents an unhelpful circularity.

In addition, the heterogeneity of symptoms in schizophrenia presents a major obstacle when looking for patterns of interactional detail across different subjects or even within a single subject. In a monograph on schizophrenic speech, McKenna and Oh (2005) detail schizophrenia in terms of three semi-independent symptom clusters, or syndromes, delineated in terms of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ symptoms, and a third factor, ‘disorganization’. One of the earlier intimations of this third syndrome referred to it not in terms of (a cognitive) ‘disorganization’ but rather as ‘disorders in relating’ (Strauss et al., 1974). This harks back to earlier descriptions by Jaspers and Schneider of a supposed difficulty in forming empathic bonds with schizophrenia diagnosees, possibly grounded in an ‘autistic’⁷ withdrawal from the field of relationships that Cameron (1938) claimed can lead ultimately to an encysted experiential bubble (Minkowski, 1987; De Haan and Gipps, 2018). Much language research in schizophrenia tends to focus on this third syndrome, conceptualized as cognitive disorganization or ‘Formal Thought Disorder’.

Nancy Andreasen redefined Thought Disorder as a ‘Language and Communication’ disorder via a scale of 18 descriptors (Andreasen, 1986). To repeat the earlier point: the danger of engaging in naïve interactional analysis without understanding what has already been operationalized as diagnostically significant is that of ‘unearthing’ exactly such diagnostic descriptors. An illustration might be drawn here with ‘clanging’, one of the 18 features on Andreasen’s scale that she describes as ‘A pattern of speech in which sounds rather than meaningful relationships appear to govern word choice... [involving] ...rhyming relationships... [and] ...punning associations’ (Andreasen, 1986, p. 478).

There are numerous examples of clanging in our data. One involves the responses of an interviewee, (BF), to a cognitive test run by the second interviewer (I2). The test proceeds by presenting the test subject with a non-sense word and offering a series of progressively more explicit clues, each time asking the interviewee to guess what the non-sense word means. BF is offered the test word ‘prither’, to which he responds with a confirmation/repair request (1402):data extract 1, Prither/enton1A

Upon further clues being offered, the ‘game’ of question–response is continually derailed, and at one stage, BF asks to go for a cigarette break but under encouragement decides to continue with the final clue:1B

‘Prither’ (1401)⟶ ‘privver’ (1402) ⟶ ‘privileged’ (1470). The possible mishearing that triggered the repair initiation at 1402 continues to be the locus of orientation for BF, despite the intervening (but here elided) 50 lines of interaction.

To the following test word, ‘enton’, in combination with the meaning prompt of ‘a form of art’, BF responds ‘Arntoine Rafaelo’.1C

After this, he gets agitated, unclips the microphone and starts to talk into it in the manner of a sports commentator, describing what the interviewer is wearing. Asked whether he wants to have a break, he clips the microphone back on and asks to continue. The interview continues with the same test item, ‘enton’, and further clues elicit ‘ten tonne hammer’, ‘newton’, and ‘per ten t’ tain’, which the interviewer interprets as ‘to entertain’, and finally a string of music-themed and alliterative words and sonic fragments – ‘melody, melodic(s) tones ‘n’ moes’.

It is obvious that in these responses, BF is responding more to phonological cues than to semantic associations. But to let the observation rest here would be to simply redescribe Andreasen’s diagnostically significant ‘clanging’. On the other hand, seen in the context of a progressive deterioration of the ‘interview game’ and BF’s attempts to leave the interview, we might also interpret this gathering swarm of phonological associations as performing work of resisting, avoiding, or otherwise displacing semantic coordination. Which is to say, it is not in itself meaningless.

