This volume breaks open traditional disciplinary confines and approaches the full complexity of communicative interaction from an impressive range of exciting state-of-the-art perspectives in social psychology, conversation analysis, hermeneutics, constructivist psychology, communication theory, computational neuroscience, sociology of communication, second language pragmatics, ergonomic interaction theory and computer-mediated interaction studies. In so doing, it sets out to establish a new research agenda in which communication science is understood as a human-social science par excellence. This collection of fifteen essays by seventeen scholars from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK will be of interest to scholars and students in all of the above fields. The editor, Colin B. Grant, is Reader in Modern Languages in the School of Management and Languages, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, where he runs the interdisciplinary social communication science research group. He is author of Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture (1995), Functions and Fictions of Communication (2000) and chief editor of Language-Meaning-Social Construction (2001). Table of contentsList of contributors vii Introduction: Rethinking communicative interaction: An interdisciplinary programme Colin B. Grant 1–26 Part I: Communicating the self Dialogicality as an ontology of humanity Ivana Marková 29–51 The subject as dialogical fiction Nicholas Davey 53–67 Language, communication and the development of the self Renato Proietti 69–85 Addressing oneself as another: Dialogue and the self in Habermas and Butler Henderikus J. Stam 87–100 Complexities of self and social communication Colin B. Grant 101–125 Part II: Constructing communication Histories and discourses: An integrated approach to communication science Siegfried J. Schmidt 129–144 Autonomy, self-reference and contingency in computational neuroscience Bernd Porr and Florentin Wörgötter 145–161 Interaction versus action and Luhmann’s sociology of communication Loet Leydesdorff 163–186 Pragmatic interactions in a second language Beatriz Mariz Maia de Paiva 187–206 Part III: Communication environments Between uniqueness and universality: An ethnomethodological analysis of language games Brian Torode 209–234 The transition of a Scottish Young Persons’s Centre — a dialogical analysis Kesi Mahendran 235–256 Conversational action: An ergonomic approach to interaction Mario Cesar Vidal and Renato José Bonfatti 257–272 ‘Flaming’ in computer-mediated interactions Anthi Avgerinakou 273–293 Constructing the uncertainties of bioterror: A study of U.S. news reporting on the anthrax attack of fall, 2001 Austin Babrow and Mohan Dutta-Bergman 295–315 Index of names 317–319 Index of subjects 321–325