Harvey Sacks is generally credited as the founder of Conversation Analysis. In an intriguing article based on a talk presented shortly after he died in 1975, Gail Jefferson details ‘exploratory’ work on poetics that Sacks had been engaged in in the final years of his career. She describes motivation for the talk thus:

She introduces the tentative work on poetics with a consideration of psychotic talk but goes on to detail similar phenomena appearing in ‘ordinary’ talk. She later notes that there is something ‘autistic’ about the self-referential nature of some of the sound and categorial associations discussed, in both psychotic and normal talk. However, she cites an early psychiatric researcher to claim that what sets psychotic production apart from ‘normal’ – what constitutes the pathology, in other words – is not so much the formal feature of textual self-reference as ‘the tendency to incorporate such autistic productions without any endeavor to translate them into a form which considers the needs of the listener’ (Woods, 1938, p. 302). In Conversation Analytic terms, this attention to the needs of the listener is described as ‘recipient design’ (Sacks et al., 1974).

What follows in Jefferson’s article is a series of descriptions of poetic instances that stand outside the normal constraints of Conversation Analytic methods: observations, hunches, and interpretations that verge on psychological readings. Jefferson is unapologetic, quoting Sacks’ response to criticism that such noticings might get ‘carried too far’ by noting that, first, one needs to raise them as a possibility. The work was exploratory, Jefferson stressed, and so one needed to ‘push the stuff, keep pushing at it, see how far it might go, you can always pull back to a more cautious, reasonable, sensible position’ (1996, p. 9).

If we look back at the above series of data extracts as a loss of recipient design, a collapse of the relational field into autistic textual self-reference, then we might ask – what use are Conversation Analytical tools here? Jefferson provides a tentative answer: We are exploring the boundaries of the Conversation Analytic method. Suggesting that there might be another world of significance intruding here – an autistic ‘Me-world’ – is to peer over the fence-line of Conversation Analytic (‘This-world’) concern and see what might be pushing back against the fence from the other side.

In a classic article on aphasia, Jakobson (1956) argued that the study of language breakdown in pathology might lead to better understanding of normal language function. However, linguistic interest in the language anomalies of schizophrenia has remained slight. In addition, what studies have been carried out have tended to focus on elicited forms of decontextualized production and clinically set forms of talk rather than on natural language interaction. In performing Conversation Analysis on topic management in unstructured talk between diagnosees and close relatives, Riou (2015) was able to demonstrate that the interactive dyad could employ non-canonical strategies to progress a conversation despite ‘glitches’ in topic transition and suggests that a richer approach to schizophrenic talk (and atypical interaction more generally) might involve identifying such idiosyncrasies of interaction as an adjunct to descriptions of dysfunctions of language production. This focus on the interactive dyad rather than the features of the abstracted language of an atomized psyche offers both research and therapeutic potential. McCabe et al. (2004) and McCabe (2009), for example, were able to argue against an influential ‘Theory of Mind’ account for schizophrenia (Frith and Corcoran, 1996) by applying Conversation Analysis to transcripts of diagnosee interaction.

It should be noted, however, that applying the Conversation Analytic method to schizophrenic interaction is not without its problems. The first, as discussed in detail by Riou (2015), is the difficulty in accessing conversational data on account of the vulnerable population. A specification of this difficulty is in accessing data that involves interactions with ‘normal’, non-clinician interlocutors. The data used in the current study falls somewhat short of this ideal of ‘natural’ conversation. As mentioned, the recorded interactions did not involve clinical settings of examination, diagnosis, or treatment but were introduced to subjects as being for the sake of non-specified ‘language research’. Nonetheless, the primary interviewer was a clinical psychiatrist member of the mental health service from which subjects were drawn, and interviews were semi-scripted, employing a combination of open-ended question prompts as recommended by Andreasen (1986) for eliciting language production for diagnostic purposes, as well as a series of more formalized cognitive test procedures introduced by the secondary interviewer. The cognitive framing of the researchers’ motivating interests led to efforts to stimulate monologues or extended turns in an attempt to minimize interviewer ‘intrusion’ into the data, which is not ideal from the perspective of interaction analysis.

In addition to these general concerns, we identified three more specific ‘hurdles’ of method that needed to be addressed.

Abiding by Garfinkel and Sacks’ recommendations on ‘glossing procedures’(Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970, pp. 164–165), we are loath to fix by definition the ‘worlds’ that we have sketched in outline; instead, we would look for examples of occasioned use to unpack their implications. It ought to be clear by this point that This-world is the domain within which microsocial interaction analysis plays. Perhaps less clear is that That-world includes macrosocial and institutional forms of organization. In this section, we will focus on explicating relations and translations between these two worlds.

Eglin (2017) does some of this work for us when he describes Garfinkel’s studies into the work of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, where investigators had to establish an account of death, as dealing with the ways that details of the ‘thises’ were processed into a formally accepted account of death:

The documentary method of interpretation, originally attributed to Mannheim (Roth, 2015), consists of treating an actual appearance or phenomenon as a ‘document’ or instantiation of an underlying regularity or pattern.

The interplay between details of the ‘this’ and socially consolidated details of the ‘that’, as Eglin describes, is a circular method of mutual interpretation between ‘this’ of instance and ‘that’ of underlying pattern–

“‘Thats’’ that give ‘thises’ their meaning” might be understood here to mean that the underlying abstract patterns (‘thats’) toward which actual concrete events (‘thises’) point represent Typifications, so that the specificity of any actual event might be characterized in terms of patterns of ‘what-it-is-that-is-happening-here’, and its situated elements in terms of ‘what-it-is-that-this-thing-is’ – which is to say, in terms of a Type of happening or thing.

It bears repeating that formulation of the ‘five-world’ framework emerged from considering language use of people who had received a diagnosis of schizophrenia – which is to say, it was a pattern discerned from a handful of ‘thises’. Aspects of schizophrenic talk, it was suggested, involved a loss of integration between these five domains of meaning and a subsequent loss of common sense world-organization. The following ‘analyses’ of interactive data are presented as illustrative of this suggestion.

We began this article by asking how, as interactants, we distinguish between seemingly mad talk by people who are not diagnosed with mental illness and ‘hearably mad’ talk by people who are so diagnosed. This led to questions about how people come to inhabit a common world in the first place and an investigation into the constitution of the coordinated world of common-sense. It was observed that certain schools of psychiatry posit the root source of the wide range of schizophrenia symptoms to lie in a disturbance of common sense, which motivates the broadly ethnomethodological approach taken here. However, attempting to apply Conversation Analytic methods to recorded talk of diagnosees raised questions about the applicability of some of these methods to psychosis, and in addition, after Antaki and Wilkinson (2012), questions about their applicability to atypical populations in general.

An attempt to find common conceptual ground with psychiatric theory directed us to examine the phenomenological roots of ethnomethods in the works of Alfred Schutz and Edmund Husserl, which led to reconceptualizing schizophrenia in terms of a ‘world disturbance’. It was suggested, after Pollner (1974, 1987), that a study of world constitution in the natural attitude needed to occur from a stance that was itself distanced from the natural attitude, and this provided grounds for proposing the ‘manifold-world’ model that has been presented here in the manner of ‘breaching’, for analytic purposes, common-sense world assumptions.

Our conclusion is that consideration of atypical interactions compels us to take account of our own implicit normative world-frames, making clear the need for engaging more complex models of sense-making, such as the one that has been sketched here. We believe that finding ways to integrate such top-down modeling with the bottom-up rigor of traditional CA method might afford CA added explanatory leverage in cross-disciplinary applications.

In terms of implications for Conversation Analytic method, we suggest that the grounds of the second-order meaning-activities of interaction analysis should be recognized as lying in unavoidable biological activities of the analyst: the orienting of attention, the making of relevance judgments, and the interpretative activities of sense-making. Recognizing the biological ground of these second-order meaning-activities would help avoid the mistake of employing a sterilizing ‘scientism’ that would otherwise deanimate the objects under study by treating them in the manner of objects of natural science. To say this is to recognize that what is occurring in the study of talk-in-interaction is a form of life-world analysis. This point is acutely relevant when it comes to the study of interaction with schizophrenia diagnosees, as the dominant psychiatric framing of schizophrenia as ‘brain-disease’ risks just such a reduction of first-order meaning activity of diagnosees to (nothing more than) neurochemical imbalance. We would generalize the observation to include the study of all atypical populations.

To recognize the biological ground of meaning-activity is to recognize that any interaction analyst is irreducibly relevance-orienting and account-generating and reads observational data in light of these relevancy fields and reflexively generated organizing accounts. In other words, any attempts at bottom-up processes of observation in interaction analysis will unavoidably meet top-down processes of plausible model generation. We make these claims because the processes under description are inherent to our activities as biological organisms. These observations are consistent with general approaches of enactivism (Varela et al., 1991; Gallagher and Allen, 2018) as well as with recent collaborations between neurophysiology and philosophy, which fall under the broad rubric of ‘predictive processing’ or ‘predictive coding’ (Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2015; Friston and Frith, 2015; Seth, 2021), where top-down modeling is seen to be ineluctably involved with attentional and relevance processing across all levels of meaning organization.

This brings the analyst once again within the analytic frame. We utilized normative membership reflexes as a potential source of information via ethnomethodological self-reflection and by paying heed to ‘hearable madness’ as well as ‘glitches’ in analyst-as-member expectation. Psychiatric readers might recognize such self-reflection as a cousin to counter-transference, and the interested reader is directed to Rumke’s (1990) writings on ‘praecoxfeeling’, where it is argued that schizophrenia diagnosis occurs via intersubjective processes, recommending clinician attention be paid to their own internal responses when interacting with a diagnosee in addition to searching for explicit external signs.

In line with Garfinkel’s unique adequacy requirement, it was seen necessary to explore the theoretical background of schizophrenia research, which included a critical examination of psychiatric constructs, including, most importantly, the schizophrenia construct itself. The resultant model we have proposed has implications in psychiatry for theoretical considerations on topics such as schizophrenic autism, double bookkeeping, disturbance of abstraction/concretism (Shimkunas et al., 1967), theories of disturbed indexicality (Crow, 2010), and insight attribution.

Exploring psychiatric theory led to an examination of phenomenological approaches to schizophrenia. In light of this, Garfinkel’s rejection of phenomenological method (Garfinkel et al., 1977) should be qualified as a rejection of Husserlian transcendence, and we suggest the ethnomethodological project be recognized as a methodological unfolding of Schutz’s proposal of a complementary (social) form of phenomenological enquiry. Considering this genealogy highlights the theoretically dense lineage that led up to CA’s ultimate abjuration of theory to focus on method. We found it both necessary and fruitful to exhume the historical connection and conceptual links between CA and the Husserlian project and suggest that if CA should cut itself off from its theoretical sources, it risks separating itself from a font of renewal, in danger of becoming a technical exercise in cataloging that fails to establish footholds of relevance in other domains.

On this note, we believe that possibilities for dialectic engagement between Conversation Analysis and psychiatry are untapped. In psychiatry, for example, Conversation Analytic methods might prove useful in the training of clinicians to identify structures of intersubjectivity, and in language-in-interaction research, the general topic of interaction with atypical populations remains under-serviced. Institutional psychiatry, which has been dealing with atypical interlocutors since its inception, will likely have developed idiosyncratic norms of interaction which – bearing in mind Jakobson’s injunction to study breakdown in order to gain a better understanding of function – might prove of inherent interest to language researchers.

In summary, we present the model of a five-world manifold as a motivated choice that has its ground in various forms of phenomenological and sociological theory. What is being suggested here is that the achievement of the one-world-in-common among and between members of language communities represents an achievement of common sense coordination. It is the supreme achievement of common sense and represents a lived commitment to the social world. It is a deeply habituated background assumption of the natural attitude that the language analyst themself is committed to in the mundane common-sense mode of acting and interacting in the world. It represents a model of reality that is already in operation as a background assumption behind day-to-day affairs. Introducing a five-world model, or meaning manifold, as has been done here, does not so much represent a theoretical imposition upon a tabula rasa but rather displaces the unconscious model of one-world bearing the load of all concrete linguistic reference that is already in operation within the natural attitude.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The studies involving humans were approved by the University of Melbourne Humanities and Applied Sciences Human Ethics Sub-Committee. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required from the participants or the participants’ legal guardians/next of kin because data used in this study was collected in a prior, independent study where informed consent was negotiated.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.